Fruits from America

More than 100 different fruits compose the offer of the traditional markets of the continent and the present inventory includes more than 1100 native American fruits, at all stages of domestication, some still collected in the wild, while some of their successful relatives are cultivated intensively. Native fruits present unique opportunities to widen or re-conquer domestic markets, to diversify agricultural production and for the sustainable development of particular areas, as the fragile ecosystems of inter-Andean valleys or the Amazon.

The recovery of information dispersed in the "gray literature" and in anthropological or ethnobotanical publications is the first step to put the fruit diversity at work for human development. It is hoped that this inventory will contribute to this task. To answer the growing interest of the American public, growers, investors, scientists, and governments, in their native fruit diversity, the CIRAD-FLHOR/IPGRI Project for Neotropical Fruits has started to gather the available information in this inventory.