The UWI St Augustine supports Breadfruit and Breadnut Festival in St Lucia

By The UWI

TRINIDAD / ST LUCIA – The department of food production, faculty of food and agriculture, The University of the West Indies (UWI), has been involved in breadfruit and breadnut research for over 30 years. Through the efforts of retired Professor Roberts-Nkrumah, a breadfruit germplasm collection was established at the St Augustine Campus of the University of the West Indies (UWI), Trinidad and Tobago.

This germplasm collection consists of accessions of existing Caribbean breadfruit and breadnut cultivars and additional breadfruit germplasm which were imported from extra-regional sources in 1990.

The collection is one of our main tools intended to support the sustainable commercialization of breadfruit for food and nutrition security and improvement of livelihoods of local communities. Our research has focused on description studies using characterization or morphological descriptors and evaluation or utilization descriptors of importance to producers, consumers, researchers, and other stakeholders along the breadfruit value chain.

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The Breadfruit Festival: Lectures on African descent and indigenous people

The department of food production is happy to partner with The Parish Holy Trinity Anglican Church, St Mary the Virgin in la Caye – Dennery the organizers of the Breadfruit and Breadnut Festival 2022, (Sunday 31 July till Saturday 6 August) which is part of their emancipation celebration.

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Breadfruit is widely grown throughout the tropics, but knowledge of its versatility as a food, its nutritional benefits to people and livestock and its traditional use in medicine and for other non-food and environmental uses is still relatively untapped.

We fully endorse and support this initiative as research shows that breadfruit festivals are important channels for heritage, livelihoods, and community development which serve important roles in supporting breadfruit utilization.

Dr Oral Daley is a researcher and educator with professional experience in the areas of agricultural production, food and quality management and education. He holds an ASc. and BSc. in Agriculture and Ph.D. in Crop Science. His PhD thesis was on breadfruit entitled “Ethnobotanical, morphological, physicochemical and genetic diversity studies in breadfruit [Artocarpus altilis, (Parkinson) Fosberg] in the Caribbean.”

Dr Daley is a lecturer in the Department of Food Production, Faculty of Food and Agriculture, The University of the West Indies, St Augustine Campus, Trinidad, and Tobago. His research focus is on crop germplasm characterization, evaluation, and conservation with the aim of harnessing the genetic variation in underutilized tropical food crops including breadfruit for long-term genetic gain and diversity, and to understand the genetic structure of complex traits that influences quality and yields to advance food and nutrition security in the Caribbean.

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