When the sugary-sweet masuku plum is in season in Malawi, locals go wild over it. “They will eat it while traveling, in the bath, on the streets … they just eat,” said Richard Swirah, an agroecologist with the Malawi chapter of the organization WeForest. Swirah has seen firsthand that native fruits like the masuku (Uapaca kirkiana) are in high demand in local markets — ”they sell like hot cakes,” he told Mongabay during a Zoom interview — but the supply is incredibly scarce. Owing to high levels of deforestation, native food-bearing trees such as the Masuku are becoming increasingly rare in Malawi and across East Africa. Recent work hopes to reverse this trend. Swirah is one of 40 people who participated in workshops earlier this year to share knowledge and questions about the use of Indigenous food trees in landscape restoration work, an area where they have so far been underutilized. Organized by University of Copenhagen postdoctoral fellow Emilie Vansant, the workshops identified the main challenges to integrating Indigenous food trees into the East African landscape, where tree-planting initiatives often focus on fast-growing, non-native timber species. These findings are summarized in a paper published in June. An agroforestry tour during a workshop at the Permaculture Paradise Institute in Lilongwe, Malawi. Image by Emilie Vansant. “Something important to highlight is that this work is not advocating for all introduced or all Indigenous trees, but for an integration — broadening the scope a bit to include these Indigenous tree species, because of…This article was originally published on Mongabay

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