CNMI breadfruit workshop opens door into future market

A breadfruit workshop at the Hafadai Beach Hotel on Friday brought together dozens of island leaders to learn about the potential of breadfruit as a growing commercial product, a source of nutrition, a tie to island culture, and a staple for food security in the Pacific.

A visiting team of experts from the University of Hawaii’s Pacific Development Center Team led talks on the growing demand for breadfruit products from the Pacific and gave the crowd an inside look into the process of making breadfruit flour.

The workshop continued into Saturday at the NMC campus.

Gov. Eloy S. Inos created the CNMI Breadfruit Initiative in 2013 to work with PDCT in developing the potential and capacity of breadfruit locally. The task force is made up of CNMI leaders, Northern Marianas College-CREES, and the Commonwealth Development Authority. It is based on the principles of commercialization, nutrition, and food security.

The initiative’s point man and project manager, Ivan Blanco, said that PDCT presented a regional and national network that the CNMI could tap into. These include milling, propagation, product development, intellectual property right, agroforestry, disaster management and food security, and community capacity experts, among others.

Sen. Sixto Igisomar (R-Saipan), who was named to the initiative when he was still Commerce secretary, commended the “background work already done” by PDCT that made the project attractive from the get go.

This includes an inventory of species, and science that evaluated this, as well as an understanding of custom, culture, and tradition in regards to the breadfruit, on top of a direction to go in terms of marketing.

But what people really felt, Igisomar said, was the “sustainability” part of the project. “At the end you really help the people out,” he said.

“It was very smart of them to provide the vehicle already. They got the vehicle and came to us and said this is what we have. All it really required next was partnership and commitment. And I think that’s from there we clicked… it’s really too good to ignore and give up. Everybody has breadfruit…the entire Pacific ocean has it,” he said.

PCDT’s Kalani Souza said they are “taking the health route” with this product.

“We are trying to make a 100-percent gluten-free product. We think we can do that through a combination of natural products that are here [like] coconut flour, cassava flour with breadfruit,” he said.

PCDT’s Craig Evelitch hopes the project drives local businesses that target local markets like hotels and restaurants.

“They’ll develop interesting products that will show more and more potential. Some of them will be winners; some of them will be losers but that innovation will drive further product development,” he said.

Souza added that rarely is there an economic development that includes the entire spectrum of the population. “It’s just not the domain of a corporation with 10,000 trees. A family with four trees can also participate in this economic model by selling their food for X amount per pound or making their own unique product that they sell roadside or at a farmer’s market,” he said.

This model is a “new look,” he said.

“We want to see local economies flourish,” Evelitch echoed. “We want to see reconnection with the traditional foods that are healthy and serve not only people’s nutrition but cultural connection to this place, to their ancestors,” he said

“It’s a renaissance of traditional foods. And we are at a time where it’s actually feasible.”

Kaitu Erasito, breadfruit research officer of the Pacific Breadfruit Project in Fiji, has been working on the “oldest and most advanced project” in commercial breadfruit over the last five years, according to Eveltich.

He told Saipan Tribune of the breadfruit’s role in a community’s resilience to natural or man-made disasters.

“In Fiji, we just had the biggest cyclone, the strongest cyclone I’ve come across. It happened during the night. In the morning when we looked outside—there was nothing. All the big trees have no leaves, all land was flat…Straight after the cyclone, we experienced flood. We were not ready for it. This is climate change.”

“Last year, we experienced drought in the western region…But the good thing was—after the cyclone, after flood, after the drought—there was people going to breadfruit tree and harvesting. We were running to the mountain, with long poles [and] taking it back to the family,” he said.

His advice to farmers it to “keep on planting.” From the original 50 trees his project started with, in three years, they have planted 2,650 trees, he said.