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OAXACA's JOHNNY APPLESEED
Talli Nauman, TheNewsMexico.com Columnist - 11/16/2002
(Editor's note: The NewsMexico.com is pleased to have the opportunity to publish this guest column written by Geert Oosterhuis.)
"The frequently ravaged and desolate aspect of the landscape," author Sherburne Cook's impression 40 years ago of Mexico's Mixteca Alta, is shared by many people in my wife's homeland in Oaxaca state.
"This land is worthless," they say. In many ways, they are right: With the topsoil gone, there is little you can do with the rotten tepetate, or limestone, that is left.
Yet, break up the tepetate, bring back the humus into it, and it becomes moisture-retaining clay again, the best soil you can have. Just work the soil.
The problem: Due to the weight of 300 post-colonial years of manual labor, field labor is looked down upon in Mexico. While foreigners may consider gardening as relaxing, many Mexicans don't. They don't like pruning and watering; orderly vegetable beds and fruit orchards are rare here.
After discovering that, I started looking around for something else to restore the habitat. Agro-forestry was in at the time in Western Europe and the United States. International tree crop institutes were founded, experts wrote gleaming articles. The idea wasn't bad: covering Third World wastelands with plague- and drought-resistant trees, as windbreaks and hedgerows sheltering pasture and cattle, enriching soils, improving climates.
But the planting had to be done by the Third World people, for sure, and there were obstacles - economic, political and social.
People at the Mixtecan Inifap, research section of Mexico's agriculture department, knew the obstacles. First, Inifap's 1,600 technicians can do little with a paltry 60-million-dollar yearly budget in a country four times the size of Spain. And, they said, certainly, one-third of the Mixteca Alta could be reforested, but, "people here are not the right ones for new ideas. We would have to dig the holes, fence and water the trees, and we haven't the manpower for that. People here won't do a thing."
Maybe I should have listened and gone straight back to the Havana restaurant on Bucareli Street in Mexico City. But one evening I met Oaxaca's Johnny Appleseed at the Inifap establishment: Boone Hallberg, a U.S. botanist. I had heard of him, his indigenous maize seed collection and problems with water use and grazing rights in his village of Ixtlan.
Trees would turn Oaxaca into a paradise, something he was telling his students of the technological institute there. Pointing at a shrub, he exclaimed: "That tree could save Mexico!" It was a carob, or Ceratonia siliqua, which he had planted, and the article on carobs he gave me was convincing.
Drought-resistant, carobs have been grown through the ages around the Mediterranean - primarily for their pods, a livestock feed. Humans, too, have survived on them in hard times, and ground cacao-like bean meal, rich in minerals and low in fats, is used for bread, cookies, beverages and syrups. Nowadays, tragasol, a multipurpose industrial gum extracted from the seeds, is widely used in industry.
The trees themselves, rooting 20 meters deep and wide, are potential barriers against mudslides. (Hurricane Paulina comes to mind!). Thriving on limestone and wastewater, they are fire resistant -- important these days! And they re-sprout abundantly after forest fires or being cut down. Their wood, very hard, makes first-class fuel and timber, and carobs are ideal for honey bees' production, as well. As ornamental greenery, they line California avenues and shade tourists in the Portuguese Algarve.
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Carob, pronounced KAR uhb, is a dark evergreen tree that grows in countries along the Mediterranean Sea. Some carobs are found in warm regions of the United States, especially the Southwest. The carob has brown, leathery pods that produce a gum. The gum, also called carob, has a taste similar to chocolate. After being roasted and ground, it can be substituted for chocolate.
Carob provides a chocolate flavor in many dishes and in such products as beverages and candy bars. During the 1970's, large numbers of consumers and manufacturers began to use carob because of the increasingly high cost of chocolate. Some people prefer carob because they are allergic to chocolate.
The carob tree grows as tall as 50 feet (15 meters) and has small red flowers. Its pods range from 4 to 10 inches (10 to 25 centimeters) long.
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Drip irrigation would overcome their main drawback, the long time it takes them to begin bearing. Grafting would push production up to 200, 300 and sometimes 1,000 kilograms per tree a decade after planting. The Mixteca Alta, with an average 700 millimeters of rain annually, seemed just right.
In nearby Huahuapan (at an altitude of 1,650 meters) I got seedlings, probably grown from seed from the two carobs former President Lázaro Cárdenas had brought to Tonala, 40 kilometers to the west (at 1,300 meters). He must have known their merits.
I planted two sample trees in our backyard in Tamazulapam (1,980 meters), under optimal conditions and watering. Seven were sown in 1.5-meter-deep plant holes around the Santa Rosa church there, with no one watering them, and 30 more trees were planted here and there. Few people really wanted them though: "We must see them first; how they grow," they said.
Efforts to convince village councils failed. Village councils come and go every three years. Trees don't grow that fast, so councils rarely plant them.
Planting wastelands and barren hills had its problems too. Being communal, they are left for grazing, wood gathering, burning and litter, so tree cutters go unpunished. Private plots aren't respected either and seedlings must be fenced, so most owners that don't live nearby just let them lie fallow.
Then this guy gave me a booklet from 1950 called Inauguration of the National Olive Commission, touting Mexico as "America's olive country of the future!" He remarked that he'd never seen an olive here that bears: "Sure your carobs will?" he asked.
But yes, my carobs did yield. Those with no watering were flourishing after eight or nine years, and the privileged backyard carobs stood 15 meters high and wide after six years. The pods, though from un-grafted trees, are good enough for fodder, cacao meal and tragasol. People, appreciating the trees for their shade, even start planting them.
Two farmers in the Tamazulapam area have now started growing carobs for protection against torrential rains from nearby sierras and for fodder. More farmers will follow, but convincing them still takes time.
Primary schools, often with spacious, fenced yards, would be ideal for planting carobs. Furthermore, as ornamentals, the trees would help restore Acapulco's glory of yore. The heat would make them grow fast.
And experts say comprehensive reforestation would make Mexico City self-sufficient in water within 20 years. Carobs, then, resistant against tree borer insects, would help rejuvenate Mexico City's plague-infested forests. Ceratonia oreothauma, a frost-resistant second variety from high up in the frost-prone mountains in Yemen y Somalia would be of value in Mexico's colder areas.
Thanks to the Dutch Leiden Botanic Gardens, I got seeds, finally. (British Kew seeds got stuck in Mexico's customs, as so many things do.) Four, from seed from Ibb of Magreb'aus, Yemen (at 1,500 meters), are now growing and yielding near the Tamazulapam swimming pool.
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Geert Oosterhuis, jurist and gardener at heart, is from the nebulous Northern Dutch countryside, which no longer exists. He has lived in South Africa and in Mexico, both with summer rainfall and eternal spring climates. He plans to move on soon.
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