Tamarind monograph.pdf - Crops for the Future

degree of sweetness. In the Philippines eight recognised cultivars are grown
by farmers while over 50 are grown in Thailand. Specific sweet and sour
cultivars also exist in the east and northern parts of Uganda and Kenya.
Table 8.3 lists the most popular improved cultivars in those countries.
Table 8.3 Selected tamarind cultivars
Country Cultivar
Thailand Muen Chong, Sri Tong, Nam Pleung, Jac Hom, Kun Sun,
Kru Sen, Nazi Zad, Sri Chompoo
Philippines
India
Cavite, Batangas, Bulacan, and Laguna
Prathisthan, Periyakulam (PKM 1), Urigam
8.5 Genetic conservation
Although wild and naturalised tamarind is widely available, some genetic
erosion is occurring in most areas due to rapid deforestation resulting from
rural development and urbanisation. Population pressure on limited
ecosystems and resources is causing rapid and damaging shifts in land use
patterns with increasing areas being planted with perennial cash crops.
Selective felling of individual trees of tamarind for timber and fuelwood in
rural locations can also cause genetic erosion as farmers’ selections are lost.
Instances of loss of germplasm have been reported in different countries.
The development of the Mahaweli River Development Project in the dry
zone of Sri Lanka removed 200,000 ha of dry zone forest in which tamarind
thrived in forest ecosystems. In southern Malawi deforestation is reported to
be the major cause for the loss of wild and semi wild fruits trees such as
Tamarindus indica, Ficus spp., Annona senegalensis and others. Here,
tamarind is reported to be one of the most important indigenous fruit trees
for consumption and sale in the Mangochi district of Malawi, but the
numbers of trees are decreasing at a high rate and becoming rare: this is now
of concern to the local communities. (Maliro and Kwapata, 2002).
A strategy for such fruit trees should be promoted to include conservation,
enhanced domestication and systematic germplasm maintenance in working
collections to back up improvement activities.
Options for genetic conservation include ex situ management, one of the
easiest and most economically and socially acceptable method for tamarind
conservation (Singha, 1995). In this way, phenotypically superior
germplasm is collected from different regions and multiplied through
vegetative propagation and maintained in clonal orchards. The totally
inadequate ex situ conservation collections are given in Appendix II. Seed
107