Moringa Tree Thrives in Dry Conditions

Federal Highway 200 snakes some fourteen hundred miles down the Pacific coast of Mexico, past volcanoes, craggy mountains, pitchfork cacti, and cattle ranches with skulls on their barbed-wire fences. Somewhere between Tepic and Tapachula, the road reaches Nueva Agua Caliente, a town named for its hot springs, which bubble into a stream at the center of a deep valley. On the western margin of Agua Caliente, Mark Olson, a professor of evolutionary biology at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, has a farm. “It may look like a sh*tty little field with runty little trees in a random little town, but it’s an amazing scientific resource,” Olson said, as he led me through the hilly, hardscrabble acre that constitutes the International Moringa Germplasm Collection. This is the world’s largest and most diverse aggregate of trees from the genus Moringa, which Olson believes are “uniquely suited to feeding poor and undernourished populations of the dryland tropics, especially in the era of climate change.”

Olson grew up on the edge of Tahoe National Forest, in California, where his father worked as a civil engineer for the U.S. Forest Service. He has pale blue eyes and wispy, sand-colored hair, and he wears a leather cowboy hat that makes him look equal parts Teddy Roosevelt and Crocodile Dundee. Olson began to study Moringa in 1995, while he was getting his Ph.D. at Washington University in St. Louis. With funding from the National Science Foundation and National Geographic Society, he spent nearly two decades collecting the seeds of the tree’s thirteen known species, travelling throughout Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and Eastern Africa. He began planting the farm in Agua Caliente two years ago, and his hope is to use the six hundred trees there to develop an optimal breed of Moringa—one that could become a staple food source in dry tropical regions all over the world. According to David Lobell, the deputy director of Stanford University’s Center on Food Security and the Environment, these regions are a nutritional hot zone. They are already home to at least two billion people, a figure that is expected to grow. “If you look at climate models, the conditions are projected to intensify more than in most other climatic regions,” Lobell said. “So the already hot, dry climates will become really hot and really dry, relative to their current state.”

http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/meet-the-moringa-tree-an-overqualified-underachieving-superfood

Petr Kosina

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