Warming temperatures are making farming much more difficult in the tropics. Food systems across island nations in the Caribbean and Pacific are particularly vulnerable, being hit hard by a combination of heat waves, droughts, and unseasonal rain. And the impact of climate change in these areas is likely to increase significantly in the next decade, especially for farmers of the most common staples like corn, wheat, and soy.
But there is one crop that loves the heat and is not easily discouraged by swings in the weather. It is called breadfruit, and it is undergoing a quiet revival in its Pacific island and Caribbean homelands, where people are hoping that the tree, and its produce, will thrive in a climate-changed future.
“There’s not really a climate that is too hot for breadfruit,” says Russell Fielding, a geographer at Coastal Carolina University. One of the highest-yielding food plants in the world, breadfruit is a large-leafed evergreen of the jackfruit family that produces an abundance of knobbly fruits that can be used in a dazzling variety of different dishes.
The range of where these trees can grow is steadily expanding as temperatures rise worldwide, and owing to their wide-spreading root system, breadfruit trees are virtually indestructible. They survive hurricanes, Fielding says, and can also grow near salty or brackish water, a big plus as ocean levels continue to inch up. They also stabilize and enrich even the most degraded soils. A big tree will sequester 1.3 tons of carbon by the time it is mature, according to calculations made by the Trees That Feed Foundation, an Illinois-based nonprofit that provides breadfruit trees to help feed people and create jobs across the tropics.
“People are beginning to recognize breadfruit’s incredible potential,” Fielding says. “It is one of the most productive trees in terms of calories per year per unit area. One breadfruit tree could easily supply all the fruit that one family needs.”
If you’ve seen the movie Mutiny on the Bounty, you’ll already be familiar with breadfruit. These were the fruit trees being transported during the merchant ship’s fateful journey. But if you haven’t been on a remote Pacific island lately, or in the Caribbean, chances are you’ve never eaten the spiky soccer-ball-size green fruit with a creamy pulp. Breadfruit has a short shelf life and is rarely exported out of tropical countries.
Originating in the Pacific and once a staple in Tahiti, Hawaii, and Jamaica, breadfruit gradually fell out of favor, replaced in these regions by a standard Western diet high in processed foods, saturated fats, and refined carbohydrates. Breadfruit’s taste is bland, a cross between mashed potatoes and sourdough bread; its gooey consistency when ripe has been likened to wallpaper paste. Yet despite these uninspiring qualities, some believe it’s the next big superfood.
Diane Ragone has been personally obsessed with the humble fruit since the 1980s. She is director emeritus of the Breadfruit Institute, a research and advocacy group based on the Hawaiian island of Kauai. For one thing, she says, breadfruit is far more nutritious than staples like rice and corn, being rich in micronutrients and vitamins. It’s also relatively high in protein, she says; a Samoan variety called Ma’afala even surpasses soybeans for protein content.
Breadfruit grows quickly, is incredibly prolific, and doesn’t need fertilizers or other agrochemical inputs. And the fact that it doesn’t have a strong flavor of its own makes it a great partner for many other foods. The starchy fruit can be added to soups, stews, salads, tamales, puddings, and pies. It’s being made into a growing number of commercial products as well, including vodka in the Virgin Islands, chips in Jamaica, crackers in Barbados, and tostones (a Caribbean fritter) in the Dominican Republic.
“There are a billion hungry people on this planet,” Ragone says. “Eighty percent of them live in the tropics, where breadfruit thrives.” Unlike field crops, which have to be replanted every year, these hardy trees produce fruit for decades—well over 400 pounds of fruit a year per tree, making it one of the highest-yielding food crops on Earth.
Breadfruit can also help to restore degraded environments, Ragone says. She has seen entire hillsides in the South Pacific carpeted with broad-leafed breadfruit trees under which there were lush understory gardens replete with bananas, avocado, taro, ginger, and yams. “Just think, with agroforestry groves like these, you could transform a bare hillside into a garden that could feed people and last for centuries.” In particular, this is her vision for Haiti, a largely deforested country. Such a transformation of its hillsides “could happen easily in five to 10 years,” she says.
Mary McLaughlin, chair and founder of the Trees That Feed Foundation—the leading supplier of breadfruit trees to the world—shares a similar vision. Along with Jamaica, McLaughlin’s country of birth, Haiti was where the foundation first started distributing trees. Breadfruit has been grown there since its introduction to the Caribbean by the notorious Captain Bligh, who was in command of the Bounty when the mutiny occurred. (He survived and embarked upon a second breadfruit-transporting expedition in 1793.) The British were looking for a crop that could be quickly and cheaply grown and fed to their slaves, and so the trees spread throughout the Caribbean. But its reputation as a lowly slave food eventually led to breadfruit being all but ignored by locals, who let the abundant fruits drop and rot on the ground or fed them to their pigs.
McLaughlin and her husband Mike were appalled by the waste of this nutritional powerhouse in Haiti, the poorest—and hungriest—nation in the Western hemisphere. So Mike designed a solar dehydrator to dry breadfruit, which can then be ground into flour. With help from Trees That Feed, Pierre Moïse Louis, an agronomist, set up Haiti’s first breadfruit mill near the town of Jeremie. Local farming cooperatives were formed to supply the mill with fruit.
“The success we are seeing in Haiti is amazing,” says Mary McLaughlin. “We have women vendors taking these products and selling them. It’s creating income for people who had none.”
People like 52-year-old Orieuse Jean Jules, who is now the proud owner of an orchard of 74 trees from which she derives a steady income. Jules says the trees have fed her family, empowered her as a woman, and put her children through school. “It has made such a huge difference in my life,” she says.
Like other Caribbean countries, Haiti imports more than 80 percent of its food. Fabrice Leclercq, a UN adviser in the country, says that breadfruit flour can help the island replace some of its costly wheat imports. He also hopes the flour will find a lucrative market in the US, where consumers seek gluten-free alternatives for use in bread and baked goods.
With Leclercq’s help, tons of breadfruit flour are being supplied every month to Haitian schools, where it is used in soups, as well as in healthy snacks and baked goods like konparets, a dense Haitian sweet bun. Breadfruit has also helped sustain Haitian families during trying times. “After the terrible earthquake of 2021, we were able to feed a large number of people with preserved breadfruit from our large warehouses,” Louis says.
Breadfruit is creating economic opportunities on other islands as well. Marisol Villalobos Rivera is CEO and cofounder with her husband of the breadfruit startup Amasar in Puerto Rico, where the fruit is called pana (a variant of the Spanish word for bread, which in Puerto Rico also refers to a best friend, someone you can count on).
“Puerto Ricans are breadfruit pioneers,” Villalobos Rivera says. “We are teaching the Dominican Republic and others how we eat breadfruit and process it into different foods.” Rivera has developed a number of breadfruit products, including an award-winning pancake and waffle mix that is selling well on the island and is now being exported to the US.
As in Haiti, breadfruit helped isolated islanders survive after Hurricane Maria destroyed most of their field crops in 2017. “We were eating breadfruit before we were eating locally grown plantains,” Villalobos Rivera says. “The ability of breadfruit trees to adapt is just amazing. I dream that one day we’ll cover the entire Caribbean with breadfruit trees. It’s our turn now to have food security and food sovereignty.”
This year the government of the Dominican Republic is donating an estimated 500,000 breadfruit trees to farmers. Meanwhile the Jamaican Forestry Department has just initiated a program for growing breadfruit in urban areas as a food source. In Africa, breadfruit is being planted in Uganda, where agronomist Espaineto Kamya is helping to introduce it into forestry plantations there.
Breadfruit has also seen a dramatic rise in production in Hawaii and other islands in the Pacific in recent years, according to Noa Kekuewa Lincoln, a professor of indigenous crops and cropping systems at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. But he says that more research needs to be done on the over 400 varieties of the tree and their responses to different climate conditions, so that farmers can decide which will be best suited to their locations as the climate changes.
But this, he believes, would be much more efficient than generating climate-adapted versions of existing staples. “In the US, we are spending hundreds of millions of dollars annually on corn research to make corn more tolerant to higher temperatures, but breadfruit is already adapted to higher temperatures, and many of the same products could be made from it,” Lincoln says. He would like to see “food forests”—like the ones grown in ancient Hawaii, with breadfruit at their center—become the agriculture of the future throughout the global south.
“Growing breadfruit can help shift our food system away from large-scale monoculture to diversified production and more home- and community-based food production.” All you need is a tree, Lincoln says, and then enough fruit to feed a family will follow, at virtually no extra effort. “While most people don’t have the time to farm in their backyards, everyone can take one hour and plant a breadfruit tree.”