Whenever I see the papaya or eat the fruit, seed or the leaves, or swallow its sap made into papain tablets, I remember Mrs Florence Fusi. She was a single mother of three children who combined catering work with part time farming. She developed oesophagal cancer , couldn’t swallow even a drop of water, had to have a hole made in her upper abdomen through which a plastic tube was pushed into her stomach for her to be able to “eat” liquified food. Her weight crashed to about 40 kg. She had to quit regular work and work more on the farm, growing mainly plantain and banana.
This column is dedicated to her as it is to the Agriculture Emergency of President Bola Ahmed Tinubu.
Fellow Camerounian Mr Simeon Ekor introduced Mrs Florence Fusi to me. She was losing weight because she could not eat, having rejected a medical advice to have her body surgically invaded with a feeding tube. My job was to advise her to accept the surgery, increase her weight for another surgery that would remove the cancerous throat which will then be replaced with a new throat formed from a portion of her intestine to almost normalise her natural feeding process. The doctors promised to form a portion of the intestine into a new throat if her weight could return to 75kg from about 40. She made 65kg and was persuaded to undergo chemotherapy preparatory to that surgery. She didn’t survive the chemo.
I remember her as a loving mother, dutiful farmer and helpful acquaintance who would cook delicious meals from home for my household to eat, although she could not join us at table. Often, she would step aside in one of the rooms to funnel her liquified food through an opening in the abdomen into the tube in her stomach.
She subsisted largely on plantain farming, proceeds from which she augmented with gifts from her friends. I sensed her budget was fragile and could not comfortably sustain heavy medical bills. So, one day, I suggested to her she could add papaya to her farm lines because it could be more financially fruitful than plantain. The plantain fruits only once in its lifetime, dies after the harvest but propagates itself about five suckers or baby plantain plants which may take one year to fruit. The papaya is different. One tree may produce more than hundred fruits in one year and offer about hundred seeds per fruit. Potentially, that is about 10,000 baby papaya trees compared to five baby plantain trees in the same period.
Mrs Florence Fusi agreed, and, soon, she brought 30 seedlings to plant in my backyard garden. It was in the harmattan season, and only about four of them, three males and one female, survived from poor watering. Before she passed, Mrs Florence Fusi made sure I had about four or six papayas every Sunday and plantain as well. The male papaya
Food and health
The purpose of an agriculture emergency should be to provide more food, jobs, wealth and boost health. The papaya can do that for Nigeria if President Tinubu makes a revolution out of it, enabling the country to produce 100 billion papayas every year,beating India which currently holds world production record of 5.23 million metric tonnes projection for this year.According to the food and agriculture organisation (FAO), Nigeria is the third largest world producer of papaya with an output of 951,000 tonnes, far behind India which engages in plantation farming of papayas. In the world market, about 80 percent of tropical papaya output is imported by developed countries . Papaya leaves are freeze dried to powder, encapsulated or packaged in other forms for international trade. The fruit is also freeze dried for a long shelf life and hydrated when needed for consumption as a drink. From the seeds and the leaves, chymopapain, an enzyme, is derived for use as tenderizers in factories or as papain tablets to treat indigestion, to kill unfriendly intestinal micro-organisms or to boost immunity, depending on how it is used.
Health
Everything about the papaya is good and healthy. I will only provide summary information here, since my focus is on how Nigeria can grow 100 billion papayas every year .
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The papaya is a rich source of lutein and Zeazanthin, two carotenoids which protect the eyes against cataract of the lens. Beta Carotene, another carotenoid, protects against age related macular degeneration (ARMD), a cause of blindness. A rich source of fiber, the papaya may help to prevent TYPE 1 and TYPE 2 Diabetes and improve digestion. I enjoy the papaya principally for digestion. It has many antioxidants and enzymes. A major enzyme is papain, which, chemically, is a cousin of Pepsin, found in the stomach for the digestion of complex proteins such as meat to simpler substances. Papain kills any protein which is not body (endogenous) protein. Thus, parasites, worms, bacteria, fungi, mold and viruses do not easily survive in an intestine in which papain regularly travels. Papain is abundant in the leaves,black seeds and the sap. Foreign companies make papain tablets from the sap for indigestion. Besides Papain, these parts of the papaya offer proteolytic enzymes which help to digest other classes of food (carbohydrates and fats) and, when taken on empty stomach, may empower the immune system to deal with retrograde tissue such as cancer. Pawpaw leaves stop bleeding through the eyes, ears, nose, mouth etc in Dengue Fever through a high amount of vitamin K 2 which supports the clotting factor of the blood. Vitamin K also helps calcium absorbtion, thereby promoting bone health. Papaya also gives us Lycopene, found also in tomatoes, for prostate gland health. I cannot forget vitamin C which, in the average papaya provides about 220 per cent of the daily requirement. The same goes for Vitamin A, Choline, potassium etc. Not many people are aware that the black seeds of papaya are probably more nutritious and medicinal than the fruit and the leaves. The black seeds bear testimonies of the leaves and fruit and more. To them have been ascribed the potential to prevent prostate cancer growth. They are also believed to be protective of the liver and therefore the kidneys, and to protect the heart against ravages by low density lipoprotein (LDL), the dangerous cholesterol fraction. The black seeds posses alkaloids, flavonoids and polyphenols which give them powerful antioxidant potential to especially reduce inflammation and challenge cancer. In these seeds are mono unsaturated fatty acids, including oleic acid, which are beneficial in the control of estrogen levels, induce menstruation and check menstrual cramps etc. They are reputed to also provide zinc, calcium, phosphorus,magnesium etc. For these and other reasons, I do not throw away the black pawpaw seeds but eat them with the fruit or with a meal. There are more health benefits from the papaya which space does not permit mention today. Over, then, to the potential grains from an agriculture revolution.
The Papaya
I love this fruit. I eat the fruit, peel, seeds and leaves. Even the roots are useful, but some studies say they may cause male infertility through sperm damage. This finding was in an animal study. In Eastern Nigeria, the root is used in the treatment of liver cirrhosis and jaundice.I once cultivated a small farm of papaya, harvested the small plants from the roots, crushed them under a hammer mill and dried them in an oven I purchased from the Federal Institute for Industrial Research, Oshodi (FIIRO) , handiwork of Engr Komolafe and his men. I called the powder Caripals (carica papaya roots, leaves, and stem) . This is a dense papain herbal product. What it is good for deserves another article.The campaign on papaya I have been itching to ignite is aimed at giving the average Nigerian affordable breakfast and dinner. Who wouldn’t fill up at either table time on two or three pawpaw fruits to himself or herself alone?
The average papaya fruit may be blessed with about 100 seeds. We often throw them away as waste for lizards, chickens and birds to eat. Yet, we may plant them to expand our food crop stock. A papaya seedling becomes a full fledged plant in about one year, producing about 100 fruits in a good fruiting season. There must be about 120 million active persons in the projected 220 million Nigerian population. If only 50 million of them are enraptured in a pawpaw planting campaign, and they plant 50 pawpaw seeds each in one year, this should yield 2,500,000,000 million papaya plants, most of which may be fruiting (female) plants , if seeds from the same mother plant are not planted near one another.Even if they are, there is a new way of making male pawpaw trees to become female trees. Indians use this method. Mrs Sade Kusa, my sister-in-law, picked it up from them and taught me. All that has to be done is to cut down a male pawpaw tree and drive nails into the stump near the top from two opposite sides. The nails are left on. The tree will regrow as a dwarf tree and begin to fruit soon after. Mrs Kusa taught me this technique when she visited my garden and noticed that I had cut down a pawpaw tree to the level of the fence. I should have cut it even lower, she said. This tree was fruitful. The trouble with it was that it grew taller than the roof of the storey building, taking its fruits away to a height where only the birds could enjoy them. I do not know if, in any way, we antagonised it or disturbed it by picking its leaves almost every week to eat them raw over a meal. This may not be superstition. Plants and trees may have no souls, but they have nature beings who tend them and respond to our relationships with the plants, according to the findings of many psychic garden studies.
We digressed from where we were looking at each of 50 million Nigerians planting 50 million pawpaw seeds for a harvest of 2,500,000000 pawpaw trees the next year, in a papaya revolution under president Tinubu’s agriculture emergency. Even if 1,000,000,000 female pawpaw trees, that is less than half of our harvest of pawpaw trees in the first year, give us 50 fruits each per tree and each of the 50 fruits gives us an average of hundred seeds, that means we are going to have for planting in the second year 1,000,000,000x 50x 100 seeds or 5,000,000,000,000 seeds. What we are going to do with five thrillion seeds will now be the business of managers of the agriculture emergency papaya revolution. If only half of the five thrillion seeds grow into female pawpaw trees, each bearing 50 fruits in one year, that will be 2,5000,000,000,000x 50 fruits or 125000,000,000,000. (Forgive my mathematics, I have no head for figures or words to express them).Wonderful! This by far surpasses the hundred billion papaya fruits suggested in the headline. It will be a lot of work for the country and managers of the agriculture emergency. Nigeria can do it. The giant of Africa would have woken up. The world will respect us. All of Chief Obafemi Awolowo’s farm settlements which are sleepy or literally dead have to be woken up. Every household has to be encouraged to grow pawpaw trees. What would it matter if single dwellings ring the setback of their perimeter fence with pawpaw trees. There will be enough pawpaw for every citizen to eat for breakfast and dinner and still leave a surplus to be kept in silos or freeze dried to powder for use another day or exported to nations which enjoy papaya but are not blessed with a climate such as ours where the papaya luxuriantly grows.The President must lead the revolution. He must grow pawpaw trees all over Aso Rock. The Senate and House of Representatives must fly the flag. So must the governor’s,State assemblies and local government offices. So must the universities, primary schools and high schools. A nation bound in a common value would be evolving. We need fear no wastages. If a freeze drying industry will arise to convert the surplus to powder. The seeds can be converted to papain tablets to solve indigestion problems and to kill parasites in the intestine. Nigerian herbalists who needed micronised pawpaw leaf powder used to import this medicinal product from Chinese, European or American papaya plantations which may stretch into several square kilometers. This revolution, like the rabbit revolution, will create several thousand jobs, provide stomach filling light and medicinal meals with a higher energy coefficient than cooked meals. Giving money handouts to poor people will not end their poverty. Creating jobs for poor persons, will also merely be spoonfeeding them. Poverty is spiritual blindness to positive possibilities in the environment . Spiritual poverty brings about material poverty even in the midst of oceans of milk and honey.
Perennial farming
Another interesting aspect of President Tinubu’s agriculture emergency is that farming will now be done year round and not seasonally. What a slow nation we are! Like many other citizens, I suggested perennial farming to the government of President Ebele Jonathan and President Mohammadu Buhari. During the Presidential election campaign of both gentlemen in 2015, I published about 13 articles in The Nation newspaper entitled JONATHAN VS BUHARI, THE RICH VS THE POOR. The summary was that whoever would become president should make food more abundant, cheaper and reduce unemployment and crime if he opened up the forests in each of the geo-political zones for specialised farming. This was to be a follow-up improvement on Chief Obafemi Awolowo’s FARM SETTLEMENTS in Western Region of Nigeria in the First Republic. Reference was made also to Israel, a country in the desert which elevated desert land into arable land and feeds itself and other countries. In the first Republic, Chief Awolowo partnered with Israel to the annoyance of the pro-Arab Muslim Northern Region.
Reference was made as well to what a former First Lady of Senegal, French woman Viviane Wade, accomplished with forest farming in a country where unemployment was at an all time high. I was privileged to meet her and to interview her in 2006 during a conference in Dakar, Senegal, on agriculture in sustainable development. This was a follow up to the 2002 Accra, Ghana conference. In Senegal in 2006, women were freely prostituting in the streets of Senegal as they do today in many Nigerian cities, wearing only under pants and blouses which do not cover their navels. May this degeneration not be contributory to the alarming cases of the raping of minors by men older than their fathers or grandfathers had been who had been subliminally sexually irradiated in buses, in the markets, in the streets…practically everywhere? I published an article a few years ago in which I recognised that rapists may be fiendish and evil, but stated that it took two to tango. After I demanded arrest and punishment for women who expose their breasts, abdomens and upper thighs in public, some women’s groups gathered signatures to fight me. I remembered them this morning when I heard on radio the story of 47-year-old man who defiled two sisters aged two years and seven years!
What did first lady Vivianne Wade do in Senegal? She had some forests cleared up and hostels built in them for unemployed young women. She took them to the forests and gave them land on which to plant cucumbers, papayas, yams, vegetable, tomatoes, cassava, beans, among other food crops and raise chickens, rabbits etc most of the surplus of which was exported to France. The women were paid in French currency and this terminated their poverty.
In the suggestions made to President Jonathan and President Buhari, farm towns, not settlements, were to be created in each geo-political zone. Each forest town was to have residential areas, farming areas, business areas, recreational areas, police stations and forest police battlements to protect the town. The government was to provide uptakers for produce from the farms. Rent was to be cheap in the residential areas. Everyone in the settlement was to have meaningful vocation.
In the settlements, water was to be ever present, like electricity. If Israel could turn desert to arable land through an irrigation system powered with boreholes, why can Nigeria not make a farming success of its arable but fallow forest land?
