Does clonal coconut material have a potential use in any agricultural system?

Abstract

I have been closely and almost continuously involved with tissue culture biotechnology for the coconut industry since 1970 when, as botanist/plant breeder to the Coconut Industry Board, Jamaica, I helped supply fresh material to research laboratories in UK. These laboratories, at Wye College and East Mailing, used tissue culture techniques for vegetative propagation (Schwabe et al., 1970) on what was even then realised to be a long slow road to better coconuts (Schwabe, 1973). In the next decade, still optimistic, I suggested ways that biotechnology could provide new approaches to collection, use and storage of coconut genetic resources by the plant breeder (Harries, 1982). Soon after that I was involved with supplying oil palm material to a tissue culture multiplication unit in UK, field testing the resulting clones in Papua New Guinea — and observing the disastrous effects of overconfident commercialisation (Corley et al.,1986). Back with coconuts by the end of that decade, older and, hopefully, wiser, my thoughts turned to overcoming constraints to the practical use of clonal coconuts (Harries, 1989). And now, because success has not yet arrived, I adopt the role of advocatus diaboli (devil’s advocate) to ask if clonal coconuts really do have any use?