Pineapple, The

Botany, Production and Uses

Garth M Sanewski, Duane Bartholomew, Robert E Paull

• Publisher: CAB International
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781786393326
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Horticulture
• Index: Biological Sciences

Completely updated with new content and full-colour figures throughout, the second edition of this successful book continues to provide a comprehensive coverage of pineapple breeding, production and yield. Pineapple is an increasingly important crop and demand for fresh pineapple is steadily growing; stakeholders in the value chain are worldwide. The Pineapple: Botany, Production and Uses provides essential coverage from botany through to postharvest handling and provides the technical information required by all those working with the crop.The second edition: - Contains new chapters on organic production and production for other uses (fibre and ornamentals).- Includes major updates to content on taxonomy, biotechnology, cultural systems, nutrition, varieties and genetic improvement.- Explores physiological changes associated with the year-round growing of pineapple in addition to the associated cultural practices and mineral nutrition.- Considers the impacts of climate change and environmental issues on pineapple crops, and relevant mitigation strategies.- Looks at the effects of new cultivars and technologies on cultural practices and plant nutrition.Written by an international team of experts, this book is an essential resource for researchers, growers and all those involved in the pineapple industry.

1

History, Distribution and World Production*

Freddy Leal¹ and Geo Coppens d’Eeckenbrugge²

¹Universidad Central de Venezuela, Aragua, Venezuela; ²CIRAD, UMR AGAP, Montpellier, France

Pre-Columbian Importance and Distribution, and Early Post-contact Diffusion

On 4 November 1493, Cristobal Colón (Christopher Columbus) reached Guadeloupe in the Lesser Antilles and, according to the chronicles of Pedro Mártyr de Anglería (1530), found the plant and fruit of the pineapple in a small Indian village in the southern part of the island. This first contact of the Europeans with the plant and fruit was confirmed by Michele da Cuneo in 1495: ‘There were some (plants) like artichoke plants, but four times as tall, which gave a fruit in the shape of a pine cone, twice as big, which is excellent, and it can be cut with a knife like a turnip, and it seems to be wholesome’ (Morrison, 1963: 216).

The Portuguese also discovered the pineapple with their share of the New World, obtained through the Treaty of Tordesillas of 1494, involving Castilla and Portugal. On 22 April 1500, Pedro Alvares Cabral landed in Porto Seguro, in the south of the Brazilian state of Bahia, officially for the first time. Cabral’s fleet continued to India, opening a major commercial route. This route was further improved in 1502 by the discovery of Saint Helen Island, midway between Porto Seguro and the Cape of Good Hope, and the pineapple was introduced there in 1505 (Collins, 1960). However, the earliest published description of the pineapple in South America comes from the observations of Pigafetta in the Rio de Janeiro area in 1519: ‘This fruit resembles a pine cone and is extremely sweet and of exquisite taste’ (Pigafetta, 1801: 14, authors’ translation). This report was followed by many others in areas corresponding to Mexico (Ciudad Real, 1584); Nicaragua and Costa Rica (López de Velazco, 1574); Colombia (Cieza de León, 1553); Venezuela, Brazil and Paraguay (Muratori, 1743); and Ecuador (Collins, 1951; Leal, 1989). Pineapple was also observed far inland by Gaspar de Carvajal, who accompanied Francisco de Orellana, the Amazon river discoverer, from 1540 to 1542, and declared: ‘The land is very large and beautiful, and very abundant of meals and fruits, like pineapples and [avocado] pears’ (Carvajal, 1542: 41, authors’ translation).

The pineapple (Ananas comosus var. comosus) was an essential plant for the Amerindians of the Antilles and the northern coast of South America (terra firma) before the arrival of Colón; they knew that pineapples were brought to the Antilles islands from the Orinoco and Amazon basins many years before by the dreaded Carib Indians, who dominated the islands. In their travels, the Carib usually took with them seeds, roots and plants to places already invaded with their large canoes. To them pineapple was a delicious fruit which could produce liquor for the occasional festivities, reduce swellings, cure scratches and wounds; and the most important thing, rotten pineapples could be used to obtain venomous substances to smear arrows and spears for war (Haughton, 1978; Leal and Coppens d’Eeckenbrugge, 1996).

Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo (1535) observed that the pineapple was very common in the Caribbean basin as well as on the South America mainland, where it was known under different names; he also made the first drawing and a good description:

Each pine grows on a very sharp thorny thistle with long prickly leaves, very wild; from the middle of this thistle emerges a round stalk which bears only one pine, which takes about 10 months or a year to ripen. Once a fruit is cut, this thistle produces no more fruit and serves for nothing except to litter the ground [. . .] In order to plant other thistle-pines these tufts are the seed or succession of this fruit because by taking this tuft which the pine has on top of it or any of the others which are joined to the stem, and thrusting them in to the earth, two or three fingers deep, leaving one half of the tuft uncovered, they soon take very well and in the course of time I have mentioned each tuft will produce a new thistle and bear another pine as I have said [. . .] The pineapples from the mainland of South and Central America are better than the ones found in the islands.

(Fernández de Oviedo, 1535: fol. 77, authors’ translation)

As shown by this wide distribution and cultivation, Native Americans had domesticated and dispersed the plant well before the arrival of Colón, and had a thorough knowledge of the plant, differentiating cultivars, wild types, related taxa and their cultivation. The words ‘nana’ or ‘anana’ have designated the pineapple in languages of the three major Amazonian families (Arawak, Carib and Tupi), all through the Orinoco and Amazon basins, as well as in terra firma. Wild pineapples are often called ‘nanai’ or ‘ananai’ (Leal and Coppens d’Eeckenbrugge, 1996). In Guarani, ‘nana’ is the plant and ‘anana’ is the fruit (Alvarado, 1939). The Brazilian name ‘abacaxi’, originally designating particular cultivars, is derived from the Guarani word for the maize ear (Bertoni, 1919). The Spanish ‘piña’ and the English ‘pineapple’ came from the comparison with the exotic pinecone. The Portuguese, instead, diffused the word ‘ananas’ together with the plant all along the tropical shores from western Africa to the Indian Ocean, so the root word ‘nana’ has acquired a pantropical distribution (Dalgado, 1913, 1919).

In addition to the fresh fruit use, the native Americans used pineapple for the preparation of alcoholic beverages (pineapple wine) (Raleigh, 1596), for fibre production, emmenagogue, abortifacient, anti-amoebic, vermifuge, correction of stomach disorders and poisoning of arrow heads and spears. Most of these medicinal uses are related to the proteolytic enzyme of the pineapple. (Leal and Coppens d’Eeckenbrugge, 1996; Maurer, 2001). The Amerindians also domesticated two fibre plants from A. comosus. Along the Amazon River and to the north, they cultivated the curagua (A. comosus var. erectifolius (L.B. Smith) Coppens & Leal, a smooth-leaved type with a high yield of long and strong fibres, used for making ropes, fishing lines, fishing nets, hammocks and loin cloths (Leal and Amaya, 1991). The curagua has found a new economic use in the production of cut flowers, and more recently in biocomposites for the automotive industry (Zah et al., 2007; Neves Monteiro et al., 2013). South and south-east of the Amazon, they obtained fibres from the wild A. macrodontes Morren, as well as from the cultivated crauatá/caroatá de rede or ananás bravo (A. comosus var. bracteatus (Lindley) Coppens & Leal) (Arruda da Câmara, 1810). Today, variegated forms of this plant are used as tropical garden ornamentals or for the cut-flower market, thanks to the long and bright red bracts of their inflorescences.

The Europeans were particularly fascinated by the pineapple. Since their first travels, Spaniards have imported pineapple fruits, which were consumed in Europe when the trip was fast enough to make them edible; one of them was presented to the Emperor Charles V, who found it very pretty but refused to taste it (Humboldt, 1816). The pineapple not only travelled to Europe but was also carried in the great voyages of the 16th and 17th centuries. Unlike the fruit, the plant and its vegetative propagules are tough, durable and very resistant to drought, which greatly facilitated its diffusion around the world. The Portuguese introduced the pineapple to St Helen Island in 1505, and to Madagascar and southern India before 1548. It was also reported in the Philippines in 1558, coming from China, and naturalized in Java in 1599. Its cultivation was reported in Nepal in 1601, in Guinea in 1602, in Singapore in 1637 and in Formosa (Taiwan) in 1650 (Laufer, 1929, cited by Collins, 1960; Chadha and Pareek, 1988).

Pineapple was readily accepted as an outstanding new fruit and other uses were recognized throughout the world. In the gardens of Mozambique, where he arrived in 1586, Frei João dos Santos (1891: 49) observed ‘many pineapples’, both on the coast (province of Sofala) and more than 400 km inland (province of Tete). Van Linschoten (1610: 136), who worked in India between 1583 and 1592, noted:

The pineapple is not native there, instead it was brought from Brazil by the Portuguese. They were much prized at the beginning . . . but now they are of little value as a result of their abundance . . . they are the size of a melon, the shape of a distaff or a pine-apple, easy to cut, of a red color admixed with green, and grow to the height of a cubit.

(Van Linschoten, 1610: fol. 136, authors’ translation)

In 1571, the people of the Philippines were already making their traditional piña cloth from pineapple leaves fibres, and the natives of Malaysia used the fruit to regulate human reproduction (Gimlette, 1915, cited by Laszlo and Henshaw, 1954). The diffusion of the pineapple by the Portuguese explains the geographic distribution of the cultivars Singapore Canning and Selangor Green, which diffused from Porto Seguro into West Africa (at least between Côte d’Ivoire and Angola) and the Indo-Pacific basin (from East Africa and South Asia to the Philippines) in the early 16th century. Slightly later, as they had explored Brazil further south, the Portuguese also diffused the cultivar Pérola to the Gulf of Guinea, which explains its current presence in West Africa, and the recent development of a small specialized export to Europe, where its delicious fruits are esteemed by connoisseurs.

The pineapple was grown in greenhouses in Europe, becoming a fashionable plant for kings, aristocrats, well-to-do and educated people, botanists and horticulturists. According to Loudon (1822), the plant was introduced to England in 1690 by Bentick, later Count of Portsmouth; but the first attempts at cultivation in Europe date to the end of the 16th century, when Le Court (or La Court), a very rich Flemish trader, grew it in Drieoeck, close to Leyden. Later, he published a Horticulture Treatise, where he included the flower induction of pineapple. From Holland, in 1719, Matthew Decker sent pineapple plants to England, even though the plant had been introduced in 1690 as a botanical sample. The pineapple was introduced to France in 1730 by King Louis XV, who ordered the construction of greenhouses at Versailles to grow them (Coppens d’Eeckenbrugge et al., 1997).

The Colonial and Post-colonial Germplasm Diffusion and Improvement

The introduction of pineapple cultivars was very active until the late 19th century. Griffin (1806) pointed out that it would be an endless and unnecessary work to enumerate all the cultivars in England, because many of them are worthless and their cultivation cumbersome; he described the ten most interesting ones, mentioning as the best the ‘Oval pine-apple’ or ‘Queen-pine’. This cultivar, brought from Barbados, was famous in England before 1661 (Evelyn, 1661, cited by Collins, 1960). Later, Loudon (1822), Munro (1835) and Beer (1857), described many cultivars and stated that their list was still increasing regularly.

In 1819, France dispatched an expedition to its colonies in America and the Pacific to collect seeds and plants for its botanical gardens in Paris and Versailles. At Cayenne, the capital of French Guiana, Samuel Perrottet (1824) collected a new pineapple, which he named Bromelia mai-pouri. This epithet, which means ‘tapir’, is still used for many large-fruited cultivars in the Amazon and Orinoco basins. The five plants collected by Perrottet were multiplied and sent from Paris to England, Belgium, Holland and the Azores, and then, from England, to Florida, Jamaica, Sri Lanka and Australia. In the late 19th century, they arrived in Hawaii, from where they were distributed to the Greater Antilles, Mexico, the Philippines, Taiwan and Kenya in the first half of the 20th century (Collins, 1960). It was thus distributed and known all around the world as the cultivar Cayenne Lisse (Smooth Cayenne) that dominated the industry for many years (Rohrbach et al., 2003; Okihiro, 2009).

With the notable exceptions of ‘Smooth Cayenne’ and ‘Queen’, most early cultivars disappeared as commercial cultivation in Europe declined and pineapples were imported from the West Indies. Thanks to its high yield and good canning characteristics, ‘Smooth Cayenne’ became the pillar of the 20th-century pineapple industry worldwide, with particular developments in Hawaii, South-East Asia and West Africa, whereas ‘Queen’ and ‘Singapore Canning’ were relegated to regional roles in the Old World tropics. In the Americas, a few other cultivars had retained regional importance too, such as: ‘Española Roja’ (syn. ‘Red Spanish’), which was popular in the Caribbean basin, ‘Pérola’, the favourite Brazilian cultivar, which still compensates its less appealing green conical white-fleshed fruits by its rusticity and a very sweet and aromatic flavour; the spineless ‘Perolera’, and its sports, ‘Manzana’ in Colombia and ‘Capachera’ in Venezuela, particularly adapted to highland cultivation in the Andean valleys.

But the largest diversity of cultivars from the Amazonian cradle of the pineapple remained ignored until the end of the 20th century. Efforts towards varietal diversification, initiated at the Pineapple Research Institute (PRI) of Hawaii, focused on hybrid breeding to develop a cultivar that would surpass ‘Smooth Cayenne’ in several characteristics. However, even the best hybrids failed in the final evaluations, due to the combination of some fatal flaw and the ‘Cayenne conservatism’ that hampered effective varietal innovation in an industry that, for decades, had been tailored by and for ‘Smooth Cayenne’. When the PRI closed in 1975, its hybrids were turned over to the founding companies. One of them, called ‘MD-2’ was selected in 1973, but only diffused by Del Monte in 1996, under the commercial name ‘Del Monte Gold’ (Bartholomew et al., 2010). This cultivar was so well accepted by the North American and European consumers that it boosted the world fresh pineapple market. Sadly, this final success story did not inspire more diversification efforts. ‘MD-2’ substituted for ‘Smooth Cayenne’ as the leading fresh fruit cultivar; however, none of the interesting hybrids created in later breeding programmes (Brazil, Malaysia, Martinique, Ivory Coast) was seriously tested to challenge this new hegemony. On the contrary, ‘MD-2’ even took a share from regional cultivars in the markets of trop...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright page
• Contents
• Contributors
• Preface
• 1 History, Distribution and World Production
• 2 Morphology, Anatomy and Taxonomy
• 3 Origin and Evolution
• 4 Varieties and Breeding
• 5 Biotechnology
• 6 Crop Environment, Plant Growth and Physiology
• 7 Cultural System
• 8 Plant Nutrition
• 9 Organic Production
• 10 Production for Other Uses
• 11 Inflorescence and Fruit Development and Yield
• 12 Pests, Diseases and Weeds
• 13 Postharvest Physiology, Handling and Storage
• Index
• Back Cover