Peace Engineering: The Breadfruit Project
For the past decade, the School of Engineering has been involved in service-learning engineering projects aimed at providing sustainable technical solutions for people found at the base of the pyramid. These people typically earn about $4/day, and are often subsistence farmers. Despite their large global numbers, these people are rarely the focus of the engineering establishment. I have been leading one of the projects, which is aimed at transforming surplus fresh breadfruit in Haiti and other Caribbean nations into flour.
Breadfruit is an underutilized staple crop long recognized for its potential to alleviate hunger in tropical climates. It can be grown sustainably with minimal agricultural inputs and can be multi-cropped with high value cash crops. Breadfruit has impressive yields compared to the current predominant staple crops such as wheat, corn and rice. A mature tree can produce 200 or more fruits per season, with an average fruit weight of 1-2 kg. The fruit is high in carbohydrates and contains important minerals and vitamins. The biggest limiting factor for large-scale production and international trade is its short shelf life. One approach to increase its shelf life and to create new products that can be incorporated into a variety of diets is to produce gluten-free breadfruit flour. The value of increased post-harvest processing techniques can be enormous in areas where raw materials are in abundance. An alignment between the grower, processor and manufacturer can be profitable and help insure food independence and security.
Over the years, I have engaged undergraduate engineering students through a service-learning option in the two-semester engineering capstone course, Senior Design, to design low-tech devices that are adapted to the culture and environment in which they are deployed. Engineering design is a cyclical process. Students come up with a design, build a prototype, and then obtain user feedback from field trials that then informs the next design iteration. Most undergraduate students do not realize that engineering a device needs multiple iterations and are surprised or disappointed when they realize their work will most likely be changed or updated by a future student team. I strongly believe, however, that the community partner is the focus of the service-learning effort, and it is the ethical responsibility of our teams to design a device or process that is truly useful for the community. Even if the student team receives an A for their work, a project is not successful until a community actually adopts and embraces the technology, and this may take several student teams.
The breadfruit processing service-learning effort has designed a manual shredder and drier and adapted a manual grinder that can be used to make the flour. The next step in the project is to develop a pilot demonstration to provide the knowledge base necessary to enable breadfruit enterprises to be established and replicated in Haiti and throughout the Caribbean. In addition to re-designing an engineering device through multiple teams, successfully deploying a new technology in a community needs a multi-disciplinary approach. In the case of breadfruit flour, one needs an end product with a market demand and a thorough understanding of the supply chain and distribution system. Thus, I have realized the need to broaden the service-learning experience to also engage graduate students in operations management and systems engineering to help create viable commercial systems from fruit harvest to end product. I have recently received funding to open a small bakery in Haiti with our Haitian partners to begin processing breadfruit flour for use in baking into a nutritious snack product in a small business setting. The introduction of a new product will further increase local food supplies, increase the demand for breadfruit flour, and create business ventures for both the producers and the processors. I believe that the students involved with establishing a real bakery in Haiti will never forget the experience and will learn firsthand the challenges of their coursework.