Carambola cultivation

Carambola cultivation

Descripción

The recent selection of sweet-flavoured commercial varieties of carambola, linked with the attractive aspect of the fruit with its unique star-shaped section, has significantly increased interest in its commercial cultivation. Except for Malaysia, Taiwan, Guyana and Florida, carambola is almost unknown in most parts of the tropics. Increased interest in carambola has been stimulated by a well attended International Symposium held in Guyana in 1989 at which it was established that t he marketing potential for this fruit is extremely high. Most currently available bibliographical references are written in Malay or Chinese. It is only recently that some papers have been published in English; only a limited amount of information is available in Spanish or other international languages. In addition, most of this recent information has a very restricted circulation, since it appears in pamphlets and articles from journals prepared for the producing countries; suc h publications are not included in the international abstracts and data bases. The purpose of this work is therefore to present an updated review of the knowledge of this species which may be equally useful to the small-scale farmer, the professional grower and the research worker.