> For the complete documentation index, see [llms.txt](https://4revs.gitbook.io/handbook/llms.txt). Markdown versions of documentation pages are available by appending `.md` to page URLs; this page is available as [Markdown](https://4revs.gitbook.io/handbook/chapters/soil-secrets/leadership-in-the-spotlight.md).
# Leadership in the spotlight
"The most ecological carbohydrate in the world"
Image source: Kiss the Ground, with permission from the Jungle Project team.
The Jungle Project offers an alternative way: food forests. Food forests are a food production system with diverse plants growing at different heights, supporting each other with shade or sharing nutrients effectively. They are combined to mimic native forests in a way that enables high food production and doesn’t need machinery. The human intervention is minimal, because these plants are multi-annual or perennial, which means farmers don’t need to replant them every year.
At the center of the business is breadfruit, a tropical forest tree native to that area, it is like a big potato that grows on trees (a filling carbohydrate, but gluten-free!). Breadfruit has Indo-Malay origins and was spread through the Pacific by early Polynesian voyagers who brought the seeds of this life-giving, abundant food source with them on all their travels. Indeed, it can be the kind of food that sustains the whole world: one tree gives approximately 3-400 kg of fruit per year, for 50 years. By comparison, a mature apple tree gives approx. 200kg.
The Jungle Project team is planting and training farmers to grow breadfruit to diversify their crops and income, at the same time creating demand for breadfruit products. Jungle Food processes it into breadfruit flour, pasta, crackers (great wheat replacer!), and expanding markets beyond Costa Rica. Their goal is to plant 600,000 trees that could feed over 3.6 million people.
The company's leadership shines through all of this: they are taking an underutilized native crop and they are creating an entire tropical agroforestry ecosystem around it. They are helping revitalize local economies and biodiversity.
At scale, the benefits of initiatives like this for the global ecosystem could be enormous. Tropical forest regeneration and tropical staple trees can make a significant impact on storing carbon and reversing climate change. Both these solutions rank very high in Project Drawdown top 100 (#5 and #14), given the estimated amount of atmospheric CO2 they can put away: a total of 72 gigatons by 2050. To picture the significance of this number, we can imagine that the world stops putting emissions in the air for two full years.
**"One breadfruit tree can feed a family for generations"**
