Food & Climate
New study examined forgotten crops that may help make Sub-Saharan food systems more resilient, and more nutritious, as climate change makes it harder to grow maize which is one of the main crops the region currently relies on.
A 2023 study was recently awarded the Cozzarelli Prize from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences for its work identifying “forgotten” food crops in sub-Saharan Africa that may be more resilient to climate change than the region’s current staple crops of maize, rice, cassava and yams, according a report seen by “Food & Climate” platform.
The study found that West Africa and Central Africa would experience the largest decrease in suitability for current staple crops by 2070, and grow maize was the most vulnerable of the staples.
52 Food crops
In addition to identifying 52 food crops that will likely be better-suited to the region’s future climate — and which have more nutritional value than staple crops — these researchers have already succeeded in introducing some of the overlooked crops to local communities.
“The changing environment, together with the need to diversify the food system and to chase away some of the health issues that we are having now, should trigger us to change the way we grow things, the way we eat,” says co-author Enoch Achigan-Dako, director of the Genetics, Biotechnology & Seed Sciences Laboratory at Benin’s University of Abomey-Calavi. “The diversity we need is already available”, according to “goodmen project”.
Using models of predicted climate for the year 2070, the co-authors identified several regions where climate change will likely make it harder to grow these current staples, especially grow maize, in the next 50 years.
The researchers compared future scenarios to the environmental ranges of 138 candidate crops indigenous to sub-Saharan Africa, found in gene banks and in fields. According to the study, these were food crops that were “relatively underresearched, underutilized, or underpromoted in an African context,” but which have the nutrient content and growing stability to support healthy diets and local economies in the region.
The researchers found that many of these plants’ current ranges suggested they would be able to thrive under new, expected climate conditions. From this group, the researchers then whittled down their list to only include crops with high nutritional content.
“If you look at larger patterns, not only in Africa but globally, there is a kind of tendency to homogenize diets, which is not only affecting our nutrition but our resilience of the food production systems,” says co-author Maarten van Zonneveld, the gene bank manager at the World Vegetable Center in Taiwan.
The researchers have already achieved some successes, including with the spider plant: the former weed is now a common sight at farmers’ markets in Kenya, and Achigan-Dako is working with farmers to sell it directly to consumers in Benin. His lab has also had success in introducing the mung bean (Vigna radiata) in Benin by sharing seeds from the World Vegetable Center with farmers.
In Eswatini, van Zonneveld and the World Vegetable Center are working with schools to introduce hardy, underutilized vegetables to their gardens, which have typically only grown maize and beans.
“These programs look like a promising way to engage with young people, provide them with more nutritious meals and also let them experience these kinds of vegetables,” van Zonneveld says. “These will be our future champions, and they will take these vegetables with them. That’s really part of a long-term solution.”
A sign of wealth
One issue is that there’s still much to be learned about native crop diversity; van Zonneveld pointed to a significant knowledge gap in terms of historic crop records in the Congo Basin in particular.
“It’s one of the least-researched areas in terms of vegetable diversity on the continent,” he says.
This comes in part because these countries are dependent on imports for their food. In many parts of the region, eating Western-style is also seen as a sign of wealth, while Indigenous populations and cultures still experience discrimination. Additionally, poor infrastructure and ongoing armed conflicts in some countries can make it difficult and expensive to carry out research.
Additionally, according to Josué Aruna, executive director of the Congo Basin Conservation Society (CBCS) in the Democratic Republic of Congo, most scientific interest in the region has focused on “improved” crops bred for yield and productivity, rather than nutrition or resilience against climate change.