Domesticating the Undomesticated for Global Food and Nutritional Security: Four Steps

Abstract

Ensuring the food and nutritional demand of the ever-growing human population is a major sustainability challenge for humanity in this Anthropocene. The cultivation of climate resilient, adaptive and underutilized wild crops along with modern crop varieties is proposed as an innovative strategy for managing future agricultural production under the changing environmental conditions. Such underutilized and neglected wild crops have been recently projected by the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations as ‘future smart crops’ as they are not only hardy, and resilient to changing climatic conditions, but also rich in nutrients. They need only minimal care and input, and therefore, they can be easily grown in degraded and nutrient-poor soil also. Moreover, they can be used for improving the adaptive traits of modern crops. The contribution of such neglected, and underutilized crops and their wild relatives to global food production is estimated to be around 115–120 billion US$ per annum. Therefore, the exploitation of such lesser utilized and yet to be used wild crops is highly significant for climate resilient agriculture and thereby providing a good quality of life to one and all. Here we provide four steps, namely: (i) exploring the unexplored, (ii) refining the unrefined traits, (iii) cultivating the uncultivated, and (iv) popularizing the unpopular for the sustainable utilization of such wild crops as a resilient strategy for ensuring food and nutritional security and also urge the timely adoption of suitable frameworks for the large-scale exploitation of such wild species for achieving the UN Sustainable Development Goals.

Agro-Morphological Exploration of Some Unexplored Wild Vigna Legumes for Domestication

“…It has been reported that only 12 crops contribute most to the current global food production, with only three of them (rice, wheat and maize) providing more than 50% of the world's calories [1][2][3]. Consequently, the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations has predicted that the world is in need of about 70% more food to adequately feed the ever-growing population [4].…”

“…Therefore, a detailed screening and exploration of hitherto wild and novel species from various agro-climatic regions of the world could help to mitigate the need. Although the crop breeding community is not yet unanimous on the importance of the crop neo-domestication concept, it is increasingly becoming popular in research on this topic that domesticating the undomesticated is an ideal method, which could aid in mitigating the global food insecurity challenges [1,5]. The method will not only promote the successful utilization of hitherto wild and non-domesticated food crops in dietary diversification programs, but also help with biodiversity conservation.…”

Role of New Plant Breeding Technologies for Food Security and Sustainable Agricultural Development

“…The recent discovery of multiple key domestication genes and scientific breakthroughs in introducing multiple genomic changes in plants simultaneously with CRISPR/Cas enables the domestication of wild species within a single plant generation (Schindele, Dorn, and Puchta 2019). De novo domestication can contribute to enhancing agrobiodiversity and dietary diversity with possible benefits for the environment and human nutrition (Singh et al 2019).…”

Fostering sustainable land restoration through circular economy‐governed transitions

“…Adoption of crop diversification practices in degraded lands can benefit restoration by increasing soil fertility, promoting sustainable agriculture and rural engagement. This involves the identification of wild varieties comparable in their nutritive profile to traditional crop plants and resilient enough to grow on degraded lands (Singh et al ). Secondly, development of suitable cropping strategies based on community and traditional tribal knowledge is required (Singh et al ; Priyadarshini & Abhilash ).…”