Forgotten food crops in sub-Saharan Africa for healthy diets in a changing climate

Abstract

As climate changes in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), Africa’s “forgotten” food crops offer a wide range of options to diversify major staple production as a key measure toward achieving zero hunger and healthy diets. So far, however, these forgotten food crops have been neglected in SSA’s climate-change adaptation strategies. Here, we quantified their capacity to adapt cropping systems of SSA's major staples of maize, rice, cassava, and yams to changing climates for the four subregions of West, Central, East, and Southern Africa. We used climate-niche modeling to explore their potential for crop diversification or the replacement of these major staples by 2070, and assessed the possible effects on micronutrient supply. Our results indicated that approximately 10% of the present production locations of these four major staples in SSA may experience novel climate conditions in 2070, ranging from a high of almost 18% in West Africa to a low of less than 1% in Southern Africa. From an initial candidate panel of 138 African forgotten food crops embracing leafy vegetables, other vegetables, fruits, cereals, pulses, seeds and nuts, and roots and tubers, we selected those that contributed most to covering projected future and contemporary climate conditions of the major staples’ production locations. A prioritized shortlist of 58 forgotten food crops, able to complement each other in micronutrient provision, was determined, which covered over 95% of assessed production locations. The integration of these prioritized forgotten food crops in SSA’s cropping systems will support the “double-win” of more climate-resilient and nutrient-sensitive food production in the region.

Comparison of Salt Stress Tolerance among Two Leaf and Six Grain Cultivars of Amaranthus cruentus L.

“…Therefore, the use of so-called “orphan” or “indigenous” crops and wild crop relatives (WCR) has been flourishing in the last few decades [ 15 , 16 , 17 , 18 ]. It is a large research field with different approaches, including the introgression of genes from orphan crops or WCR to major crops, breeding of under-domesticated crops or de novo domestication of wild species [ 19 , 20 , 21 , 22 ]. This array of approaches is promising for breeding for salinity tolerance [ 22 , 23 ].…”

TreeGOER: A database with globally observed environmental ranges for 48,129 tree species

“…outliers (version 2.15-1). In one application of the methodology termed 'method 1' here, the default parameters of the function were used for n_min (the minimum number of environmental variables required to flag an outlier record) of 5 and fence.k (the fence multiplier of the interquartile range) of 2.5. van Zonneveld et al ( 2018) provides the justification for method 1, which was recently also used by van Zonneveld et al (2023). As a more strict outlier detection method, I also used a 'method 2' where n_min was set as 2 and fence.k as 1.5, the latter as in the original Tukey method.…”

“…I illustrate my argument via Figure 1 where the simulated environmental niche of a species has an ellipsoid shape as used in previous theoretical discussions as by Hijmans and Graham (2006), Etherington (2019) or Erickson and Smith (2023). The same arguments can be made, however, for niches with convex or concave hull shapes, as used for example in climate change studies by Pironon et al (2019) or van Zonneveld et al (2023). With a large enough sample size where more complex model calibrations can approximate the true ellipsoid niches well, the BIOCLIM algorithm tends to overestimate suitable conditions in the zones labelled as 'B1' in Figure 1.…”

Finger millet: a hero in the making to combat food insecurity

“…Crop models for mid- and end-of-century predictions of yields for maize, wheat, rice, and soybean forecast decreases for all four crops caused by warming temperatures, with losses offset to varying extents by yield gains under increased CO 2 concentrations (Hasegawa et al 2022 ). Yield declines are predicted to be most prevalent in low-latitude tropical regions (Jägermeyr et al 2021 ), affecting food production and food security in some of the most densely populated and arid areas of the world (Center for International Earth Science Information Network (CIESIN) Columbia University 2018 ), including in sub-Saharan Africa (van Zonneveld et al 2023 ). The grain projected to be most affected is maize.…”