Africa’s growing population, expected to reach 2.5 billion by 2050, is taking its toll on food production and consumption. This is a major source of concern for governments across the continent.
Despite rich biodiversity and excellent potential for self-sufficiency in food production, several challenges, such as land degradation, climate change, lack of access to fertilizers, poor agricultural infrastructure, banditry, and insurgency, are continuously impeding sustainable agriculture, leading to low agriculture productivity, among other issues.
To address these challenges, IITA–CGIAR is deploying research technologies across 30 countries to help smallholder farmers access improved varieties and clean seeds and increase productivity. With Africa’s food security dependent on a few major crops, and many of them providing only basic energy sources in diets, there is a need to address the combination of zinc, iron, and vitamin A deficiency as well as the high hidden hunger index (HHI) in sub-Saharan Africa.
A recent study explored indigenous African orphan legumes and their potential for food and nutrition, crop diversification, and climate resilience. According to the study carried out by researchers from IITA’s Genetic Resources Center (GRC) and the University of Ibadan, promoting the cultivation of African orphan—neglected or underutilized—crops due to their cultural linkage with the regional food habits of the communities in Africa can improve food and nutrition security.
These orphan crops, particularly legumes, are nutritionally rich foods with untapped genetic diversity, which adapt to harsh climate conditions and poor marginal soils. Legume orphan crops also contribute to improving soil fertility because these crops can nodulate and fix nitrogen with varying degrees of effectiveness.
According to the study, despite the wide distribution of orphan legumes across sub-Saharan Africa, these important crop species have low yields. They are rarely used partly due to a lack of improved varieties and adequate research attention. Hence, the availability of large and diverse germplasm collections is an essential resource for crop improvement on the continent.
IITA-GRC conserves a collection of orphan legumes, particularly the Bambara groundnut, African yam bean, and Kersting’s groundnut, that have been characterized and evaluated for their key traits in crop improvement efforts.
The study reveals that new collections are also being built to fill gaps and widen genetic diversity. These will support breeding that can be used further with Genomic-assisted breeding (GAB) tools to develop faster, cost-effective, climate-resilient cultivars with high nutrition value for farmers.
However, this requires a significant investment of resources for applying modern breeding to orphan legume crops if their full potential is to be realized. There is limited climate modeling research done on indigenous orphan legumes. So, more efforts are also needed now to model future climate signals for orphan legumes compared to other major crops of Africa.
Despite their impressive climate resilience and nutritional profiles, using conserved collections in crop improvement has been limited due to a lack of knowledge on phenotypic and molecular diversity information. Presently, several genomic research activities, including genetic diversity, linkage mapping, and marker-trait association, are in progress using genotyping by sequencing at IITA-GRC.
Many African indigenous legumes are almost forgotten and no longer widely cultivated due to factors such as high cost of inputs, lack of improved varieties, little or no research on some of the crops, long cooking time, and low seed yield. Hence, there is an urgent need to capture this diversity to avoid genetic erosion and extinction.
The study summarized the economic potential, utilization, and constraints to yield production in these three orphan crops, as research on them is still far behind compared to other legumes such as cowpea, groundnut, and soybean.
A successful hybridization of the available landraces can make a difference in promoting an alternative to diversifying the African cropping system and food diets. Under harsh climate regions of Africa, orphan legumes could be used as an alternative crop to avoid complete crop failure due to climate change. With the use of GAB, this hybridization can contribute to developing improved varieties that yield more and have improved resilience and high nutritional value. This would help address food shortage and nutrition deficiencies among the rural population. It could also generate income for women and rural farmers in Africa.
Contributed by Timilehin Osunde
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