By Luxon Nhamo, Sylvester Mpandeli, Samkelisiwe Hlophe-Ginindza and Tafadzwanashe Mabhaudhi
The 2024 World Food Day on 16 October is being celebrated under the theme “Right to foods for a better life and a better future”.
The theme is significant as access to food is a basic human need, yet in most parts of the world, particularly in the global South, food insecurity and malnutrition are worsening.
The challenge is aggravated by extreme weather events, conflict, and rising food prices that are pushing most households further into hunger and widening inequalities. Africa, for example, currently spends over US$35 billion annually on food imports to supplement local deficits.
The challenge is compounded by the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) induced droughts that have affected the continent.
As of this year, countries like Malawi, Zambia, and Zimbabwe have declared state of emergency due to the ENSO drought.
Therefore, adopted crops like maize, rice, wheat, and soyabeans are threatened by the increasing recurrence and intensity of extreme weather events and degraded lands as they are not adapted to harsh local conditions.
The challenges facing major crops, including high water usage, limited dietary diversity in the food basket, low nutritional value and poor adaptive capacity under harsh climatic conditions, have increased the call to mainstream underutilised indigenous and traditional crops into the main food system.
Underutilised indigenous crops are locally produced crop species primarily grown in particular native communities.
However, they have been losing their popularity for some time as they have been sidelined and have yet to mainstream into the food value chain.
They have been described as food for people experiencing poverty, besides their high nutritional and medicinal value. Such crops include Bambara groundnut, taro, sorghum, teff, Amaranthus, sweet potatoes, and cowpea, among others.
They are often characterised by their resilience and adaptation to extreme climatic and edaphic conditions and have local cultural significance.
Current changing environments, characterised by extreme droughts and shortened growing seasons, favour indigenous crops.
Historically, they have always helped ensure food and nutritional security as part of a balanced diet when adapted crops fail or between harvests.
Introducing major commercial crops resulted in abandoning the ancient food wealth of indigenous crops as the newly found crops became popular as they substituted these local crops.
The change resulted in most local indigenous food crops being driven into eternal exile, yet some grow naturally in the wild. Although 300,000 to 500,000 existing plant species exist globally, about 30,000 are edible.
At the same time, only 7,000 have been cultivated or collected as food, yet only 20 species provide 90% of the world’s food requirements, with wheat, maize and rice contributing 60% of the human diet.
Therefore, tens of thousands of edible plant species adapted to local climatic conditions remain underutilised, besides their potential to meet local food demands with little production costs.
In the case of South Africa, the country is one of the seventeen megadiverse countries in the world, boasting of a rich tapestry of agro-biodiversity of which indigenous fruits and crops are part.
However, as they are generally sidelined, they currently cover a limited area that is neglected and underfunded due to their perceived limited value in the global food market.
Hence, there are growing calls to mainstream underutilised crops into the food systems due to their advantages, including using fewer resources like chemicals and nutrients, diversifying farming systems and making them more resilient (to biotic and abiotic stresses and climate change), enhancing water productivity and promoting food and nutritional security while strengthening local food systems and sovereignty.
Their low input requirements, among other advantages, give them an economic advantage over commercial and major crops.
Large tracts of degraded agricultural land deemed unsuitable for major crops and which may require costly land reclamation practices can, therefore, be reclaimed and used to cultivate underutilised crops adapted to extreme local weather conditions.
Due to the many advantages of indigenous fruits and crops, they are now regarded as ‘opportunity crops’ as they are earmarked to sustainably address topical challenges, including food and water insecurity under climate change.
They play a pivotal role in food and nutritional security, resilience and adaptation to climate change, environmental degradation reduction, local economy stimulation, and employment creation.
Their socio-economic and ecological values offer enhanced agro-biodiversity with the potential to address several Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
There is, therefore, a need to recognise the potential of indigenous crops to offer genetic diversity, nutrient density, and their peculiar adaptative capacity to particular ecological niches.
Therefore, cultivating and mainstreaming indigenous crops is an alternative climate change adaptation strategy.
Their capacity to enhance agro-biodiversity at the field level, promote nutritional diversity, disrupt pest and disease cycles, and reduce the water allocated to agriculture.
Harnessing and mainstreaming local knowledge and traditional crop species and developing underutilised crop breeds have enormous potential to improve water, food and nutritional security globally amidst extreme weather events' increasing frequency and intensity.
As a result of the need to bring back underutilised indigenous crops into the main food basket, the Water Research Commission (WRC) and its strategic partners have been spearheading research that promotes their mainstreaming into the food value chain.
This is key to food and nutritional security, economic empowerment of marginalised groups, climate change adaptation and promoting equity, diversity and inclusion in the food system.
*Luxon Nhamo, Sylvester Mpandeli and Samkelisiwe Hlophe-Ginindza are Research Manager at the Water Research Commission, and Tafadzwanashe Mabhaudhi is a Professor at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.
** The views expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of IOL or Independent Media.
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