A new article in Nature Food recommends addressing agricultural transformation in sub-Saharan Africa by prioritizing the concept of “Crops that Nourish.” This approach focuses on crops and cropping systems that are nutritious, climate-resilient, good for soil health, culturally relevant, and developed through participatory, community-led processes.
The researchers, representing interdisciplinary and international collaborations, suggest that conventional agricultural research has skewed too heavily in support of staple crops including rice, wheat, and maize. They argue that this approach has overlooked factors of nutrition, climate resilience, and cultural relevance.
A “Crops that Nourish” approach shifts the focus on commercial crops to crops that “promote the soil fertility to nutrition pipeline,” Kate Schneider Lecy, Assistant Professor at Arizona State University’s School of Sustainability tells Food Tank.
The researchers frame traditional yet underutilized crops as opportunity crops, uplifting their health and environmental potential. Amaranth, for example, is rich in protein, fiber, and iron, and generally resilient to climate variations, which ultimately benefits neighboring plants and habitats.
To inform more holistic farming decisions, the article calls for transdisciplinary collaboration between areas of expertise. This means incorporating the perspectives of agricultural researchers, nutrition scientists, farmers, and the local communities who consume or utilize the crops. To foster stakeholder engagement along the value chain, from growers to chefs, authors emphasize the value of Participatory Action Research (PAR), which encourages collaboration on everything from seed breeding to market development.
“This is one of our key themes,” Sieglinde Snapp, co-author of the article and Program Director at the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center, tells Food Tank. “It requires engagement with farmers and farming communities to ensure that modern crop development is oriented towards goals of families, such as nutrition for their children.”
On-farm experimentation, in order to test how a new crop will behave and interact with its surroundings (such as providing soil fertility), is a key part of PAR. And in semi-arid parts of West Africa, researchers are seeing the results: collaboration between seed breeders and small-scale farmers to develop new seed varieties have brought about “markedly increased adoption of millet and sorghum varieties,” says Snapp.
But market demand remains one of the greatest challenges to scaling opportunities crops, Lecy tells Food Tank. She says that if more eaters are interested in eating — and purchasing — these foods, it will incentivize farmers to grow them. The lack of infrastructure to produce and sell at scale is another hurdle. According to Lecy, it is often prohibitively expensive without the help of private sector funding.
Millet and sorghum are two opportunity crops traditionally consumed in African diets and highlighted in the paper. But they tend to be traded in small-scale markets and are not currently sold at scale in sub-Saharan Africa, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization.
“It’s partly an exercise in rebranding,” Lecy tells Food Tank, noting that these crops should be presented as “aspirational” for consumers. “How do we make these healthier, more environmentally [beneficial], more prosocial decisions, the cool things to choose?”
The researchers also urge the importance of leveraging policy instruments to support farmers who grow crops that nourish. Subsidies and federally funded crop insurance for farmers need to be realigned “to favor a diverse set of nutrient dense, climate-adapted, resilient crops” Lecy says.
The article, fundamentally, calls for systemic, locally driven transformation of African food systems that requires collaboration between farmers and researchers, investments in sustained research and development, and supportive government policy.
“We should be prioritizing crops that become foods that are nutrient dense so that people start eating diverse, nutrient-dense diets and send market signals back that prioritize these resilient farming practices,” Lecy tells Food Tank.
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Photo courtesy of Leeshalom, Creative Commons
