Smallholders and the rural poor in Africa grow a huge variety of edible plants other than maize, wheat and rice. These other crops – including baobab, amaranth, breadfruit and the spider plant – have long been neglected by researchers and are often known as 'orphan crops'. But with the recent launch of a new African Plant Breeding Academy, improved varieties of these crops may soon play a bigger part in achieving household food security for millions of people.

The Academy, an initiative of the African Orphan Crops Consortium (AOCC) opened in late 2013 and is being hosted by the World Agroforestry Centre (ICRAF) in Nairobi, where about 250 scientists from around Africa will receive training over the next five years in the latest biotechnological techniques to sequence, assemble and annotate the genomes of 100 traditional African food crops.

The aim is to produce more robust and nutritionally improved varieties of these 'backyard' crops, and to make them available to smallholders everywhere. Not all are necessarily indigenous, but all are typically used in local diets.

"They're neglected crops, but that doesn't mean they're not important," says Allen Van Deynze, a researcher at the University of California, Davis who has helped design the training programme.

"Our main goal for the AOCC, which the academy is part of and funded by, is to reduce stunting due to malnutrition in the first couple of years of life. In Africa, depending on the country, 30 to 40% of children are stunted in some way. This is an irreversible condition: if you're malnourished in the first couple of years of life, you just don't have a chance."

The role of neglected and underutilised species in diets has generally been receiving more policy attention in recent years, according to Michael Hermann, global co-ordinator at Crops for the Future.

"The newest version of the FAO's Global Plan of Action mentions neglected crops much more often than in the previous version which is now around 15 years old. Compared to 25 or even 15 years ago, donors and organisations are becoming more aware of this agenda."

The crops focused on at the African Plant Breeding Academy were chosen based on surveys of anthropologists, sociologists and scientists working in Africa, who were asked to identify the crops most important to people's diets.

"These are the crops that smallholders are growing and eating themselves every day," says Van Deynze. "We want to work on the crops they're already eating, to improve productivity and make selections within the individual crops for plants that have positive nutritional profiles. It really comes down to zinc, iron and some key vitamins."

The baobab is one of the first species being studied at the new centre. Native to Africa, its fruit contain high levels of vitamin C. Ramni Jamnadass, a senior scientist at ICRAF who is running the academy, describes it as "iconic" in Africa but under-researched.

"With baobab, we're characterising its variation and we're seeing there are big differences in baobab from one provenance to another," says Jamnadass.

"Trees are just like us with different traits – some are better built than others, some more petite. We want to sequence the genome, and see if we identify genes which are related to higher nutritional content such as vitamin C. You also find some baobab have huge fruits and some are tiny. Having that sequencing information will allow the scientists and breeders to start looking for things of interest to them."

IFPRI's 2013 Global Food Policy report noted that agricultural R&D in sub-Saharan Africa is lagging, and called for increased funding from governments and donors along with a focus on ensuring that farmers can adopt the resulting innovations. This capacity building is one of the aims of the academy, which Van Deynze says is training the "brightest and best" scientists from all over Africa.

"They already will have a PhD or masters, and we're giving them the latest technology and tools. Our goal is to make ourselves obsolete so they can continue to give training in their own countries."

The FAO's global plan also notes that as well as being important to food and nutrition security, underutilised crops can contribute to improving the livelihoods of smallholders. However, it may not always be the case that the species themselves need to be improved. Crops are underutilised for a reason, says Hermann of Crops for the Future, and it's important to understand why. Some may well need improving but some may need better marketing channels.

"We need a sharp understanding of what is it in crop x, y or z that limits its availability or demand to local or export markets, rather than making the assumption that we need to improve it," he says.

But for dozens of 'backyard' crops at least, it's hoped that the work of the African Plant Breeding Academy may eventually help reduce the problem of undernutrition and stunting in many countries. The training itself will run over the next five years, though Van Deynze expects the work to continue indefinitely with the help of national governments.

"The long-term goal for the AOCC is to get African governments to invest in plant breeding and the development of these crops," he says.

"We'll be asking governments to put up several million dollars a year on breeding programmes for the crops that are important to their country, and the AOCC will work to match that. A crop development programme is not a one-year project: it's a continuous process of development."

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