Abstract
International agricultural policies to address hunger and malnutrition in the tropics and sub-tropics have typically been based on approaches to the intensification of farming systems effective in industrialised economies where the social, economic, and environmental conditions and the infrastructure are very different to those in Africa. The consequence of this short-sightedness has been that agricultural productivity, dependent on ecosystem services from natural capital, has declined in Africa due to ecological and environmental collapse. This has undermined the livelihoods of the millions of smallholder farmers living on the brink of the cash economy, leading to severe social injustice. This review summarises advances in smallholder agriculture’s sustainable intensification in the tropics and sub-tropics, leveraging the domestication and commercialisation of wild indigenous tree species that produce nutritious, marketable, and useful food and non-food products. These are grown within diversified and multifunctional farming systems together with conventional food staples and local orphan crops to reduce land degradation, pollution, water extraction, and nutrient mining while promoting services such as pollination and other ecological functions. The benefits arising from this approach simultaneously address hunger, malnutrition, poverty, social injustice, and a stagnant economy, as well as important global issues such as climate change, loss of biodiversity and environmental degradation. Addressing these issues may also reduce the risk of future pandemics of zoonotic diseases, such as COVID-19. This set of serious global issues epitomise our divided and dysfunctional world and calls out for action. Enhancing sustainable smallholder productivity using indigenous and wild foods is an important international policy and business intervention, vital for achieving the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals and the rebalancing of the global economy by restoring natural capital within new African indigenous food industries.
Highlights
On the other side of the same coin, there are unaddressed issues arising from the colonial days [1] such as: blindness to the marginalisation of poor, smallholder subsistence households across Africa, inappropriate policies for agricultural intensification and international trade that impede national programmes for food security, social justice, climate change and biodiversity retention
It is time for action to address (i) the discrimination against African farmers, which has led to them being locked in social injustice, hunger, malnutrition, and poverty, and (ii) environmental degradation on a planetary scale
Over the last 30 years, progress has been made towards finding ways to address the failures of African agriculture and its consequent hunger, malnutrition, and environmental degradation, which are intertwined with abject poverty, societal marginalisation, injustice, and social conflict
Summary
These severe consequences are exacerbated by pollution, water extraction, nutrient mining, habitat change, and fragmentation, which threaten sustainability, reduce resilience, and increase vulnerability to climate change Intertwined with this are issues of culture, sense of place, dignity, and environmental rights. This, together with its environmental consequences, are key drivers of social migration leading to the rapid urbanisation of Africa and its impacts on the dislocation of families, rising unemployment, and civil injustice in burgeoning city slums Taken together, it seems that the current abuse of farming households can be attributed to capitalist business self-interest seen as more important than resolving the significant global issues of hunger, malnutrition, poverty, social injustice, environmental degradation, and climate change. Beeckmans [3] expressed this as a need to ‘decolonise’ research and emphasises the importance and universality of interdisciplinary research
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