Abstract
Ensuring the food and nutritional demand of the ever-growing human population is a major sustainability challenge for humanity in this Anthropocene. The cultivation of climate resilient, adaptive and underutilized wild crops along with modern crop varieties is proposed as an innovative strategy for managing future agricultural production under the changing environmental conditions. Such underutilized and neglected wild crops have been recently projected by the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations as ‘future smart crops’ as they are not only hardy, and resilient to changing climatic conditions, but also rich in nutrients. They need only minimal care and input, and therefore, they can be easily grown in degraded and nutrient-poor soil also. Moreover, they can be used for improving the adaptive traits of modern crops. The contribution of such neglected, and underutilized crops and their wild relatives to global food production is estimated to be around 115–120 billion US$ per annum. Therefore, the exploitation of such lesser utilized and yet to be used wild crops is highly significant for climate resilient agriculture and thereby providing a good quality of life to one and all. Here we provide four steps, namely: (i) exploring the unexplored, (ii) refining the unrefined traits, (iii) cultivating the uncultivated, and (iv) popularizing the unpopular for the sustainable utilization of such wild crops as a resilient strategy for ensuring food and nutritional security and also urge the timely adoption of suitable frameworks for the large-scale exploitation of such wild species for achieving the UN Sustainable Development Goals.
Highlights
Ensuring the food and nutritional demand of the ever-growing human population is a major sustainability challenge for humanity in this Anthropocene
Practices,Since standardization ofthe suitable cropping models is resilient to diverse climatic conditions, they can be used as border crops, as crop breaks, intercrops and essential for successful crop diversification program
Developing benefits suitable to models forstakeholders, crop diversification based suitable on such policies neglected and wild crops
Summary
The sustainable utilization of our limited natural resources for maximizing the food production [1]. Whole-genome sequencing is yet to be done in many promising but neglected crops and there are many wild species yet to be explored for their food and nutritional significance. Exploring the diversity in root and tuber crops are essential for the food security, especially in tropical regions as they are nutritionally rich and widely found in tropical regions [26] Vigna is another important legume genus having more than a 100 species of high nutritional value for human and animal consumption [27]. 4. Apart from the exploration of wild and neglected conservation of the germplasms most promising species are important for theircrops, sustainable utilization.
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