Abstract
Business as usual or transformative change? While the global agro-industrial food system is credited with increasing food production, availability and accessibility, it is also credited with giving birth to 'new' challenges such as malnutrition, biodiversity loss, and environmental degradation. We reviewed the potential of underutilized indigenous and traditional crops to bring about a transformative change to South Africa's food system. South Africa has a dichotomous food system, characterized by a distinct, dominant agro-industrial, and, alternative, informal food system. This dichotomous food system has inadvertently undermined the development of smallholder producers. While the dominant agro-industrial food system has led to improvements in food supply, it has also resulted in significant trade-offs with agro-biodiversity, dietary diversity, environmental sustainability, and socio-economic stability, especially amongst the rural poor. This challenges South Africa's ability to deliver on sustainable and healthy food systems under environmental change. The review proposes a transdisciplinary approach to mainstreaming underutilized indigenous and traditional crops into the food system, which offers real opportunities for developing a sustainable and healthy food system, while, at the same time, achieving societal goals such as employment creation, wellbeing, and environmental sustainability. This process can be initiated by researchers translating existing evidence for informing policy-makers. Similarly, policy-makers need to acknowledge the divergence in the existing policies, and bring about policy convergence in pursuit of a food system which includes smallholder famers, and where underutilized indigenous and traditional crops are mainstreamed into the South African food system.
Highlights
Agriculture became the backbone of food systems more than 10,000 years ago, as humans shifted from hunting and gathering to growing and cultivating food [1]
We reviewed the status of South Africa’s food system with the aim to identify opportunities for mainstreaming underutilized indigenous and traditional crops into the food system
While the agro-industrial food system has inadvertently excluded smallholder farmers and women in rural areas, underutilized indigenous and traditional crops offer the opportunity for such groups of farmers to re-enter the system
Summary
Agriculture became the backbone of food systems more than 10,000 years ago, as humans shifted from hunting and gathering to growing and cultivating food [1]. A lesser documented outcome of the global agro-industrial food system has been the post-colonial replacement, and subsequent relegation, of underutilized indigenous and traditional crops through the introduction of exotic and, considered “major” crops, that were often higher yielding, and more input intensive [19,20] This led to neglect of underutilized indigenous and traditional crop species that had previously formed the basis of local food systems, especially in the global South. While the global agro-industrial food system has recognized the role played by smallholder rural farming systems [22], these groups of farmers marginally influence the system, and are at great risk from economic and climatic shocks [23] This is because they have limited access to the modernized inputs, techniques, and markets necessary to participate in the production of major crops [24,25]. Such integration or inclusion should occur in a way that allows them to retain the attributes that make them attractive and transformative while benefiting from the support mechanisms that exist within the dominant food system
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