Abstract
AbstractUnderutilized, or orphan legumes, are widely distributed across farming landscapes in sub‐Saharan Africa (SSA) but often have low yields and do not fulfill their potential due to very limited research, breeding, development, marketing, and awareness of their benefits. These advantages include nutritional quality and climate resilience. In this review, we focus on Bambara groundnut, African yam bean, and Kersting's groundnut. Knowledge of the challenges and rewards of exploiting them will provide opportunities for concerted approaches to their revival and contribution to future global food systems, especially in the context of climate change. This review identifies the institutional and noninstitutional challenges, the constraints, the prospects, and the rewards that can be derived from exploiting orphan legumes in SSA. The genetic resources center (GRC) of the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA) conserves a diverse collection of about 2500 accessions of these crops with the majority from Africa. In this review, we focus on the ex situ conservation of the genetic resources of these indigenous African legume crops, their characterization and evaluation, prospects for the development of improved cultivars, and the role they could play, particularly with respect to nutrition and adaptation to climate change. We emphasize progress made in recent years concerning the assembly of information required for application of genomics tools to these crops and how this will underpin the development of improved varieties.
Highlights
By 2050, Africa is projected to add about half of the world's increase in population (Frayne, Crush, & McLachlan, 2017)
We identify challenges and rewards associated with the exploitation of orphan legumes for sub-Saharan Africa (SSA)
The available diverse genetic resources for these legumes provide an opportunity for research to explore their potential for food security, employment and income generation, for smallholder farmers of SSA
Summary
By 2050, Africa is projected to add about half of the world's increase in population (Frayne, Crush, & McLachlan, 2017). We focus on the challenges and rewards from exploiting orphan legumes towards addressing malnutrition and hidden hunger through nutritious, economical, climate-resilient, and smart agriculture food systems in SSA These African domesticated legumes have useful properties but do not have high demand compared to major staple crops of the world due in part to supply limits. Rich Harms) is an underutilized indigenous legume of sub-Saharan Africa It is an annually prostrate or climbing vine that produces both nutritious seeds and tubers (Figure 1). It is considered a neglected crop with very limited research attention and no breeding (Anonymous, 2012). GRC has assessed the variation in 127 of 456 African yam bean accessions
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