African Lives Matter: Wild Food Plants Matter for Livelihoods, Justice, and the Environment—A Policy Brief for Agricultural Reform and New Crops
Abstract
:1. Introduction
1.1. African Context
- The New Partnership for African Development of the African Union.
- The development of the Common African Agricultural Development Program.
- The Maputo Declaration on Agriculture and Food Security (2003).
- The endorsement of the African Green Revolution by African Heads of State at the 2006 Abuja Africa Fertilizer Summit.
- The formation of the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) in 2006.
- The 2014 Malabo Declaration by African Heads of State [10]. It recognised the CBD’s emphasis on the “critical importance of biodiversity and ecosystem services in supporting economic growth, sustainable development, livelihoods and human wellbeing in Africa”. Under this Declaration, African Governments heightened the importance of the agriculture sector for its role as a driver of shared prosperity and improved livelihoods.
- The endorsement of the ambitious global development agenda for 2015–2030 UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). SDGs 1, 2, 3, 5, and 10 seek to address poverty, end hunger, achieve human health and wellbeing, and reduce inequalities, all while protecting the environment.
1.2. Africa’s Overlooked Natural Capital
2. New Crops for Africa
2.1. The Importance of Diversification
2.2. Recent Developments
2.3. The COVID-19 Pandemic, the Sustainable Development Goals, and Climate Change
3. Way Forward: Actionable Recommendations
- The IAASTD concepts of multifunctional agriculture (Table 2), which seek to:
- Understand the complexities of the interactions between the uses of natural, social, and financial capital with a new generic and highly adaptable model for sustainable intensification of subsistence farmers in tropical/sub-tropical zones.
- Overcome the constraints to smallholder farmers’ production by helping them achieve what they want—and so getting away from telling them what they need.
- Provide understanding, knowledge, and appropriate techniques/skills for enriched, long-term livelihood gains. This is more important than providing short-term funding for top-down projects.
- Appreciate the need to incentivise systematic changes in farming systems and rural communities across agroecological landscapes that meet their multiple and diverse farming and household needs [61]. In this regard, Pretty et al. [62] have highlighted the importance of appropriate low-cost technologies to allow the dissemination of knowledge and new practices from farmer to farmer. This also allows households to adapt techniques to meet their own needs and circumstances.
- A problem-based approach aimed at reversing the ‘Cycle of Land Degradation and Social Deprivation’ [8,27] to refine and build on the Green Revolution’s many achievements. This would seek to:
- Rectify inappropriate production policies by smallholder communities living on the brink of the cash economy and in environments very different from those in Industrialised countries.
- Foster equity at the community and population levels by promoting self-help incentives for self-sufficiency in participating households by training communities to use appropriate and straightforward technologies for remote, resource-poor communities. This should embrace aspects of education, trade, fiscal, and innovation policy priorities affecting smallholder farmers [63]. Such capacity building at village and district levels can be achieved through Rural Resource Centres and farmer-to-farmer training—in doing so decentralising the domestication process [34].
- Implement a ‘bottom-up’ participatory approach that seeks to meet rural households’ aspirations (especially women and youths) to cultivate indigenous and traditionally/culturally important food and non-food forest species as new crops. This decentralised approach to tree domestication can protect against the loss of intraspecific genetic diversity during the domestication process.
- Apply simple, well-known horticultural domestication techniques that harness the wide intraspecific variation in qualitative traits within market-oriented ‘ideotypes’ that meet new markets’ needs based on useful and highly nutritious indigenous food species.
- Draw on existing knowledge about the value and use of products from local food and non-food species that are typically marketed locally and sometimes regionally for domestic consumption.
- Address the link between food insecurity and international migration from Africa [61] by recognising the potential to domesticate these new crops in ways that create new local/regional markets and local processing industries without breaching sovereign rights and intellectual property. This aims at creating employment in local businesses as a result of new on-farm initiatives. Indications are that this also reduces migration to towns and cities, contributing to social problems in urban areas [64]. This can generate new sources of farm-derived income for rural and urban dwellers.
- Adding ‘land maxing’ to the approach of ‘land sharing’ to ensure the sustainable intensification of tropical agriculture (Figure 4). This would:
- Increase food production by restoring soil fertility and health and closing yield gaps in staple food crops (between two- to six-fold increases in average staple food yield above those currently achieved by farmers in Africa) and increasing the economic returns from the investment in the Green Revolution [65].
- Enhance livelihoods and reduce land degradation and social deprivation that are drivers of hunger, malnutrition, poverty, climate change, and biodiversity loss. This would release degraded land for both more productive landscapes and reduce many pressures on planetary boundaries adding global to local benefits from a more sustainable agriculture approach. This is achieved by recognising the importance of harnessing multiple food production, social, economic and environmental benefits that can be derived from using the intra-specific diversity within a large set of different and useful long-lived perennial species to: (i) generate income for enhanced livelihoods, (ii) improve and diversify diets and nutrition for improved health, (iii) restore ecological health above- and below-ground in ways that enhances wildlife habitat and mitigates climate change, (iv) create business opportunities and employment in new local industries and (v) enhance social justice locally, nationally, and internationally.
- Adopt technologies to develop new crops for mixed agroforestry production regimes that combine tree commodities in diverse production systems with locally important food trees, staple crops, vegetables and edible fungi [27].
- Convert the environmental, social, and economic trade-offs associated with conventional approaches to agricultural intensification into new development policy objectives or trade-ons, which are cognisant of the dangers of policies that do not adequately respect traditional knowledge, local knowledge, and customary rights [66].
- Counteract the conventional ‘silo thinking’ that overlooks the ‘whole life’ costs and benefits of farming systems and their integration into both the food system and local economic developments to relieve hunger, malnutrition, poverty, and climate change.
- Promoting the large-scale adoption and up-scaling of new technologies for community engagement, and the enhanced stewardship of natural resources by using farmer-friendly, wildlife-friendly, environment-friendly, and climate-friendly approaches to agriculture based on the wise use of natural, social, human, and commercial capital. This would address planetary health [67] and, particularly, the critical water–food–nutrition–health nexus [68], thus improving nutrition and health of poor rural communities across the continent.
4. Policy Recommendations
- The under-production of staple food crops that cause food insecurity and its consequences—hunger and malnutrition—caused by the downward spiral of land degradation and social deprivation related to deforestation and loss of natural capital and traditional culture.
- The nutritional imbalance of starch-based diets from cereals and root crops and their consequences—weakness and ill-health—caused by lack of dietary diversity and loss of traditional foods.
- The lack of income-generating opportunities for smallholder farmers struggling to grow enough to feed their families, let alone to market—caused by a lack of marketable products, a lack of local rural industries, and unfair international commodity markets.
5. Conclusions
Author Contributions
Funding
Institutional Review Board Statement
Informed Consent Statement
Acknowledgments
Conflicts of Interest
References
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Goal | Purpose | Contribution (Scored 0–5) |
---|---|---|
1 | End poverty in all its forms | 4 |
2 | End hunger, achieve food security and improved nutrition and promote sustainable agriculture | 5 |
3 | Ensure healthy lives and promote wellbeing for all at all ages | 4 |
4 | Ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all | 1 |
5 | Achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls | 4 |
6 | Ensure availability and sustainable management of water and sanitation for all | 2 |
7 | Ensure access to affordable, reliable, sustainable, and modern energy for all | 2 |
8 | Promote sustained, inclusive, and sustainable economic growth, full and productive employment and decent work for all | 4 |
9 | Build resilient infrastructure, promote inclusive and sustainable industrialization and foster innovation | 2 |
10 | Reduce inequality within and among countries | 3 |
11 | Make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient, and sustainable | 0 |
12 | Ensure sustainable consumption and production patterns | 2 |
13 | Take urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts (under the auspices of UN Framework Convention on Climate Change) | 4 |
14 | Conserve and sustainably use the oceans, seas, and marine resources for sustainable development | 0 |
15 | Protect, restore, and promote sustainable use of terrestrial ecosystems, sustainably manage forests, combat desertification, and halt and reverse land degradation and halt biodiversity loss | 5 |
16 | Promote peaceful and inclusive societies for sustainable development, provide access to justice for all and build effective, accountable, and inclusive institutions at all levels | 2 |
17 | Strengthen the means of implementation and revitalize the Global Partnership for Sustainable Development | 1 |
No. | Lessons from Historical Evaluation of Agricultural Knowledge, Science, and Technology |
---|---|
1 | Excessive reliance on the draw-down of natural capital |
2 | R&D has failed to address the ‘yield gap’ |
3 | R&D has largely ignored traditional production systems for wild resources |
4 | R&D has failed to fully address the needs of poor people |
5 | Malnutrition and associated poor human health are still widespread |
6 | Intensive farming is frequently promoted and implemented unsustainably |
7 | Agricultural governance and institutions have focused on producing individual commodities |
8 | Agricultural activities have been very isolated from non-agricultural activities in the rural landscape |
9 | Agricultural science and technology have suffered from poor linkages among its stakeholders and actors |
10 | For decades ‘Globalization’ has been isolated from local communities at the ‘grassroots’ |
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Leakey, R.R.B.; Mabhaudhi, T.; Gurib-Fakim, A. African Lives Matter: Wild Food Plants Matter for Livelihoods, Justice, and the Environment—A Policy Brief for Agricultural Reform and New Crops. Sustainability 2021, 13, 7252. https://doi.org/10.3390/su13137252
Leakey RRB, Mabhaudhi T, Gurib-Fakim A. African Lives Matter: Wild Food Plants Matter for Livelihoods, Justice, and the Environment—A Policy Brief for Agricultural Reform and New Crops. Sustainability. 2021; 13(13):7252. https://doi.org/10.3390/su13137252
Chicago/Turabian StyleLeakey, Roger R. B., Tafadzwanashe Mabhaudhi, and Ameenah Gurib-Fakim. 2021. "African Lives Matter: Wild Food Plants Matter for Livelihoods, Justice, and the Environment—A Policy Brief for Agricultural Reform and New Crops" Sustainability 13, no. 13: 7252. https://doi.org/10.3390/su13137252