15 From Shade to Light: Fonio, an African Orphan Crop, Towards Renewed Challenge
15 From Shade to Light: Fonio, an African Orphan Crop, Towards Renewed Challenges
Highlights box
- Fonio (Digitaria exilis Stapf) is a promising crop under a large range of environmental conditions
- Recent advances in genomic resource availability open up the road for more effective plant breeding
- Targeting these domestication genes would represent a first important step towards a significant improvement of fonio
- Needs for a coordinated transdisciplinary collaboration across research disciplines involving actors beyond research
- Fonio, a key crop in advancing agricultural development beyond the Green Revolution model
Abstract
The FAO recently estimated that demand for food will increase by 70% by 2050. The challenge will not only be on increasing the food supply but also on improving its nutritional value under an accelerating rate of environmental and social changes. One solution would be the wider use of underutilized crops to diversify alimentation and develop sustainable and low-input agriculture. Are orphan crops commodities for the future, and how can they be promoted? In this regard, fonio (Digitaria exilis Stapf) appears to be a promising crop. It is an indigenous staple cereal from Western Africa playing a crucial role in food security. Additionally, it is a model crop in important up-to-date concepts such as resilience, agroecology, population health, climatic changes, poverty reduction, and women’s empowerment. Nevertheless, fonio has received limited attention from mainstream research compared to other dryland cereals, such as pearl millet and sorghum. Increasingly available genomic resources promise to promote advanced breeding strategies in fonio. This paper presents the past, present, and future of fonio research. We argue the need for interdisciplinarity and multistakeholder research approaches for increasing fonio production, conservation, and sustainable uses.
Keywords: Fonio, Neglected and Underutilized Species (NUS), Sustainable agriculture, Food and nutritional security, Breeding strategies, Resilience
Introduction
The FAO recently estimated that demand for food should be increased by 70% by 2050. The challenge will not only be on increasing the food supply but also on improving its nutritional value and alleviating poverty under environmentally sustainable production systems. Agricultural productivity is expected to decrease in the near future because of climate change, groundwater depletion, and land degradation. This decrease will particularly impact Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), one of the most food-insecure regions globally (FAO et al., 2019). The agricultural sector in SSA is dominated by smallholder farmers (AGRA, 2016) and employs more than half of the population. SSA agriculture is characterized by almost exclusively rainfed crops (Lowder et al., 2016). In a context of multiple social and environmental constraints of varying intensity over time, increasing attention is being paid to agrobiodiversity to enhance resi