The fifteen countries that make up the Southern Africa region contain a wealth of occurring wild plant diversity. This includes feral rice, millet, eggplant, cucurbits, sorghum, sweet potato, cowpea, pigeon pea, sesame seed, coffee, watermelon, okra, and asparagus species. As the countries in the region covert historic landscapes into new cities, roads, and agricultural fields, the ecosystems that harbor these valuable plants become threatened. Everyone that drinks coffee in the morning or enjoys a slice of watermelon in the summer has a stake in the conservation strategies that Southern Africa develops.
(Image 1: Wild watermelon relative Acanthosicyos naudinianus)
(Image 2: Wild sweet potato relative Ipomoea littoralis)
(Image 3: Wild coffee relative Coffea liberica)
Known as crop wild relatives, these plants escaped the bottleneck of domestication and high-yielding variety production. Unlike our crops, these plants have also evolved outside of the pampered environment of a farm. As a result, they can survive harsher conditions like droughts, floods, temperature fluctuations, pests, and diseases. Crop wild relatives offer farmers and breeders an essential source of genetic diversity for crop improvement, which will allow mitigation of the region’s agricultural systems to short- and long-term changes in climate. Conserving wild plant diversity in Southern Africa is also crucial for other areas dependent on crops that originated outside their borders. For example, coffee farmers in Latin America will continually need to adapt domesticated coffee trees to novel conditions. Ultimately, they rely on traits found in wild coffee trees that grow naturally in Southern Africa. Scientists have long acknowledged the interdependence among countries and regions for food products and plant genetic resources.
Since countries have limited time and money for planning and implementation, it is imperative to prioritize which species deserve initial conservation action. In 2019, Cambridge University Press published an article that I co-authored A crop wild relative inventory for Southern Africa: a first step in linking conservation and use of valuable wild populations for enhancing food security in the journal of Plant Genetic Resources. The article presents an analysis that I helped carry out with Bioversity International, the School of Biosciences at the University of Birmingham, and the Southern African Development Community.
Together we identified 1,900 crop wild relative species in the region related to food, beverages, ornamental, forage/fodder, forestry, medicinal, and environmental crops. We then prioritized these species based on two criteria: i) the value of the related crop for human food and economic security in the region and/or globally, and ii) the potential or known value of the wild relatives for crop improvement. We found that the region contains 745 wild species related to 64 human food and beverage crops of high socioeconomic importance. One hundred of these are of immediate priority for conservation action because of their enhanced value to breeders. The results of this study represent the first step in developing a conservation and sustainable use strategy for the Southern Africa, where its implementation would contribute to food security and well-being in the region and beyond.
Read the full article here: https://doi.org/10.1017/S1479262118000515
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