Potential of Underutilized Traditional Vegetables and Legume Crops to Contribute to Food and Nutritional Security, Income and More Sustainable Production Systems
By A. Ebert. 2014
371 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Agriculture is under pressure to produce greater quantities of food, feed and biofuel on limited land resources. Current over-reliance on a handful of major staple crops has inherent agronomic, ecological, nutritional and economic risks and is probably unsustainable in the long run. Wider use of today’s underutilized minor crops provides more options to build temporal and spatial heterogeneity into uniform cropping systems and will enhance resilience to both biotic and abiotic stress. Many traditional vegetables and underutilized legume crops are an essential source of vitamins, micronutrients and protein and, thus, a valuable component to attain nutritional security. Vegetables in general are of considerable commercial value and therefore an important source of household income. Significant research, breeding and development efforts are needed for a range of promising crops to convert existing local landraces into competitive varieties with wide adaptation and promising commercial potential. Access to genetic diversity of these selected crops is a pre-condition for success. Three underutilized minor crops—amaranth, drumstick tree, and mungbean—are highlighted and briefly described. All three crops are well-represented in AVRDC’s genebank with substantial inter- and intra-specific genetic diversity, and already have demonstrated their potential for wider adoption and commercial exploitation.
Subfields: Agronomy and Crop Science, Food Science, Plant Science
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f8e069e5133de7979f3492e0037fb47522d6c1f5
How researchers see this paper
The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.
In Agronomy and Crop Science
In Food Science
In Plant Science
Citations in the corpus
- Status and utilisation of Moringa oleifera Lam: A review (2018, background): “With such naturalisation in so diverse regions, Moringa can be considered a highly plastic species that adapts well to hot, semiarid regions with as little as 500 mm annual rainfall (Bosch, 2004; Ebert, 2014).”
- Pulses for Sustainability: Breaking Agriculture and Food Sectors Out of Lock-In (2018, background): “Therefore, pulses could significantly increase the sustainability of our diets (e.g., Ebert, 2014; Jallinoja et al., 2016) as put forward in the FAO’s International Year of Pulses in 20161.”
- Plant food anti-nutritional factors and their reduction strategies: an overview (2020, background): “Food quality assessment of this type of underutilized crop can lead to increased sustainability or food security while improving the economic condition and human health of rural populations (Gopalan et al. 1989; Ebert 2014).”