African Lives Matter: Wild Food Plants Matter for Livelihoods, Justice, and the Environment—A Policy Brief for Agricultural Reform and New Crops

International agricultural policies to address hunger and malnutrition in the tropics and sub-tropics have typically been based on approaches to the intensification of farming systems effective in industrialised economies where the social, economic, and environmental conditions and the infrastructure are very different to those in Africa. The consequence of this short-sightedness has been that agricultural productivity, dependent on ecosystem services from natural capital, has declined in Africa due to ecological and environmental collapse. This has undermined the livelihoods of the millions of smallholder farmers living on the brink of the cash economy, leading to severe social injustice. This review summarises advances in smallholder agriculture’s sustainable intensification in the tropics and sub-tropics, leveraging the domestication and commercialisation of wild indigenous tree species that produce nutritious, marketable, and useful food and non-food products. These are grown within diversified and multifunctional farming systems together with conventional food staples and local orphan crops to reduce land degradation, pollution, water extraction, and nutrient mining while promoting services such as pollination and other ecological functions. The benefits arising from this approach simultaneously address hunger, malnutrition, poverty, social injustice, and a stagnant economy, as well as important global issues such as climate change, loss of biodiversity and environmental degradation. Addressing these issues may also reduce the risk of future pandemics of zoonotic diseases, such as COVID-19. This set of serious global issues epitomise our divided and dysfunctional world and calls out for action. Enhancing sustainable smallholder productivity using indigenous and wild foods is an important international policy and business intervention, vital for achieving the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals and the rebalancing of the global economy by restoring natural capital within new African indigenous food industries

Agroforestry tree products (AFTPs): targeting poverty reduction and enhanced livelihoods

Agroforestry tree domestication emerged as a farmer-driven, market-led process in the early 1990s and became an international initiative. A participatory approach now supplements the more traditional aspects of tree improvement, and is seen as an important strategy towards the Millennium Development Goals of eradicating poverty and hunger, promoting social equity and environmental sustainability. Considerable progress has been made towards the domestication of indigenous fruits and nuts in many villages in Cameroon and Nigeria. Vegetatively-propagated cultivars based on a sound knowledge of 'ideotypes' derived from an understanding of the tree-to-tree variation in many commercially important traits are being developed by farmers. These are being integrated into polycultural farming systems, especially the cocoa agroforests. Markets for Agroforestry Tree Products (AFTPs) are crucial for the adoption of agroforestry on a scale to have meaningful economic, social and environmental impacts. Important lessons have been learned in southern Africa from detailed studies of the commercialisation of AFTPs. These provide support for the wider acceptance of the role of domesticating indigenous trees in the promotion of enhanced livelihoods for poor farmers in the tropics. Policy guidelines have been developed in support of this sustainable rural development as an alternative strategy to those proposed in many other major development and conservation fora. <br/

Deliberate Introductions of Species: Research Needs

Research questions about introductions Several research questions need to be answered to help ensure that proposed introductions are done wisely and safely. Guarding against risks without sacrificing benefits: How can the potential benefits and costs of introductions best be evaluated in economic, environmental, and social terms? Should all introductions be regulated? How different must organisms or recipient ecosystems be from those assessed previously to warrant independent assessment? When is it appropriate to assess and regulate taxa other than species? What are appropriate ecological and political boundaries for regulation? Alternatives to introductions: How and when can indigenous organisms be domesticated so that they can substitute for proposed uses of nonindigenous organisms? How can the retention of indigenous species and natural food webs be integrated into agroecosystems so that the risk of pest problems is minimized? Purposeful introductions: What common guidelines can be developed for deliberate introductions of all kinds of organisms? Have screening procedures differed for introductions that proved successful or harmful? How can the potential for nonindigenous organisms to disrupt ecosystem processes be assessed and reduced? Can the demand for introductions be reduced by improving the effectiveness of introductions that are attempted? Reducing negative impacts: When can reduction of human-caused disturbance within natural areas be used to control nonindigenous species impacts? Can subtle, indirect effects of potential introductions be predicted? Can enough be learned from the population growth lags, booms, and crashes of previously introduced organisms to make useful generalizations? Should special guidelines accompany release of sterile forms, which may pose less risk than fertile organisms? Can protocols be developed to predict when an introduced species will hybridize with natives and what the ecological and economic consequences of such hybridization might be? Should special guidelines related to invasion and hybridization potential be added to those that already regulate release of genetically engineered organisms

Trees, soils, and food security

Trees have a different impact on soil properties than annual crops, because of their longer residence time, larger biomass accumulation, and longer-lasting, more extensive root systems. In natural forests nutrients are efficiently cycled with very small inputs and outputs from the system. In most agricultural systems the opposite happens. Agroforestry encompasses the continuum between these extremes, and emerging hard data is showing that successful agroforestry systems increase nutrient inputs, enhance internal flows, decrease nutrient losses and provide environmental benefits: when the competition for growth resources between the tree and the crop component is well managed. The three main determinants for overcoming rural poverty in Africa are (i) reversing soil fertility depletion, (ii) intensifying and diversifying land use with high-value products, and (iii) providing an enabling policy environment for the smallholder farming sector. Agroforestry practices can improve food production in a sustainable way through their contribution to soil fertility replenishment. The use of organic inputs as a source of biologically-fixed nitrogen, together with deep nitrate that is captured by trees, plays a major role in nitrogen replenishment. The combination of commercial phosphorus fertilizers with available organic resources may be the key to increasing and sustaining phosphorus capital. High-value trees, 'Cinderella' species, can fit in specific niches on farms, thereby making the system ecologically stable and more rewarding economically, in addition to diversifying and increasing rural incomes and improving food security. In the most heavily populated areas of East Africa, where farm size is extremely small, the number of trees on farms is increasing as farmers seek to reduce labour demands, compatible with the drift of some members of the family into the towns to earn off-farm income. Contrary to the concept that population pressure promotes deforestation, there is evidence that demonstrates that there are conditions under which increasing tree planting is occurring on farms in the tropics through successful agroforestry as human population density increases. <br