Attachments
Chapter 1
Introduction
Africa is home to a diversity of indigenous food crops that are locally adapted and relatively easier to grow compared to exotic cultivars. Indigenous foods are foods of plant and animal origin that naturally exist in specific agroecological domains and are produced and consumed as part of traditional diets (Rampa et al., 2020).
Although indigenous foods have the potential to sustainably provide the much-needed dietary nutrients to various communities across Africa, they have suffered progressive loss of cultural image, denigration, and utter neglect, being largely substituted with exotic foods. Consequently, they have earned the unenviable appellations of “forgotten”, “neglected”, or “orphan” foods due to the fact that they have received relatively little or no policy and research attention – especially towards their genetic improvement, value chain development, and dietary integration.
The Forum for Agricultural Research in Africa (FARA) and partners have identified the deliberate promotion of such forgotten foods, in a food systems perspective, as a potential avenue to ending hunger and malnutrition (SDG 2), and other dietary challenges in Africa. The forgotten foods lend themselves suitably to all the five UN Food Systems Summit 2021 action tracks, namely: i) ensuring access to safe and nutritious foods for all; ii) shifting to sustainable consumption patterns; iii) boosting nature-positive production at sufficient scale; iv) advancing equitable livelihoods and value distribution; and v) building resilience to vulnerabilities, shocks and stresses (Von Brown et al., 2020).
In preparation for the UN Food Systems Summit 2021, FARA (in collaboration with GFAR) led regional consultations on the development of an African manifesto and plan of action on forgotten foods. As a follow-up, the Food and Agriculture Organization and FARA launched a consultancy to carry out scoping studies, stakeholders’ engagement, and other activities to identify and characterize forgotten food commodities in Africa with the potential of being mainstreamed into the evolving food systems.
Source link : https://reliefweb.int/report/world/integrating-africas-forgotten-foods-better-nutrition-companion-publication-compendium-forgotten-foods
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Publish date : 2024-07-18 13:42:49
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