Stronger legumes - an answer to future food shortages in Africa?
Nicole Chidrawi, University of Cape Town
The United Nations Population Fund is urging the international community to take
practical steps to reduce poverty and hunger.
One person who is seeking to increase food security is Associate Professor
Felix Dakora of the University of Cape Town's Botany Department. Dakora's
project aims to develop stronger and better African food legumes and legume
crops.
"In terms of nutrition, legumes form a high-protein alternative to meat
as a food source," explains Dakora.
Among the legumes that Dakora and his team of researchers will be looking at
are the cowpea and the Bambara groundnut, which come in various shapes and
sizes.
The key to success is the naturally occurring plant product, flavonoid, which
gives plants and flowers the healthy colours that attract bees, butterflies and
other pollen-transporting
insects that help with the process of fertilisation. But flavonoids may also
serve other crucial purposes, says Dakora.
They may, for example, aid in the production of high levels of healthy
antioxidants, help beans resist disease through their anti-microbial compounds,
keep malevolent insects at bay, and serve - in their extracted form - as
treatment against a range of human ailments. They also improve nitrogen
fixation, which in turn improves soil quality and leads to bigger and better
crops.
"Although 70 - 85% of the population in sub-Saharan Africa is active in
agriculture, the region has produced inadequate food supplies for the past 30
years due to a host of biological and social factors," Dakora points out.
"Which is why it seems a good idea to encourage the production of
flavonoids in legumes," he adds.
"What we are essentially trying to do is improve the formation of
flavonoids in legumes," he says. Dakora aims to increase production of
flavonoids in these legumes through the combined use of classical plant breeding
and recombinant DNA technology. Using molecular markers, the team will explore
for the genes involved in flavonoid synthesis and cross varieties of legumes
with good agronomic traits (e.g. flavonoids for pest resistance or N2 fixation)
with others that may be high yielding but are low in N2 fixation or susceptible
to insect pests and diseases. "Ultimately, we hope to come up with a crop
plant that is high in N2 fixation, produces lots of grain, and is resistant to
insect pests and diseases. The good thing is that these methodologies do not
involve the transfer of foreign genes from other organisms into these leguminous
crops" explains Dakora.
Dakora is able to do so through funding from the McKnight Collaborative Crop
Research Programme.
Dakora has, at the behest of the McKnight Programme, set up collaborations
with the Agricultural Research Council (ARC)-Grain Crops Institute in
Potchefstroom, the Sokoine University of Agriculture in Tanzania, the
International Centre for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) (also in Tanzania), the
Savanna Agricultural Research Institute in Ghana, and the University of
California.
Dakora explains that this is the first year of the McKnight Foundation
Project.
"We have only just started field experiments in Ghana and Tanzania during
this May to October cropping season, and will start others in South Africa in
the coming cropping season from October 2002 to April 2003," he says.
Not only does he hope to produce better legumes with the project, but Dakora
also wants to have trained about eight Masters students, four or five PhDs, and
two to three post-docs.
Currently, Dakora has one PhD student in his lab from Tanzania and he is
expecting another two PhD students from Ghana and Tanzania on the McKnight
project.
Article by Nicole Chidrawi,Department of Communication & Marketing
University of Cape Town
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