Cultivating Food Security in Africa

As hunger and drought spread across Africa, a huge effort is underway to increase yields of staple crops, such as maize, wheat, cassava, and rice. While these crops are important for food security, providing much-needed calories, they don't provide much protein, vitamin A, thiamin, niacin, and other important vitamins and micronutrients--or taste. Yet, none of the staple crops would be palatable without vegetables. Vegetables are less risk-prone to drought than staple crops that stay in the field for longer periods. Because vegetables typically have a shorter growing time, they can maximize scarce water supplies and soil nutrients better than crops such as maize, which need a lot of water and fertilizer. Unfortunately, no country in Africa has a big focus on vegetable production. But that's where AVRDC - The World Vegetable Center steps in. Since the 1990s, the Asian Vegetable Research and Development Center (based in Taiwan) has been working in Africa, with offices in Tanzania, Mali, Cameroon, and Madagascar, to breed cultivars that best suit farmers' needs. By listening to farmers and including them in breeding research, AVRDC - The World Vegetable Center is building a sustainable seed system in sub-Saharan Africa. The Center does this by breeding a variety of vegetables with different traits--including resistance to disease and longer shelf life--and by bringing the farmers to the Regional Center in Arusha and to other offices across Africa to find out what exactly those farmers need in the field and at market.