Uncovering a revolutionary way of transforming farming systems with forgotten foods

Objective

Current farming practices are driving environmental degradation, yet fall short of ensuring nutritious food. Thus, by transforming how we produce food, we can address multiple sustainability challenges concurrently. This project quantifies where and how farming system transformation with ‘opportunity crops’ can simultaneously tackle pressing health, poverty, and environmental challenges. Opportunity crops are forgotten foods: plant species that were once embedded in local cultures but have since fallen out of favour due to neglect from policy and research. Transforming farming systems with opportunity crops is thus revolutionary in the traditional sense of the word: returning to something from the past to change the system for a better future. I will apply a cutting-edge multi-scale and multi-crop approach. First, I will take a broad-scale view across Africa to identify where we already see benefits of opportunity crops (‘bright spots’) – with the goal of learning from these real-world cases. To do so, I will use longitudinal household data on crops grown and food intake. Second, I will uncover how opportunity crops affect human health, poverty, and the environment using three signature cases: 1) Common crop portfolios, 2) Baobab (The tree of life) and 3) Moringa (The miracle tree). The three cases progressively integrate health, poverty, and biodiversity surveys with state-of-the-art satellite-based tree mapping and environmental DNA methods. Together, the cases represent original and innovative integration of methods to unlock the potential of opportunity crops by placing food at the nexus between human health, environmental sustainability, and social justice. This project will break new ground by providing empirical evidence to lay the foundation for a new theoretical framework and a truly interdisciplinary research field on farming transformation that can simultaneously tackle interdependent health, poverty and environmental challenges around the world.