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Publications
Publications (64)
Sorghum is one of the staple food crops in Tigray, northern Ethiopia. Despite this, limited research attention was given to the nutritional and antinutritional profiling of sorghum. Thus, this research was initiated to profile and evaluate the variabilities in protein, starch, minerals, flavonoid, tannin, and antioxidant activities among sorghum la...
Sorghum is an important crop in the livelihoods of Kunama and Tigrayan farmers in Northern Ethiopia and we present here a study of what factors have shaped the genetic diversity of the varieties cultivated in neighboring communities of the two ethnolinguistic groups. Using a combination of methods from crop science and cultural anthropology, we inv...
Sorghum is one of the staple food crops in Tigray, northern Ethiopia. Despite this, limited research attention was given to nutritional and antinutritional profiling of sorghum. Thus, this research was investigated to profile and evaluate the variabilities in protein, starch, minerals, flavonoid, tannin, and antioxidant activities among sorghum lan...
Weather shocks and poverty worsen seed and food insecurity in smallholder farming. Here we use rich and representative household-level data for Ethiopia, Malawi, and Tanzania, combined with historical monthly weather data to examine the effects of prior drought exposure and wealth (asset endowment) inequality on seed purchase decisions. We find tha...
The purpose of this study was to assess how multiple expectations of seed systems outcomes, such as closing the yield gap, adapting to climate change, improving nutrition, ensuring equality, enhancing agro-biodiversity, and securing farmers' rights, influence seed systems development in Ethiopia, Malawi, and Tanzania. A comparative approach was use...
Indigenous and local knowledge (ILK) holders have deep ecological, horticultural, and practical knowledge of plants, but this knowledge is not routinely considered and supported along with seed collections conserved ex situ. In this opinion, conceived collaboratively by a team of botanists, ecologists, ethnobiologists, and practitioners in biodiver...
The study was conducted with the aim of inventorying and assessing the level of sorghum landraces richness, estimating the extent and patterns of phenotypic diversity, identifying race type, and predicting suitable areas of production using future climate scenarios in Tigray, Northern Ethiopia. Overall, 358 landraces from 125 independent farmers’ f...
Ending world hunger remains one of the central global challenges, but the question of how to measure and define the problem is politically charged. This article chronicles and analyses the indicator selection process for SDG 2.1, focusing in particular on the Food Insecurity Experience Scale (FIES) indicator. Despite alleged efforts to separate pol...
Food systems face new climatic and socioecological challenges and farmers need a diversity of new plant varieties to respond to these. While plant breeding is important, institutional innovations in seed systems are critical to ensure that new traits and varieties make their way into farmers' fields. This Perspective reviews the state of knowledge...
This study investigates how exposure to short and long-term measures of rainfall shocks and past crop diversification decisions influence subsequent diversification in Malawi and Tanzania. We use balanced household panel data combined with corresponding historical monthly weather data to achieve our aim. Crop diversification is studied as a state-c...
In Sub-Saharan Africa, the cultivation of local crop varieties persists despite a political environment that favours commercial seed system development to address seed and food insecurity. Community seed banks (CSBs) are emergent alternative/complementary development initiatives, yet there remains limited empirical research on their role in farmers...
Among smallholder maize farmers in Ethiopia (and similar areas in Africa), yield and stress tolerance traits in maize varieties are important. While high yields remain a major objective, breeding and seed system development programs are increasingly based on the recognition that farmers also have an interest in other agronomic and consumption trait...
Cultural Effects on Sorghum Varieties Grown, Traits Preferred, and Seed Management Practices in Northern Ethiopia. Agrobiodiversity is fundamentally shaped by farmers’ preferences and management practices, and these are again shaped by the farmers’ social and cultural background. This study investigates variety preferences and seed management pract...
Crop diversity plays a central role in smallholder farmers’ ability to cope with and adapt to shocks. Shifting crop varieties and diversifying the crop portfolio are common risk reduction strategies. This paper addresses the influence of covariate climate shocks and idiosyncratic socioeconomic shocks on crop variety use and crop species diversifica...
Advancing women’s empowerment and gender equality in agriculture is a recognised development goal, also within crop breeding. Increasingly, breeding teams are expected to use ‘market-based’ approaches to design more ‘demand-led’ and ‘gender-responsive’ crop varieties. Based on an institutional ethnography that includes high-profile development-orie...
Cassava (Manihot esculenta) is among the most important crops in Brazil, not only due to its widespread cultivation and consumption, but also its history in the country. This root has been important both to the colonial project and the resistance to it, particularly in the quilombo-communities. Such sites of resistance have served as paradigmatic e...
The authors would like to make the following correction to the published paper [1]:
In Table A1 of Appendix A, the second table header should be changed from “Actors
(Gindabarat)” to “Actors (Heexosa),” and the last row under the first header Actors
(Gindabarat) should be included under the second header Actors (Heexosa).
Contestations about the way in which digital sequence information is used and regulated have created stumbling blocks across multiple international policy processes. Such schisms have profound implications for the way in which we manage and conceptualize agrobiodiversity and its benefits. This paper explores the relationship between farmers’ rights...
The problem addressed in this paper is the challenge of moving from formulating policy goals to achieving the promised results. The purpose is to assess the possible role of innovation in agriculture as a way of contributing towards achieving the Malabo Declaration commitments and the zero hunger Sustainable Development Goal 2 (SDG2) in six African...
The ‘grain hypothesis', postulated by James Scott, suggests that cereals are ‘political crops’ intrinsic to state formation. Drawing the classical agrarian political economy of maize into dialogue with recent more-than-human political ecology, we explore the grain hypothesis with empirical material from present day Malawi and India. The evolution a...
Seed security is central to crop production for smallholder farmers in developing countries, but it remains understudied in relation to long-term seed sector development. Here, we compare seed systems in two districts of Central Ethiopia characterized by subsistence-oriented teff cultivation and commercially oriented wheat production and relate thi...
The Sudd wetland is one of the oil-rich regions of South Sudan where environmental pollution resulting from oil extraction activities has been unprecedented. Although phytoremediation is the most feasible technique, its efficacy reduces at high TPH concentration in soil. This has made rhizoremediation the most preferred approach. Rhizoremediation i...
Crop diversity underpins food security and adaptation to climate change. Concerted conservation efforts are needed to maintain and make this diversity available to plant scientists, breeders and farmers. Here we present the story of the rescue and reconstitution of the unique seed collection held in the international genebank of International Cente...
Seeds and planting material are fundamental assets in all crop production and thus at the
heart of food system resilience. The ongoing Covid-19 pandemic and the health policies
meant to break chains of virus transmission are also affecting the chains of seed transmission
around the world. The humanitarian sector as well as the commercial seed se...
The purpose of this paper is to assess lessons learned from past and present policies and actions related to creating a conducive environment for a sustainable food system transformation in Malawi. We take a food system approach because it provides the opportunity for a holistic and integrated analysis of the drivers and constraints that influence...
Farmers' and breeders' access to a genetic diversity is essential for food system sustainability. The implementation of international agreements regulating access to plant genetic resources for food and agriculture (PGRFA) varies substantially between countries. Here, we examine why some countries implement a restrictive access governance regime, t...
Climate change is already negatively affecting Sub Saharan African agriculture. One of the most effective ways to adapt on farm is to switch crop varieties. This technological change depends on the policies and institutions involved in governing the seed systems on which farmers rely for access to suitable seeds. Whilst the need for seed systems to...
The promotion of conservation agriculture (CA) for smallholders in sub-Saharan Africa is subject to ongoing scholarly and public debate regarding the evidence-base and the agenda-setting power of involved stakeholders. We undertake a political analysis of CA in Zambia that combines a qualitative case study of a flagship CA initiative with a quantit...
Genebanks conserve key resources for handling current and future challenges to food production and security. The role of genebanks has evolved from primarily serving plant breeders to include long-term biodiversity conservation and distribution to a wider user community. International policy frameworks stress the complementarity of ex situ and in s...
Genebanks conserve key resources for increasing global food security and adapting to environmental change. The conventional way genetic resources are deployed to farmers goes through a linear pathway of breeding, delivery and adoption (BDA) of improved varieties. However, over the past 30 years a number of other pathways from genebanks to farmers’...
Crop adaptation plays a key role in enabling farmers to adapt to the impacts of climate change. According to the latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), cultivar adjustment is the single most effective on-farm adaptation strategy, but the report is largely silent on the modalities of cultivar adjustment; what are th...
Food security is a concept that features high on the development agenda. The meaning of the concept has evolved considerably over its 40 years' history in policy, practice and scholarly debate. Our focus in this essay is on three sets of interrelated issues. First, we critically examine the academic food security discourse from a historical perspec...
This chapter explores the history, design, roles, and activities of two key institutes and summarizes their contribution to the conservation and use of crop wild relatives (CWRs). The RBG Kew Millennium Seed Bank (MSB) of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew (RBG Kew) and the Svalbard Global Seed Vault (SGSV) are two major global facilities in modern ex...
Background: Rural livelihoods relying on agriculture are particularly vulnerable to climate change. Climate models project increasingly negative effects on maize and sorghum production in sub-Saharan Africa. We present a case study of the role of genetic resources and seed systems in adapting to climatic stress from the semi-arid agroecological zon...
Significance
This paper shows that cultural factors play a key role in shaping the genetic structure in sorghum. We present molecular evidence of close associations between sorghum population structure and the distribution of ethnolinguistic groups in Africa. We show that traditional seed-management practices, which have played an important role fo...
Maize is the most produced crop in Sub-Saharan Africa, but yields are low and climate change is projected to further constrain smallholder production. The current efforts to breed and disseminate new high yielding and climate ready maize varieties are implemented through the formal seed system; the chain of public and private sector activities and...
Ex-situ conservation of crop diversity is a global concern, and the development of an efficient and sustainable conservation system is a historic priority recognized in international law and policy. We assess the completeness of the safety duplication collection in the Svalbard Global Seed Vault with respect to data on the world's ex-situ collectio...
Representation of 156 crop genera in WIEWS with more than 1000 accessions stored ex-situ globally. Only genera commonly stored as seeds are included.
(XLSX)
The ten largest collections worldwide of the 29 largest food crop genera in WIEWS. Genebanks are identified by WIEWS coding [23].
(XLSX)
Climate change threatens maize productivity in sub-Saharan Africa. To ensure food security, access to locally adapted genetic resources and varieties is an important adaptation measure. Most of the maize grown in Africa is a genetic mix of varieties introduced at different historic times following the birth of the trans-Atlantic economy, and knowle...
Assessments of Structure results.
(PDF)
Unrooted cluster based NJ tree of the combined African and Association Panel.
(PDF)
The total SNP dataset for the 48 accessions in the African panel.
(TXT)
Unrooted accession based NJ tree for the African panel based on 26,900 PZE-prefix SNPs.
(PDF)
Assignment probabilities for K = 3 in the combined African and Association Panel in predefined African clusters.
(PDF)
Estimated population structure in the combined African panel and Landrace Panel.
(PDF)
List of plant material with source and collection information.
(PDF)
Plots of the relationship of Q group membership for the same accessions from different datasets.
(PDF)
Comparison of Q group membership and cluster assignment between subsets of the African panel.
(XLS)
Comparison of Q group membership from SSRs and SNPs.
(XLSX)
SNPs associations with maximum temperature during growing season.
(PDF)
List of SNPs used in the different analyses.
(XLSX)
Amplified fragment length polymorphism fingerprinting was applied to survey the genetic diversity of primitive South American Gossypium barbadense cotton for establishing a possible link to its pre-Columbian expansion. New germplasm was collected along coastal Peru and over an Andean transect in areas where most of the archaeological evidence relat...
