IITA’s Knowledge Café, a seminar series designed to foster dialogue, critical thinking, and innovative problem-solving among IITA stakeholders, recently turned its attention to a question at the heart of the Institute’s mandate: how much untapped value remains locked in crops that African farmers have grown for generations?
The session featured Professor Carlos Iglesias of North Carolina State University’s Department of Horticultural Science, whose career has taken him from plant breeding research in Uruguay to heading the global cassava program at CIAT and leading research and development at Syngenta.
Iglesias walked participants through “Exploring Biodiversity in African Crops through Adaptive Breeding,” an NC State initiative built on a simple premise: Africa’s vast plant biodiversity, particularly its secondary metabolite diversity, remains underexplored. Unlocking this diversity could lead to new bioactive compounds, nutritious food sources, and sustainable materials.
The initiative’s strategy spans market exploration, cataloging biodiversity, collection and preservation, matching diversity to market demand, working with farmers and industry, and scaling successful models to new crops and regions.
North Carolina State University has been testing the adaptation of African indigenous vegetables to North Carolina conditions. One of the crops tested, jute mallow (Corchorus olitorius), has adapted well and can be harvested and regrown. Its leaves contain mucilage with a viscosity that has outperformed that of established food hydrocolloids such as guar gum, suggesting potential applications in egg replacement, gluten-free flours, and cosmetics.
One product to emerge from this work is the Kijani Bar, a food bar combining jute mallow, Ethiopian kale, amaranth, sweet potato flour, teff, and peanuts, designed to help address malnutrition while promoting local agriculture.
Bambara groundnut, a drought-tolerant grain legume grown mainly by subsistence farmers across sub-Saharan Africa, is also drawing commercial interest. Companies such as WhatIF Foods have already launched a Bambara groundnut milk product.
Kenaf (Hibiscus cannabinus) offers a different value proposition. The fast-growing fiber crop can be harvested within four to six months and has potential markets in paper, cardboard, bioremediation, and water filtration.
One of the most developed areas of research is yams. A parallel effort involving IITA and PowerPollen is tackling yam pollen storage to broaden the crop’s limited breeding windows, while a separate study focuses on developing a callus-free, transgene-free gene-editing method for yam trait improvement.
The team has also been exploring the value of yams as a food and industrial ingredient, including efforts to optimize starch extraction. Enzymatic methods increased starch purity from roughly 67 percent to 78 percent while reducing fiber contamination.
From jute mallow and Bambara groundnut to kenaf and yam, the research presented a different way of looking at Africa’s crops, not simply as sources of food, but as reservoirs of traits and opportunities that could support new products, industries, and more resilient food systems.
The Knowledge Café discussion underscored the need to move beyond conserving Africa’s crop diversity to understanding it, investing in it, and finding practical ways to turn its untapped potential into value.
Contribute by Anuoluwapo Oyeleye
