Lost Crops of Africa Volume I: Grains (1996) / Chapter Skim
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Introduction
Introduction
Pages 3-16
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At least 10 of the wild grasses were domesticated and eventually produced by farmers in their fields. In modern times, however, this wealth of native grains has been neglected and sometimes even scorned.
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And if global warming occurs, they could even become vital for keeping today's best arable lands in production. Forged in the searing savannas and the Sahara, sorghum and pearl millet in particular have the merits to become crops for the shifting and uncertain conditions of an overpopulated "greenhouse age." LOCAL PROMISE In the last few centuries in Africa, the local grains have been superseded by foreign cereals introduced and promoted by outsiders such as missionaries, colonial powers, or researchers.
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Maize, rice, and wheat have much to offer and deserve greatly increased support. A crucial objective, though, must be to extend cereal production into areas where environmental stresses and plant diseases currently limit their growth.
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An indigenous West African crop, fonio (comprising two species, Digitaria exilis and Digitaria iburua) is grown mainly on small farms for home consumption.
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In many ways, it seems to have ideal qualities for a grain, yet research has been scanty and intermittent, and so far the crop is all but unknown beyond Ethiopia. In the last few years, however, commercial production has started in the United States and South Africa, and an export trade in tef grain has begun.
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Peanuts, potatoes, and other common crops once suffered from this same discrimination. In the United States the peanut was considered to be "merely slave food" until little more than a century ago, and in the 1600s the English refused to eat potatoes because they considered them to be "Irish food." Cultural bias against peasant crops is a tragedy; the plants poor people grow are usually robust,
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Farmers grow them for their own use rather than for market, and therefore there are no statistics on production or costs. A plant may be helping feed millions, but in the international figures on area sown, tonnage produced and exported, and prices paid it never shows.
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Indeed, Ethiopian barley has been isolated so long that it has been given its own botanical name, Hordeum irregulars, and has developed its own genetic "personality." This ancient barley is grown mainly in Ethiopia, where it ranks fourth among crops, both in production and area. Throughout most of the upper highlands it accounts for over 60 percent of the people's total plant food.
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Examples of such untamed cereals are drinn, golden millet, kram-kram, panic grasses, wild rices, jungle rice, wild tefs, and crowfoot grasses. Resurrecting the grain-gathering industry of the past might be a way to help combat desertification, erosion, and other forms of land degradation across the worst afflicted areas of the Sahel and its neighboring regions.
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