The African Plant Breeding Academy has graduated its first group of plant breeders; a major step forward in helping to increase food security and eliminate malnutrition and stunting among Africa’s youth.

Over the next 5 years, the Academy will train 250 new plant breeders who can “help to develop traditional African plants and trees that are important to African diets into hardier and more nutritious crops for smallholder African farmers in the region,” reports Africa Union News.

The breeders are focusing on ‘orphan crops’. These are traditional foods that have largely been neglected by the research community yet they are locally important as subsistence foods for many people across the globe. In Africa, they include cocoyam, hibiscus and shea as well as 35 tree crops such as Baobab and the African plum.

In an article on the same topic in Global Post, Tony Simons, Director General of the World Agroforestry Centre outlines how indigenous orphan crops are often more nutritious and resilient to environmental stresses than many of the large commodity crops.

"It's wrong for people to run away from traditional foods, as they are both nutritious and healthy foods," said Simons.

He explains how orphaned crops are under researched and undervalued by policy makers because they offer little global trade yet they are a vital source of energy, protein, vitamins, minerals and micronutrients.

The first class of 21 graduates from the Academy represents 11 nations and 19 institutions throughout Africa.

“The knowledge and experience these new graduates have will enable them to apply modern scientific techniques to some of Africa’s oldest crops and, in so doing, meet the nutritional needs of millions of African farmers and their children,” said Howard-Yana Shapiro, chief agricultural officer for Mars Incorporated and a senior fellow in the UC Davis Department of Plant Sciences and World Agroforestry Centre

The Academy, a program of the African Orphan Crops Consortium, is based at the World Agroforestry Centre in Nairobi, Kenya. The Consortium plans to sequence, assemble and annotate the genomes of 101 African orphan crops so that they can be developed into reliable sources of nutritious food.

The approach will be particularly useful in speeding up improvements in the 35 orphan tree crops. Tree crops are challenging to improve because they take longer to mature and require more space to grow than field crops.

The information generated through the program will be made publicly available and the materials developed by the trained plant breeders will be offered to smallholder farmers throughout Africa.

Read the story in African Union News: New Plant Breeding Academy Graduates To Improve Africa’s ‘Orphan’ Crops

Read the story in Global Post: Africa Economy: Africa's orphaned crops slowly bounce back under scientists' efforts

See also: At ICRAF, the African Plant Breeding Academy graduates elite scientists