RHI Seminar: Breads from local and diversified crops for improving food security

Title: Breads from local and diversified crops for improving food security
Authors: Martijn Noort and Stefano Renzetti

In sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), rural communities traditionally prepare meals from a wide variety of locally grown crops like cassava, sorghum and pulses, which can be considered Climate Resilient Crops (CRC). However, massive urbanization favours a rapid transition in diets and lifestyle. Africa growingly depends on imported wheat, while CRCs are undervalued and in decline, which makes the population increasingly vulnerable for disruptions in (global) food supply chains, like the current wheat crisis.

Food System thinking provides a scientific framework to understand these problems and to guide (technologic) interventions and opportunities to improve the impact on food security, healthy diets and sustainability. We performed a food system analysis in which we compared imported, usually refined, wheat flour with local CRCs for making bread-type staple products [1]. A key result is that combining a variety of CRCs can address most food system aspects positively, and hence support a shift towards a more resilient and sustainable food system. Attractive and affordable bread products based on local CRCs have the potential to provide nutritional, socio-economical and sustainability improvements. This is supported by recent economic studies [e.g. 2] which advocate that crop diversification and decentralized production are important interventions to improve stable food and nutrition security.

Main bottlenecks are the availability and costs of CRCs due to the low efficiency of the local supply chains, as well as their different technological functionalities, hampering these crops to compete with imported wheat. We show that bread-type products with attractive properties can be formulated, entirely based on combinations of CRC flours from sorghum, cowpea and cassava. Together with local stakeholders in Uganda we developed several CRC based bread type products like chapatis for low income consumers, as well as gluten-free breads for high-end African consumers and export.

We demonstrate that CRCs can provide valuable ingredients for healthy and attractive bread-type products and offer commercial opportunities and new value chains and hence can create jobs and employment in SSA. This can help to improve the resilience of SSA food systems.

References:

[1] Noort, M.W.J.; Renzetti, S.; Linderhof, V.; du Rand, G.E.; Marx-Pienaar, N.J.M.M.; de Kock, H.L.; Magano, N.; Taylor, J.R.N. (2022) Towards Sustainable Shifts to Healthy Diets and Food Security in Sub-Saharan Africa with Climate-Resilient Crops in Bread-Type Products: A Food System Analysis. Foods 2022, 11, 135. https://doi.org/10.3390/foods11020135

[2] Zhang, Z., Abdullah, M.J., Xu, G. et al. Countries’ vulnerability to food supply disruptions caused by the Russia–Ukraine war from a trade dependency perspective. Sci Rep 13, 16591 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-023-43883-4