Extreme weather putting Africa's traditional food crops at risk

Africa is rapidly losing a cornerstone of its food security as climate risks intensify, according to a report released by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations in Nairobi.

The Third Report on the State of the World's Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture warns that extreme weather conditions are posing a threat to traditional crop varieties, including sorghum, millet, yam, rice, cowpea, and African eggplant.

Other wild plants harvested for food, like the baobab, shea, marula, tamarind, African bush mango, and nutrient-rich leafy greens like amaranth, spider plant, and African nightshade, are also disappearing faster than they are being conserved.

Chikelu Mba, deputy director of the plant production and protection division at FAO, cautioned that the erosion of agrobiodiversity disproportionately affects the poorest communities, many of whom rely on the traditional crops for food, income and cultural identity, leaving them increasingly vulnerable as climate pressures grow.

"This report shows clearly that Africa is losing plant genetic diversity at a pace that threatens food security, nutrition, and the overall resilience of agrifood systems," he said.

About 16 percent of more than 12,000 of these distinct locally adapted crop varieties in Sub-Saharan Africa recorded across 19 countries were found to be threatened, narrowing farmers' options as droughts and heat intensify.

The crops are often better suited to local soils and climates than commercial varieties, some of which were not bred for Africa's diverse agroecological conditions or farmers' preferences.

The report finds that over 70 percent of assessed crop wild relatives in Africa are under threat, while African gene banks conserve only about 14 percent of those collected. As a result, many adaptive traits are at risk of irreversible loss.

According to the report, drought now drives nearly two-thirds of emergency seed interventions across Africa, with 110 responses recorded in 20 countries.

Around 220,000 seed samples from nearly 4,000 plant species are conserved in 56 African gene banks, yet only about 10 percent of collections are safely duplicated elsewhere. This leaves them vulnerable to conflict, flooding, power failures, and chronic underinvestment.