Food security: Sequencing West Africa’s “yam belt”

A market in Ibadan is lined with piles of hairy yams, and traders dispute over price and quality before putting them onto vehicles to transport them the final distance to Nigerian consumers. A nearby man maneuvers through congested traffic pulling a hand cart loaded with the tubers.

Yams, whether boiled, fried, or processed into flour, are a staple food and source of income in West Africa. But as the cost of other necessities rises, growing conditions are getting worse along the “yam belt” from Guinea to Cameroon.

Farming in Nigeria is already more difficult than it was in the past, when the soil was good and the land was fertile, according to vendor Adewale Elekun.

He said, despite the commotion of the market, “Today the quality of the soil has disappeared.”

Another molecular geneticist in Ibadan, 130 kilometers (80 miles) northeast of Lagos, Dr. Ranjana Bhattacharjee, says she intends to improve things by assisting in the development of tougher and more adaptable plants.

She is completing the whole-genome sequencing of about 1,000 yam samples at the city’s International Institute of Tropical Agriculture, work she claims lays the way for actions to ensure that future crops are more climate-adaptable.

The genome sequencing is necessary to understand the genes underlying your targeted qualities, such as disease resistance and quality, if you want to improve crops, according to Bhattacharjee.

Because several major food-producing nations have elected to export less food and because Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has halted grain and sunflower seed exports from that nation, the need to increase locally grown crops is particularly pressing given the rise in food prices globally.

Yams are a sign of riches, wealth, and even fertility in West Africa since they are larger than their unrelated north American cousin.

According to Bhattacharjee, sequencing their genomes may enable West African farmers, who produce 90% of the world’s yams, increase and maintain their productivity. He added that once the data are released, others will try to put them to use.

Then, she continued, “that will finally result in food security, not only in Nigeria but also in West Africa where the yam is farmed.”