Bambara groundnut: a neglected and underutilized climate-resilient crop with great potential to alleviate food insecurity in sub-Saharan Africa

ABSTRACT

Bambara groundnut (Vigna subterranea) is a drought-tolerant legume in sub-Saharan Africa and is well adapted to marginal agricultural lands. Its seeds have high nutritional value, owing to their protein, fat, fiber, carbohydrate, vitamin, and mineral element contents. Nevertheless, this crop is still underutilized, not well-known and has almost been ignored by researchers and funding bodies. Meanwhile, Bambara groundnut offers opportunities for crop diversification and has a great potential to significantly contribute to food security, especially in the context of climate change. This paper provides an overview of the origin, distribution, adaptation and resilience to climate change of Bambara groundnut, as well as constraints to production and its diffusion. Furthermore, this review highlights the advantages offered by micropropagation, microbial biofertilizers and plant breeding to improve Bambara groundnut yield. Hence, this review provides useful information and tools to fully exploit the potential of Bambara groundnut.

KEYWORDS:

• Food security
• biotechnology
• climate change
• plant breeding
• micropropagation
• beneficial microorganisms

Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the Senegalese Ministry of Higher Education, Research and Innovation through a grant from the FIRST (Fonds d’Impulsion de la Recherche Scientifique et Technique- edition 2013).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).