Validation of the African Vegetable Biodiversity Rescue Plan by the African Union Commission

African vegetables are ideal for diversifying farming systems for climate change adaptation. They are hardy, require limited space, grow on short rotations, are highly nutritious, and providing numerous options for farmers, traders and processors to improve their livelihoods. If well integrated into the food systems of African countries, vegetables can contribute significantly to achieving the US Sustainable Development Goals of zero hunger, poverty reduction, and climate action by 2030. To ensure this transition, however, requires urgent actions to rescue, safeguard, and use African vegetable biodiversity. This is especially relevant in the identified ‘hotspots’ of vegetable biodiversity.

This African Vegetable Biodiversity Rescue Plan has been developed to address these challenges and achieve a holistic approach to unlock the potential of African vegetable biodiversity, addressing supply, demand, and policy challenges and opportunities. It is also aligned with relevant global, continental and national frameworks that share components that seek to improve the rescue, conservation and sustainable utilization of vegetable biodiversity.

Implementing the Rescue Plan will result in the genetic diversity of selected African vegetables and their wild relatives being rescued and well conserved through complementary in-situ and ex-situ activities, supported by national, regional and international policies. This diversity will in turn be actively used by farmers, breeders and researchers from sub-Saharan African countries to increase the supply of nutrition-dense food and to diversify farming systems.

The Rescue Plan is an outcome of the process that started with a study on the diversity and conservation status of African vegetables (van Zonneveld et al., 2021) that established that African vegetable biodiversity is poorly conserved, and the research identified six biodiversity ‘hotspots’ in sub-Saharan Africa so far, and proposed priority actions for safeguarding these genetic resources for food and agriculture. A draft African Vegetable Biodiversity Rescue Plan was developed, and stakeholder consultations were organized to collect feedback and inputs from experts across the continent. This included sub-regional plant genetic resources (PGR) networks of the Southern Africa Development Community (SADC), West and Central Africa (WCA), and the Plant Genetic Resources Management Working Group (PGRM-WG) of the African Union’s African Seed and Biotechnology Program. The process was completed with a validation workshop on 14-15 December 2023 in Mbabane, Eswatini, including representatives of plant genetic resources networks and national genebanks from 16 African countries, leading to the endorsement of this publication.

The Rescue plan will be published later in 2024.