Legumes: a Triple Win for Poverty Reduction, Improved Sustainability and Nutrition.

Legumes provide a triple win for smallholder farmers in developing countries. Legumes contribute to a diverse, high quality diet, bring much-needed income, particularly for women, and generate greater sustainability in production systems. Over the past six years, the U.S. Agency for International Development’s implementation of the Feed the Future Research Strategy has elevated and focused research investments in legumes. These investments have yielded new tools, such as a SNP chip for cowpea that will accelerate progress in cowpea breeding developed by the Feed the Future Innovation Lab for Climate Resilient Cowpea at UC-Riverside. New bean, cowpea, and peanut varieties stacked with biotic resistance and abiotic stress tolerance traits have been developed by researchers in the Legume Innovation Lab led by Michigan State University and the Peanut & Mycotoxin Innovation Lab led by the University of Georgia. These new varieties will reduce production risk to farmers in Central America, West Africa, and East and Southern Africa. In Malawi, Africa Rising researchers demonstrated the benefits of the doubled-up legume system on maize yields while also reducing expensive fertilizer requirements. These examples demonstrate how research can deliver concrete benefits to smallholder producers in the developing world. But this is just the beginning of what is needed. While legumes are uniquely suited to contribute to achieving global food and nutrition security, they are also susceptible to the looming constraints emerging from a changing climate. Solutions to legume production challenges must be developed more quickly with understanding of the social, cultural, and economic contexts to ensure innovations are timely, relevant, and can be accessed by those who need them most.  Building on Feed the Future’s lessons learned from the past six years, this talk will examine opportunities for legumes research to deliver the triple win.