Contributions

e) Additional quality, market and environmental traits

The commissioned foresight and ex-ante impact analyses did not include the critical contribution that GLDC crops make in terms of their importance to human nutrition or as a source of forage and fodder for livestock in the target agroecologies. For quality attributes of commodities, such as biofortified cereals, aflatoxin-free groundnut varieties, or varieties with desired market attributes, further efforts are needed to refine the models to fully account for economic gains due to shifts in the demand function and the resulting price changes. This will be a priority investment in the early stages of GLDC implementation. In the meantime, a more qualified assessment of attributes for each crop is suggested in Table 3, in light of a commissioned analysis of GLDC crops and such attributes⁵³.

Nutrient-rich dryland cereals and the grain legumes are increasingly recognized for their contributions to both food and nutritional security⁵⁴. Research coverage of GLDC agri-food systems must deliver both resilience in food and nutritional security and opportunities for market-oriented development for smallholder farmers. Breeding for nutritional quality, mainstreaming biofortification for nutrients such as iron and zinc, addressing aflatoxin health concerns and responding to market-demand for commodity traits must be priorities for GLDC.

Table 3: Heat map of quality, market and environmental traits; darker the shading, higher the contribution.