Abstract
Traditional
vegetables are piloted as champion species for sub-Saharan Africa, a region
experiencing high levels of nutritional food insecurity and water scarcity. The
important benefits of traditional vegetables over alien vegetables are; (i)
their high nutrient density (iron, zinc, and β-carotene), (ii) their
productivity under water stress, and (iii) their availability to rural
resource-poor households. However, information on these benefits is anecdotal.
The objectives of this study were to benchmark nutritional water productivity
[NWP = (aboveground edible biomass and/ or storage organ biomass/actual
evapotranspiration) × nutritional content of a product] of ten traditional vegetables
and compare them with ten alien vegetables. We selected vegetables that are
widely utilized by rural resource-poor households. A comprehensive literature
search was conducted using common databases. Data [biomass (aboveground biomass
and/ or storage organ), water use, and nutrient concentration] sourced from the
literature were used to compute water productivity, nutritional yield (NY), and
NWP of selected vegetables. Our results revealed that the water productivity of
traditional vegetables was comparable to that of alien vegetables. In addition,
traditional vegetables were superior in nutritional yield (Fe-NY and Zn-NY) and
NWP (Fe-NWP and Zn-NWP) of micronutrients. Alien vegetables were rich in
β-carotene-NY and β-carotene-NWP; this is contrary to the anecdotal
information. We acknowledge the weakness of our approach; generating the NWP
database using two independent datasets (crop water productivity and the
nutrient concentration databases). However, this was the only pragmatic
approach to establish first-order estimates of NWP for selected groups of
vegetables. We propose that future research should be conducted to validate
these results.
Keywords
Nutritional
food security
Traditional
vegetables
Water
productivity
Hidden
hunger
Micronutrients
Vitamin
A
Water
footprint
By Thesis Doctor
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