Amazing ting: South Africa must reinvigorate sorghum as a key food before it’s lost

The world’s food systems have developed in a way that will not be serving health and sustainability.

People are increasingly eating industrially produced foods which are low in nutrients and high in fats and sugars. For example, in South Africa between 2005 and 2010, sales of snack bars, ready meals and noodles all rose by greater than 40%. These are related to increasing levels of obesity and diet-related non-communicable diseases like diabetes.

The diets of individuals living in poverty are typically monotonous, dominated by refined cereals with impacts on nutrition, especially for kids. Healthy diets remain unaffordable for many South Africans.

The way food is produced, processed and transported also has environmental impacts. Among these are lack of biodiversity, high levels of water extraction and greenhouse gas emissions.

At the guts of the food system’s problems is an absence of diversity. Power is consolidated within the hands of a number of mega-corporations. Growing single crops in an enormous area makes them liable to shocks. And the world relies on 4 major staple crops – wheat, rice, maize and soybean – to fulfill most food needs.

There have been widespread calls for the food system to vary. The query is how.

In our research project on sustainable and healthy food systemswe got down to explore some options. We checked out the South African, English and Indian food systems and the way they might turn out to be more sustainable, healthy and fair. In particular we explored how you can make these systems more diverse by growing local and indigenous foods.

We found that the advantages and value of indigenous foods within the African context haven’t been fully understood. Knowledge of how you can use these foods is being lost from one generation to the subsequent.

So we decided to do a deep dive into one specific crop indigenous to the African continent: sorghum. In South Africa it’s also known by names like and .

Following the ting

Sorghum is one of the necessary cereal grains for food consumption in Africa. Africa is the world regional leader in total production of sorghum at 25.6 million tonneshowever it has the common lowest yield at 967 kilograms per hectare. It is indigenous to the continent’s savannas and there may be archaeological evidence within the Sahara of the usage of sorghum dating back 8,000 years.

Sorghum is as nutritious as maize and has high drought tolerance. This makes it a resilient option for farmers to plant under changing climatic conditions.

Sorghum also has traditional significance. or is a beer traditionally produced from maize and sorghum by the family matriarch for special occasions. As well as traditional beer, the Tswana people of South Africa also make a fermented porridge () from sorghum.

Despite these advantages and traditional significance, production of sorghum in South Africa has declinedwith a peak of around 700,000 tonnes within the Nineteen Eighties to a low of 100,000 within the later 2010s.

There can be a have to overcome its perception as a backward or “poor man’s food” and its association with drunkenness, which was reinforced during apartheid to denigrate indigenous food and traditional practices.

From encounters with a spread of South Africans connected through sorghum by either its consumption, processing or production, we learned of three key interventions that could possibly be made to reinvigorate this food. They involve availability, affordability and appeal.

New life for sorghum

There is a have to focus research on improving sorghum production in collaboration with small scale farmers to permit them to adapt to recent local conditions under climate change. This can even improve yields to be more competitive with maize, which has globally received so much more research funding for crop improvement.

Making sorghum a zero-rated tax foodstuff in order that it might probably compete with maize on the shelf could make it more competitive. As a rough comparison, the most affordable house brand mabele meal product in a single retailer’s online store is R26.99 (US$1.58) for 2kg, whereas a brand of maizemeal is R22.49 (US$1.32) for two.5kg.

Innovation meets tradition

Another necessary intervention is around product innovation and, through this, increase in demand, to supply a more guaranteed market to farmers. Once local production might be increased, this could reduce dependence on sorghum imports. As a respondent in our research said:

If sorghum might be bought at the identical price as maize, then people will begin to shift their consumption due to its health advantages and since its indigenous heritage has marketing potential.

Another respondent said:

You have to create aspirational products. It shouldn’t be considered poor man’s food – should you ask many individuals in (South Africa) about sorghum, they give you two associations: beer and the ‘drunk uncle’; and poor man’s food, ‘porridge’.

Sorghum products – newly developed ones and reconfigurations of traditional gastronomy – must meet modern consumers’ need for convenience and aspirational preferences. Then there could possibly be a revolution within the sorghum market. Public procurement of sorghum, for instance in schools, couldn’t only teach children about these crops, but provide a more diversified and healthy food regimen – while enabling a marketplace for farmers. As a 3rd respondent told us:

Most people have a positive story about sorghum – we’d like to tap into tradition and culture … People remember things – what grandmother would eat. There is quite a lot of marketing within the stories – it’s tradition. It’s gogo (grandmother).

is now registered on Slow Food’s Ark of Taste. This incorporates a collection of artisanal products steeped in culture, but in addition susceptible to extinction as the normal practices upon which they’re based are lost or the species from which they’re made turn out to be endangered.

The potential lack of sorghum from the South African food system has implications not just for climate adaptation and agro-biodiversity, but for nutrition security, cultural practices and a way of identity.

Our research highlights that a robust cultural link to sorghum stays in South Africa. If an enabling policy environment for research and innovation could possibly be broadly interpreted, this might invigorate a richer engagement with sorghum. Not just as a commodity, but as a culturally significant food that would help construct resilience in local food systems.