Potential of underutilized crops to introduce the nutritional diversity and achieve zero hunger

Abstract

Several crops with enormous nutritional values were once largely consumed by mankind. However, due to selective domestication, most of them had become marginally cultivated in a confined region. It is an estimate from various studies on the evaluation of mankind that about 80,000 plant species have been directly used by humans for food, fodder, fibre, medicine, and industrial purposes. Among these, more than 25,000 are edible and about 7000 have either been domesticated or collected from the wild for food at one time or another (Muthamilarasan et al. 2019). At present, merely 30 species are being cultivated for food, among which 6 crops including rice, wheat, maize, potato, soybean, and sugarcane share more than 75% of total plant-derived energy intake. Green revolution in Asia occurred due to the introduction of high-yielding rice and wheat varieties with excess soil nitrogen application has uplifted the undernourished incidences from one in three people being hungry during 1960 to roughly one out of ten in the present date. However, the advent of green revolution has negatively impacted crop diversity in developing countries. Narrowing down of crop diversification together with consumption of highly processed food and sedentary life resulted in double-burden nutritional challenges with nearly 2 billion people still suffering from malnutrition and additional 1.9 billion people suffering from obesity and non-communicable diseases due to higher caloric intake (Sreenivasulu and Fernie 2022; Tiozon et al. 2021). Switching to crops with higher caloric yields has ended the cultivation of super-nutrient crops and general awareness of broader climatic adaptation of several native species to be grown in marginal environments.