Biodiversity And Domestication Of Yams In West Africa eBook

The domestication of wild yams is still common practice in West Africa. It also offers one of the few remaining opportunities to understand how farmers use their empirical knowledge to tap the genetic resources of wild plants and create products suitable for agriculture. Yam agronomists and breeders have, until recently, focused little attention on this process of organizing and generating agrobiodiversity. This book aims to fill the gap by pooling existing knowledge on the subject. This original field offers a wealth of prospects for scientific progress at a time when scientists are becoming increasingly aware of the fact that local farmers' knowledge and practices relating to genetic resource management substantially enhances the potential for technical progress and adaptation to environmental change. Roland Dumont was, until his retirement in 2002, a CIRAD agronomist. He had the privilege of studying under Professor Jacques Miège. He spent over 30 years of his long African career working on cultivated and wild yams and, in particular, investigating indigenous knowledge on these topics. Alexandre Dansi is a geneticist and phytogenetic resource specialist. His work is essentially focused on the genetic resources of African yams. He is a researcher in the Faculté des sciences et techniques at the Université d'Abomey-Calavi, Benin, and President of IRDCAM, an NGO working on the biodiversity of crops and of aromatic and medicinal plants. Philippe Vernier, a CIRAD agronomist, is working on yam-based farming practices and cropping systems. He has conducted research in New Caledonia and West Africa. Jeanne Zoundjihèkpon is a lecturer in genetics at the Université d'Abomey-Calavi, Benin. She is also the Regional Programme Officer for Francophone Africa of GRAIN, an NGO which promotes the sustainable management and use of agricultural biodiversity in collaboration with local communities.