It is very encouraging reading the detailed commentary and action plans outlined here for promoting pulses. From Zimbabwe, Australia and Norway there is clearly tremendous commitment to how we can support greater investment in agricultural education and policies that support growing pulses, and in nutrition education to enhance the demand for pulses. I am interested in any experiences from members of this forum in terms of working with ministries of education, or ministries of nutrition and health, as novel means to support awareness of pulses, nutritional benefits and understanding of the wide range of environmental services that pulses provided.
As an agriculturists I am very interested to see ideas about expanding the range of pulse varieties so that farmers and consumers have more options. I have worked with some plant breeders who have been committed to releasing many different types of varieties that meet both local and market preferences for taste and other seed traits. This has been been my experience based in work with bean breeders, I have seen much less investment by public research institutions in other pulse breeders, such as pigeonpea breeding as only a few varieties have been released for African smallholder farmers. Beside bean breeding, which has included participatory approaches, molecular tools and long-term, sustained efforts on seed systems, is there other examples of pulse breeding efforts and agronomy that has expanded pulse production options, and supported widespread adoption? I would really like to see such examples highlighted.
Another area that requires more attention is agricultural statistics which are rather poor for pulses, including aggregated combinations of different bean species and inaccurate reflection of what is grown on the ground in many countries. How might we support greater attention to documenting legume species and varieties, and consumption, so that we know that agricultural statistics accurately reflect what pulses are grown, and where.
I am interested to hear of others experiences with legume statistics or documentation of impact from adoption of growing or eating more pulses
Sieg Snapp