Guinea Yams of Ethiopia
A young edible tuber of a wild plant of Dioscorea praehensilis Benth.
This project began in 2002. It aims to document the ethnobotany and use, modes of domestication and patterns of variation in the guinea yam complex in South-West Ethiopia. The complex is traditionally thought to comprise five species, the major cultigens Dioscorea rotundata Poir. and D. cayenensis Lam., the small-scale crop D. abyssinica Hochst. ex Kunth and the “wild” species D. praehensilis Benth. and D. sagittifolia Pax. Together they feed millions in Africa as primary and secondary carbohydrate sources and famine foods. The truly wild progenitors of the complex remain unknown: discovering them is a long-term goal of the project. Much research has been done on the guinea yam complex in the “yam zone” of W Africa, especially in breeding and pathology, but very little elsewhere in the continent. This is surprising, given that the spectrum of cultivated to wild plants in Ethiopia appears much closer to the origins of guinea yam domestication than that which now exists in West Africa. The cultivation and ethnobotany of the guinea yams in SW Ethiopia were described in a coauthored paper (2002), after which a pan-African morphometric study was undertaken to compare morphological variation between the SW Ethiopian taxa and with those from elsewhere in Africa. This will be submitted for publication in 2006. It is being built upon in a PhD programme in which a broader range of Ethiopian cultivars will be studied morphologically, and the results compared with patterns of AFLP variation. The PhD thesis will be completed in 2008.
Project Team
Project Leader: Wilkin, Paul
Herbarium
Paul Wilkin
Jodrell Laboratory
Mike Fay
Project Partners and Collaborators
Ethiopia
Addis Ababa University
Norway
University of Oslo
USA
Washington University, St. Louis