Understanding the regional landscape and contributions of crops to end hunger in the Global South: Towards a parsimonious foundation

International agricultural research for development contributes to the development of agricultural technologies that aim to reduce poverty, increase incomes of resource-poor farmers in low and lower-middle income countries that provide poor consumers with affordable, healthy and sustainable diets. Setting priorities for demand driven breeding that service complex and dynamic agri-food systems, requires a strong evidence base. Efforts to provide foresight to support priority setting are often contested. Our paper aims to develop a parsimonious approach to better understand the regional landscape and contributions of the various crops to end hunger in the Global South. It thereby sets out to build a foundational understanding of the current situation as a robust starting point for looking into the future. The study shows the importance of being conscious of the impact lens of interest and the inherent data limitations by bringing together evidence in a transparent manner by making comprehensive and robust open access data sets interoperable and providing a method for generating a composite index to view the evidence. The available data allowed us to pursue two lenses: a Rural Livelihoods Lens (focused on food production/supply); a Food and Nutrition Lens (focused on food consumption/demand) and a composite index of the two.