Over the last 25 years, the process of domesticating culturally-important, highly-nutritious, indigenous food-tree species. Integrating these over-looked ‘Cinderella’ species into conventional farming systems as new crops is playing a critical role in raising the productivity of staple food crops and improving the livelihoods of poor smallholder farmers. This experience has important policy implications for the sustainability of tropical/sub-tropical agriculture, the rural economy and the global environment.

A participatory domestication process has been implemented in local communities using appropriate horticultural technologies to characterize genetic variation in non-timber forest products and produce putative cultivars by the vegetative propagation of elite trees in rural resource centers. When integrated into mainstream agriculture, these new crops diversify farmers’ fields and generate income. Together, these outcomes address land degradation and social deprivation—two of the main constraints to staple food production—through beneficial effects on soil fertility, agroecosystem functions, community livelihoods, local trade and employment. Thus, the cultivation of these ‘socially modified crops’ offers a new strategy for the sustainable intensification of tropical agriculture based on the maximization of total factor productivity with minimal environmental and social trade-offs.