• In many cases where modern food markets and development technologies have been introduced, people have stopped growing and consuming highly nutritious and diverse native foods, such as pulses, legumes and/or high-protein traditional grains, and have replaced them with modern monoculture cereals, such as uniform wheat and maize varieties, which are less nutritious.

• The nutritional status of the most important staple foods, such as the cereals is ultimately dependent on their metabolic composition (Galili et al., 2002).

• Taken together, these studies demonstrate that intercropping of legumes and cereals is less sustainable for increased crop yields in Africa compared with crop rotations involving cereals after solecropped legumes.