01809naa a2200205 a 450000100080000000500110000800800410001910000210006024500740008126000090015552012840016465000100144865000120145870000190147070000140148970000140150370000140151770000210153177300510155216636422025-06-24       2003    bl uuuu     u00u1 u    #d1 aBROUGHTON, W. J.  aBeans (Phaseolus spp.) – model food legumes.h[electronic resource]  c2003  aGlobally, 800 million people are malnourished. Heavily subsidised farmers in rich countries produce sufficient surplus food to feed the hungry, but not at a price the poor can afford. Even donating the rich world’s surplus to the poor would not solve the problem. Most poor people earn their living from agriculture, so a deluge of free food would destroy their livelihoods. Thus, the only answer to world hunger is to safeguard and improve the productivity of farmers in poor countries. Diets of subsistence level farmers in Africa and Latin America often contain sufficient carbohydrates (through cassava, corn/maize, rice, wheat, etc.), but are poor in proteins. Dietary proteins can take the form of scarce animal products (eggs, milk, meat, etc.), but are usually derived from legumes (plants of the bean and pea family). Legumes are vital in agriculture as they form associations with bacteria that ‘fix-nitrogen’ from the air. Effectively this amounts to internal fertilisation and is the main reason that legumes are richer in proteins than all other plants. Thousands of legume species exist but more common beans (Phaseolus vulgaris L.) are eaten than any other. In some countries such as Mexico and Brazil, beans are the primary source of protein in human diets.  aBeans  aFeijão1 aHERNÁNDEZ, G.1 aBLAIR, M.1 aBEEBE, S.1 aGEPTS, P.1 aVANDERLEYDEN, J.  tPlant and Soilgv. 253, n. 1, p. 55-128, 2003.