Traditional crops are more nourishing for people who eat them and for the soils in which they are grown, according to Mr. Fowler, and they are better at withstanding the wild weather delivered by climate change. The problem, he says, is that they’ve been ignored by plant breeders. His goal, through the new State Department initiative, is to increase the agricultural productivity of the most nutritious and climate-hardy among them.

The initial focus is on a half dozen crops in a half dozen countries Africa.