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Plant resources of south-east asia 9 : plants yielding non-seed carbohydrates
Prosea, short for 'Plant Resources of South-East Asia', is an international programme focused on South-East Asia. Its purpose is to make available the wealth of dispersed knowledge on plant resources for education, extension, research and industry through a computerized data bank and an illustrated multivolume handbook. A thorough knowledge of plant resources is essential for human life and plays a key role in ecologically balanced land-use systems. Extensive information on the plants growing in the region is needed to enable the plant resources of each country to be used optimally. A large international team of experts is preparing the texts on particular species or genera, which are being published in commodity groups. All taxa are treated in a similar manner with details on uses, botany, ecology, agronomy or silviculture, genetic resources, breeding, prospects and literature.
This volume deals with plants in South-East Asia that produce and store starch and/or sugar as a reserve food in organs other than seeds, e.g. in tubers, corms, cormels, stolons, thickened roots, stems, trunks and fruits. Starches and sugars are the main source of food energy for humans and animals.
this volume are grown at subsistence level in the tropics. Although many of them may potentially produce twice the amount of useful energy per unit of land and time than cereals, they have never received comparable scientific, industrial and commercial attention. This neglected group of crops deserves more attention to realize its full potential. In this volume 54 important crops (cultivated and wild) including sago palm, sugar palm, fishtail palm, sugar cane, yams, cassava, sweet potato, Irish potato, taro, arrowroot, yam bean, plantain and cooking banana, zedoary, Chinese artichoke, are treated in 33 papers. Some 50 species of minor importance are described briefly and a further 100 species yielding non-seed carbohydrates as a by-product are listed. Hopefully, this volume will stimulate research on and development of this neglected group of tropical crops.
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