Evolutionary Adaptations in Drought-Resilient Crops and Their Impact on Agricultural Sustainability in Nigeria

Drought stress poses a major threat to food production in Nigeria, especially in the northern regions where rainfall has become increasingly irregular. While modern breeding programmes continue to focus on yield improvement, they often overlook the long-term resilience needed for sustainable agriculture. This review examines how evolutionary adaptations, such as deep rooting systems, early flowering, drought-induced dormancy, stomatal regulation, and water storage mechanisms, have enabled certain crops to survive under water-limited conditions. These traits, found in indigenous crops and their wild relatives, offer untapped potential for improving drought resilience in mainstream agriculture. The study draws on data from peer-reviewed journals, agricultural reports, and research articles retrieved from Google Scholar, JSTOR, ScienceDirect, and Web of Science. Keywords like “drought adaptation,” “natural selection,” and “plant resilience” were used in combination with Boolean operators to refine the search. Priority was given to field-based studies with ecological and physiological relevance to Nigerian farming systems. Findings show that crops such as pearl millet, fonio, cowpea, and baobab possess adaptive traits that remain underutilised in current breeding frameworks. The review concludes that integrating these evolutionary traits into crop improvement strategies, through genomic selection and marker-assisted breeding, can support the development of varieties that are both high-yielding and drought-tolerant. It further recommends preserving the genetic diversity of indigenous crops and reorienting breeding priorities to include long-term resilience, especially in the face of Nigeria’s increasing climate variability.