Legumes : Past, Present, and Future

The man domesticated many legumes from the wild species of the Family Leguminosae (Fabaceae) during about 10,000 years of the agricultural history. About 80 species are known as edible, but only about 30 of them are most popular among the Leguminosae (ca. 700 genera, 20,000 species), which is one of the most prosperous groups in the flowering plant families. More commonly, legumes belong to the Subfamily Papilionoideae which is herbaceous, annual, and dominant in temperate regions and shows the most evolutionary trends in the Leguminosae. As dry seeds contain high protein, grain legumes are called "poor man's meat", and their young shoots and pods are also important as vegetables. Two other Subfamilies, Caesalpinioideae and Mimosoideae are primarily, woody, perennial, and tropical and subtropical, and have a potential economic importance as resources. Most of legumes are cosmopolitan and are growing under different environmental conditions by the advanced and traditional farming systems in the world. Soybean in United States occupies big share more than 60 % in world production, and this is attributed to the socio economic factors that soybean is the most suitable as a component in rotation system with maize, and also important as industrial materials. And, the reason of the same concentration of production of chickpea, pegionpea and lentil in India is high consumption of grain legumes as protein source instead of the animal foodstuffs, which are restricted to eat by religious laws and poverty. Parallel development of legumes accompanying with cereals, which is shown by the archaeo logical evidences of early agriculture in Old and New World, suggests us that the ancient peoples were the inventors of the principles of mixed-cropping of legumes and cereal crops, and also of mutual supplementation of limiting amino-acids between legumes and cereals, by simultaneous intake of them.The role of legumes to enrich the soil fertility had been well-known by the ancient farmers. In the present, the most attractive nature of legumes, the nitrogen fixation-ability by symbiosis in association with nodule bacteria, Rhizobium spp, should be evaluated again by its significance of the saving of consumption of fossil energy resources by the fertilizer manufacturing industries in the developed countries. Dry seeds of legumes have many merits as diets, i.e., containing of "condensed protein", which is rich about 3-4 times than the cereals, and as well as in oil content with excellent fatty-acids composition in some species, and suitability for long storage and transportation. But, at the same time, they have demerits, i.e; stone-like hardness, culinary problems and lesser digestability and palatability due to thick seed testa and properties of their protein, and containing of flatulence factors and various toxic or anti-nutritional substances. However, traditional and recent development of technology of processing and pre-treatment or cooking procedures had greatly improved the above-mentioned demerits and enlarged a potentiality of legumes as human food, and made them the important foodstuffs equal to cereals. Grain legumes are contributing to improving the protein mal-nutrition in developing countries, and are increasing the significance of their supplemental role in the global deficiency of animal protein foods. The author emphasized the needs of efforts to develop, not only annual species, but also tree species as new resources, i. e., tuberous root species storing fermentable carbohydrates, species to be grown as "shelter" to prevent the progress of desertification, "nitrogen-supplier tree" species, species as feeds for wild animals for meat production, and as firewoods, etc. Finally, the author introduced the work of collection, evaluation, registration, documentation, storage, and distribution of genetic resources of legumes by the international agricultural in stitutions, supported by IBPGR (International Board for the Plant Genetic Resources)/U. N.前田和美（高知大学農学部