Comparative life cycle assessment of the local agri‐food product Lagenaria siceraria and soybean seeds from Côte d'Ivoire

Abstract

Abstract Sub‐Saharan Africa's structural protein deficit is increasingly met through imported soy, and diversification towards local sources is advocated on nutritional and food‐security grounds. Whether such substitution delivers an environmental benefit is not self‐evident, since local production avoids intercontinental transport while forgoing the efficiencies of industrial processing and improved varieties. This study presents an environmental analysis for Lagenaria siceraria , an underutilized Ivorian cucurbit whose seeds are rich in oil and protein, through a cradle‐to‐gate Life Cycle Assessment of oil and protein extraction. The results are presented for 18 environmental impact categories, with Monte Carlo simulation used to propagate uncertainty. Contrary to the common pattern established for conventional oilseeds, where cultivation dominates, in the case of cucurbit (under an economic allocation assumption) the agricultural phase proved a minor contributor: fertilization at prevailing regional rates altered the results by less than 0.2% in 17 categories. Impacts were instead governed by downstream processing, principally electricity for protein drying and sodium chloride use. Cucurbit protein showed lower impacts than imported soy protein in 11 of 18 categories, though the two were indistinguishable for climate change, and the ranking reversed under a mass allocation assumption. Local protein production can therefore be environmentally advantageous, but the conclusion is conditional on modeling choices that must be reported explicitly.