April, 2009
Source:
CGIAR
newsletter, April 2009
Sub-Saharan Africa needs concerted efforts to improve the
production of maize, its most important cereal. Two Centers
supported by the CGIAR — the
International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT)
and the International Institute of
Tropical Agriculture (IITA) — have found a way to achieve
precisely that.
Their combined efforts are vital for improving and stabilizing
Africa’s maize production in an era of food price volatility and
emerging climate change. Drought, which is expected to become
more frequent and severe with climate change, already reduces
maize yields by an average of 15% annually, amounting to about
US$200 million worth of lost grain. Recent droughts in eastern
and southern Africa have been particularly disastrous.
Maize is a highly diverse crop, ensuring ample scope for
genetically enhancing its tolerance to drought through breeding
techniques designed specifically for this purpose. CIMMYT and
IITA work with national partners to adapt and apply such
techniques in Africa. As a result, more than 50 new
drought-tolerant varieties and hybrids have been developed and
released for dissemination by private seed companies, national
agencies and nongovernmental organizations. African farmers now
grow many of those varieties, which yield 20-50% more than
others under drought, on hundreds of thousands of hectares.
To build on this success, CIMMYT and IITA now focus their
collaborative efforts on the Drought-Tolerant Maize for Africa
(DTMA) Initiative. By significantly scaling up current efforts
through more intensive collaboration, the DTMA Initiative
expects to provide over the next decade 30-40 million farmers
with improved maize varieties that will help to boost maize
productivity on small farms by 20-30%. It is working in 13
African countries where maize is particularly important, with
support from Germany’s Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation
and Development (BMZ, its acronym in German), Howard G. Buffett
Foundation, Hermann Eiselen, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation,
International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD),
Rockefeller Foundation, Swiss Agency for Development and
Cooperation (SDC), and US Agency for International Development
(USAID).
“From a biological point of view, there is no limit to building
even stronger drought tolerance into maize varieties that are
well adapted to the conditions of Africa’s small farmers,” says
Marianne Bänziger, the director of CIMMYT’s Global Maize
Program. “Moreover, a much larger number of farmers could
benefit from the tolerant varieties already available if seed
and information were made available to them.”
For many years, CIMMYT and IITA tended to divide their
responsibilities for maize research in Africa geographically,
with CIMMYT working in eastern and southern Africa and IITA
focusing on West Africa, explains Paula Bramel, IITA’s deputy
director general in charge of research for development.
“The big advantage of the DTMA Initiative,” she says, “is that
bringing together the complementary strengths and research
products of the two Centers, in an effort that spans the
continent, enables national public and private partners to tap
into and benefit from a much broader base of improved germplasm,
knowledge and expertise.”
CIMMYT and IITA bring to the project considerable strengths
derived from decades of maize research in diverse agroecologies.
IITA has amassed a strong record of achievement in combating
biotic constraints. Starting in the 1970s, it successfully
thwarted outbreaks of the maize streak virus in the moist
savanna region of West Africa, an achievement for which it
received the King Baudouin Award in 1986. More recently, IITA
researchers have registered important gains against parasitic
weeds of the genus Striga, also called witchweed. The single
most important biotic constraint of cereal crops in Africa,
Striga causes especially severe damage to maize yields in the
savannas of coastal and central sub-Saharan Africa. Two newly
released varieties — Sammaz 15 and 16, developed in
collaboration with Nigeria’s Institute for Agricultural Research
(IAR) — show high yields, with only minor losses to the weeds,
even under extreme infestation.
CIMMYT has built up particular strength in coping with abiotic
constraints through 30 years of research on drought tolerance in
maize, work for which the Center received the King Baudouin
Award in 2006. CIMMYT safeguards the world’s largest collection
of maize genetic resources, in which both IITA and CIMMYT
scientists search for new sources of drought tolerance and other
valuable traits.
Through the DTMA Initiative, CIMMYT and IITA have created a
platform for working more efficiently on drought tolerance, as
well as for collaborative research on other problems in maize
production, such as Striga.
“How well we combine our strengths and play shared roles — in
capacity strengthening, for example — is ultimately a question
of our commitment to the partnership and to increasing
development impact,” says Bramel.
Other news from
CIMMYT
Other news
from IITA |
|