Maize is the main staple crop in a substantial part of Africa. More than a quarter of a billion Africans depend on it as their staple food, often eating a quarter kilogram or more of maize and maize products every day. It however is a crop that requires much in terms of soil nutrients and water.
Its demanding requirements increasingly clash against the African reality of overfarmed soils, costly synthetic fertilizers out of the reach of most farmers and erratic, unpredictable rain seasons. This has led to stagnant or declining yields at a time of increasing need. Some policy-makers and agriculturalists have urged a return to hardier, well-adapted traditional grains such as sorghum and millet as one part of the strategy to deal with this issue. But for now and the foreseeable future, maize has become the deeply entrenched and preferred source of dietary starch for many Africans.
Another suggested coping mechanism is to select and breed maize varieties better suited to the changing conditions. Early maturation and increased drought-tolerance are some of the qualities that may be more suitable for African farmers in many situations than outright yield potential.
The International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) and the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA) have teamed up to scale up the work on developing drought-tolerant maize hybrids better suited for evolving African conditions than those currently in use. The initiative is funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to the tune of 5.8 million U.S. dollars and will involve trials in eleven sub-Saharan countries.
"With every year of research that we do now and in the future, we can add to a drought-affected fields another 100 kgs of maize," said Marianne Banziger, director of the IITA said at a news conference in Nairobi. She said CIMMYT and IITA will combine their expertise in working with
maize farmers in varying agroecologies across the continent and will draw from the genetic resources (maize seeds) held in their two substantial germplasm banks to make this research program truly pan-African.
"The vision of the new work is to generate maize varieties which are much hardier when drought hits," said Wilfred Mwangi, CIMMYT's project leader. "Doubling the yield of adapted maize varieties under drought is the ambitious goal for the next 10 years and is possible because of the huge, natural, genetic variation in maize and new scientific methods that permit better use of this variation," he added.
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