Improved wheat varieties developed using CGIAR breeding lines, either in cross-pollinations or as direct releases, cover more than 100 million hectares — nearly two-thirds of the area sown to improved wheat worldwide, new research (Lantican et al., in press) shows. Benefits in added grain from CGIAR wheat research range from $2.8 to 3.8 billion each year — a very high return for the work’s annual, public funding of only $30 million, according to the full-length study. Consistent and secure funding is crucial to maintain the research and institutional capacities required to deliver such impact, particularly given the mounting challenges facing wheat food security and farm livelihoods in developing countries.

According to the study, the impacts derive largely from research and development activities conducted by the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) and the International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA), both members of the CGIAR Consortium of agricultural research centers, with support from the CGIAR Research Program on Wheat (WHEAT) and partners worldwide including national research programs, advanced research institutes, and private companies.

Findings show that since 1994, farmers globally have enjoyed access to 4,604 improved wheat varieties and that there is continued and significant use in the developing world of CIMMYT and ICARDA wheat lines, which are bred and shared freely through international partnerships. CIMMYT-derived varieties alone cover as much as 80% of the wheat area in South Asian countries and, in sub-Saharan Africa, more than 90% of the area in Kenya and in Ethiopia.

More than a quarter of all wheat varieties and 40 percent of all spring wheat varieties released in this century contain CIMMYT germplasm.

In addition to profiting farmers in the developing world, where CIMMYT and ICARDA’s efforts are focused, the surplus grain produced also benefits wheat consumers — particularly the poor who spend a large portion of their income on food — according to evidence cited.

Specifically, the authors made reference to the study of Stevenson et al. (2013), published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, which showed that, in the absence of CGIAR wheat improvement, global wheat prices would have been 29-59% higher in 2004 than they actually were.

Evidence also shows that elite wheat lines from CIMMYT or ICARDA are immediately useful for most wheat improvement programs worldwide and that their use saves a decade or more of cross-breeding for those programs. Moreover, far from representing a bottleneck in diversity, breeding stocks from the two centers have significantly enhanced the genetic diversity of improved wheat, particularly for critical traits like yield potential, grain processing quality, disease resistance, and early maturity, according to research cited by the authors (Warburton et al. 2006; Huang et al. 2015, pp. 13-14).

Finally, in contrast to the commonly-held belief that modern varieties are less resilient than farmers’ traditional varieties, the authors cite the study by Gollin (2006) showing that the increased use of improved wheat varieties over the past 40 years has made grain yields more stable and actually reduced farmers’ risk.

In addition to leading the world’s largest publicly-funded wheat improvement networks, CIMMYT and ICARDA delivering impact through extensive partnerships and longstanding research on productive and sustainable cropping practices. Crucial to their success are initiatives that foster farmers’ access to quality seed of new varieties and capacity-strengthening activities that target individuals and partner institutions. Notably, the two centers maintain, study, and share seed collections of wheat genetic diversity comprising nearly 200,000 unique samples wheat landraces, improved varieties, and wild relatives.

The new study proves that international collaboration on wheat research continues to provide the impressive returns on investments, as occurred during the 1960s-70s. Wheat breeding impacts at that time helped to spark the Green Revolution from which the 15-member CGIAR arose and to keep food prices at historically low levels for decades (Evenson and Gollin in Science, 2003).

Wheat farming in an age of changing climate and shifting markets

Although the costs of basic food commodities have fallen recently, they are still well above the decades-long, stable levels that preceded the 2008 food crisis. Worse, despite low grain prices, global stocks have shrunk 30% from levels at the outset of the millennium (Brown, L.R. 2012. Full Planet, Empty Plates; The New Geopolitics of Food Scarcity.). Reverberations of relatively local disturbances, like droughts or crop disease outbreaks, now cause inordinate price spikes and worsen food insecurity for the world’s poorest.

Looking forward, by 2050 the current global population of 7.3 billion is projected to grow 33 percent to 9.7 billion, according to the United Nations. Demand for food, driven by population, demographic changes and increasing global wealth, will rise more than 60 percent, according to a recent report from the Taskforce on Extreme Weather and Global Food System Resilience. Wheat farmers must meet this rising demand from the same or less land area, while confronting more extreme and erratic rainfall and temperatures and using inputs like water and fertilizer much more effectively.

As the world’s policymakers begin to acknowledge the interconnected nature of food, energy, water, and peace, every effort made to improve global food security is an investment in the future of humanity. Food insecurity drastically affect all sectors of society; either through hunger, high food prices, or social conflicts that send massive waves of desperate refugees in flight.

Farmers have met repeated food security challenges since the Industrial Revolution, with the support of science and focused development efforts, but science and development require investment. Wheat breeding and crop management research have long horizons – typically, for example, it takes much more than a decade for a variety to go from initial crosses to farmers’ fields.

The requisite research and institutional capacities for this work also take years to develop, but can be lost very quickly in the absence of committed policy support and consistent and secure funding. Publicly-funded wheat research barely has the resources to maintain the essential breeding and capacity building activities that underpin the impacts documented in this new publication, which will be released in November 2015 and aims to set the record straight on the magnitude of CGIAR contributions to global food supplies.

As of 2015, CIMMYT and ICARDA have agreed to operate their wheat research as a single joint program. They are struggling to find support for work on new technologies, such as advanced phenotyping platforms for heat and drought tolerance, or advanced global consortia focusing on traits that dramatically raise the genetic yield potential of wheat. Those and other tools and initiatives will be crucial for public wheat breeding research to partner effectively with the private sector and keep step with societal demands for food security and nutrition.

Funded through the CGIAR Wheat Research Program, the study is based on a survey sent to 94 countries that produce at least 5,000 tons of wheat each year. Responses came from 66 wheat-growing countries — 44 of them developing countries that account for nearly all the developing world’s wheat output. Survey data were complemented with information from published wheat varietal guides, figures on wheat varietal area insured or grown, papers in scientific journals, technical bulletins, and on-line sources including the US Department of Agriculture National Agricultural Statistics Services (USDA-NASS), the Annual Wheat Newsletter, and wheat area, production and yield statistics from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO). The study updates results of Lantican et al. (2005).

Lantican, M.A., T.S. Payne, K. Sonder, R. Singh, M. van Ginkel, M.Baum, H.J. Braun, and O. Erenstein. In press. Impacts of International Wheat Improvement Research in the World, 1994-2014. Mexico, D.F.: CIMMYT.

The building of local capacities is one of the objectives MasAgro pursues to achieve the adoption of conservation agriculture in Mexico. As part of this vision, MasAgro helps develop local machine manufacturers with the capacity to supply and service the implements farmers across the country need to implement conservation agriculture systems.

Martín Sánchez Gómez welcomed us to Sembradoras TIMS, the shop where he manufactures farm machinery, located in San Joaquín Coapango, Texcoco, State of Mexico. When we arrived, Sánchez and his family were in the middle of checking the details in preparation for an event to show the implements they have developed for conservation agriculture systems. They set up tents, chairs and a demonstration plot. This is the first demonstration Sánchez and his family have organized to show the machines they manufacture, and they invited several partners, such as CIMMYT, to attend.

Sembradoras TIMS is a family business that used to be a car repair shop before transitioning into the manufacture of farm implements five years ago, when the family started working with CIMMYT and learned about farm machine prototypes.

It all began when CIMMYT staff in charge of El Batán Experiment Station asked them to replace a harvester’s four-cylinder engine with a six-cylinder one.

“I have always liked the idea of building things, but I didn’t know how these machines work,” says Sánchez. The first seeder they developed was the multiuse-multicrop seeder. During the process, “we would go to CIMMYT, make changes in the shop, test the machines, make new changes and then tried to find ways of improving them. If we were told ‘this doesn’t work,’ we would change it. Later, CIMMYT started to give technicians our contact information and we started to get calls from other states of Mexico,” says Sánchez. Due to these requests, they had more work at the shop, so Sánchez asked the whole family to join in. That’s when they decided to make a complete change and focus on manufacturing machinery.

After the “big” seeders, TIMS began manufacturing manual and animal-drawn machines.

“I can’t say we’ve done everything ourselves, because we learned a lot from CIMMYT staff like Gabriel Martínez, Jesús López, Javier Vargas, Jelle Van Loon, and Dr. Bram Govaerts, who never lost faith in us, and that counts for a lot.”

That’s how the Sánchez-Gómez family started a business where innovation and continuous improvements have allowed them to market different types of seeders. Just recently they started manufacturing hermetic metal silos for post-harvest management.

What does the CASFESA project have to show for two-and-a-half years in Kenya?

Many poor smallholder farmers in Africa bear the brunt of infertile soils. Research offers a partial solution: Conservation Agriculture (CA) helps farmers improve soil productivity through sustainable intensification.

Participants of the project closing workshop held on March 5, 2015.
And some smallholders in Africa are already reaping CA benefits. For example, the Conservation Agriculture and Smallholder Farmers in Eastern and Southern Africa (CASFESA) Project worked with farmers and other partners in Kenya and Ethiopia since 2012. CASFESA’s aim was to buffer small-scale farmers by enhancing farm resilience through better natural resource management in maize based systems.

In Kenya, CASFESA ran for two-and-a-half years in Embu County. At a summative closing workshop held at Embu on 5 March 2015, farmers shared their CASFESA experience. For some of them, the project transformed their farming with remarkable benefits, due to their commitment, as well as the commitment of other key actors in CA dissemination such as the Kenya Agricultural and Livestock Research Organization.

In Kenya, CASFESA promoted three main technologies targeting maize farmers. The technologies are maize and legume intercropping, residue retention and zero tillage with permanent furrows and ridges. Thirty farmers in 15 randomly selected villages volunteered their farms for demonstrations showcasing the three technologies in tandem. Practical demonstrations were done during farmer field days in the selected villages to compare the performance of maize and beans using conservation agriculture and using normal practice. Intercropping is not new and is already very common in the area.

Moti Jaleta, CASFESA Project Coordinator, observed, “From a quick adoption monitoring survey, we noticed about 60 percent of the sample farmers have tried at least some of these techniques with keen interest to continue. The success of the CASFESA Project in Embu has been in getting these technologies to the farmers through practical demonstration, and linking them with farm input suppliers. With this, I believe we have accomplished our task in supporting the smallholders to improve their crop management.”

Farmers evaluating maize stand on the conventional versus conservation agriculture plots during field days organized in Embu.

Indeed, a good number of farmers in the villages started using zero tillage with permanent furrows and ridges covered with maize residue. But there was a hitch: initially, adopting the full suite of sustainable-intensification practices appeared unpopular. And why was this? Not because of the practices themselves but because most farmers use maize residue for animal feed. This made residue retention for mulching and enhancing soil fertility a big challenge. So how did the farmers themselves – independent of the researchers – get around these unfavorable trade-offs? Let’s hear it from them.

One farmer, Nancy Mbeere, who adopted CA, harvested an additional eight bags of maize from her small farm. And she did not keep her new know-how to herself: “I have trained my three neighbors on this new technique and they have already started using furrows and ridges and residue retention in their maize shamba [farms].”

Nancy and her neighbors found a solution on animal fodder. “We agreed to have one in every three rows remain in the field as residue and use the other two as feed,” explained Nancy.

For Bethwel Kathiomi, another CA farmer, when his farm had two very good seasons, other farmers approached him for tips on his new-found farming technique. “People kept stopping by my farm to ask questions, and I was happy to share this information with them.”

At the closure workshop, farmers attending committed to continue sharing their experiences and successes, and to support each other through small groups to learn, and access inputs like fertilizers, herbicides and improved seeds. This community commitment should lead to greater CA adoption, given the attention CA benefits are drawing going by the experience of Bethwel and Nancy. It would therefore appear that in this particular case, CA has successfully moved from researchers to farmers, who are now the ones propagating CA practices. Good news indeed for impact, reach and sustainability!

CIMMYT-Southern Africa Regional Office (CIMMYT-SARO) is stepping up efforts to combat malnutrition, especially among women and children, through agricultural research and the release of orange maize varieties.

Orange maize is nutritionally enhanced and provides higher levels of vitamin A than white maize. In addition, orange maize varieties are high-yielding, disease resistant and drought tolerant, which helps farmers face challenges posed by recurrent droughts and climate change.

“Orange maize rich in beta-carotene could bring positive benefits to maize-dependent communities, particularly women and children, by providing up to half of their daily vitamin A needs,” said Thokozile Ndhlela, CIMMYT-SARO maize breeder, who is working on the orange maize breeding project. According to Ndhlela, the project is conventionally breeding non-genetically modified orange maize to endow it with higher levels of beta-carotene. Beta-carotene is a naturally occurring plant pigment that the body converts into vitamin A.

Vitamin A deficiency is a serious health threat that is prevalent in Southern Africa (SA) and may lead to blindness, reduced disease immunity and other health problems. In Zambia, for example, it affects more than half of children under five years of age, according to a Feed the Future newsletter. Feed the Future is the US Government’s global hunger and food security initiative.

In neighboring Zimbabwe, one in every three children suffers from stunted growth (as much as 32%) or chronic malnutrition, which contributes to 12,000 deaths each year, according to the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF). Malnutrition is most prevalent in Zimbabwe’s rural areas, which are home to over 75% of the country’s entire population (about 13 million).

While vitamin A is available from other food sources such as oranges, dark leafy vegetables and meat, these are not always available or are too expensive for the ordinary person in SA. As a result, most people eat a lot of white maize, which has no beta-carotene.

Orange maize can be eaten as a porridge-like staple food called nshima in Zambia and sadza in Zimbabwe. It can also be used to prepare other traditional foods made from maize.

CIMMYT is working with HarvestPlus, a CGIAR organization that breeds and disseminates micronutrient-rich staple food crops to reduce hidden hunger in malnourished populations. The orange maize project was initiated in Harare, Zimbabwe, in 2004, but later moved to Mexico. Since the subtropical environments in Mexico are similar to those in SA, the germplasm developed in Mexico has adapted well to SA environments.

Three hybrids (GV662A, GV664A, and GV665A) were extensively tested in Zambia and released by the Zambia Agricultural Research Institute in partnership with HarvestPlus. These hybrids have a yield potential of 9-11 tons per hectare. Hybrid GV665A will be released in Zimbabwe in October of this year. Three seed companies are marketing the released hybrids on an exclusive basis in Zambia and four other pre-release hybrids are being tested in national performance trials.

Since 2012, HarvestPlus has provided orange maize to more than 10,000 farming households in Zambia. It is working with the private sector to reach 100,000 farmers by the end of this year.

Zimbabwe’s Crop Breeding Institute has expressed an interest in sending two of these hybrids to the Seed Certifying Authority of Zimbabwe for quality testing during the 2015/2016 agricultural season. Malawi, another SA country, has also identified hybrids for release in 2016.

CIMMYT-China, the Gansu Foreign Expert Bureau and Gansu Agricultural University (GAU) in Lanzhou City sponsored an international farming systems research workshop from 30 June–4 July 2015. Jack McHugh, CIMMYT-China Systems Agronomist, and Li Lingling, Vice Dean of the Agronomy Department at GAU, were the lead organizers of the event.

To strengthen functional linkages between private seed companies and public sector institutions in Pakistan, CIMMYT and its national partners jointly organized four training sessions, one each in Punjab and Sindh and two in Khyber Pakhtunkhaw during March and April, 2015. Participants included 45 staff members from 10 private seed companies from those provinces.

Although private seed companies have a major share of Pakistan’s wheat seed market, they rely almost completely on public sector wheat breeding institutes for pre-basic and basic seeds. However, the public sector has limited capacity for producing adequate amounts of pre-basic and basic seed to support the deployment of new wheat varieties. In addition, a recent study on the private wheat seed sector in Pakistan suggests that around two-thirds of seed companies do not obtain the amounts of pre-basic/basic seed they require from public seed corporations.

Currently, only a few private seed companies obtain pre-basic or basic seeds from wheat research institutes based on personal relationships, but functional and institutional linkages between public and private sector organizations have yet to be established. CIMMYT identified this gap and is now working towards bridging it by engaging important actors from both sectors. The first step was to convince the public sector to provide pre-basic and basic seeds to private seed companies, particularly small companies in rural areas. Several of the public sector wheat breeding institutes responded positively to this call. Another important step is to develop the capacity of private seed companies to produce quality basic and certified seed by building trust between them and public sector institutions.

The training sessions had an innovative curriculum focusing on the technical aspects of producing high quality basic seed and enhancing marketing skills and networking to develop profitable, sustainable seed companies able to produce seed of new varieties. Experts from public sector research institutions addressed subjects such as rouging, isolation distances, crop and varietal mixtures, weed management, post-harvest technologies, quality control procedures, and conservation agriculture. They also showed how contract growers and seed companies can reduce their production costs and improve their profit margins.

Representatives of the Federal Seed Certification and Registration Department (FSC&RD) highlighted protocols for pre-basic/basic and certified seed production and multiplication. The training sessions enhanced participants’ understanding of various aspects of the seed business, such as business plan development, market assessment, product pricing and using proper marketing channels.

The expectation is that 14 private seed companies will produce around 1,000 tons of basic seed of 12 wheat varieties, enough to plant more than 8,000 ha of seed plots. This would enable the production of more than 24,000 tons of certified seed for the rural areas of the three provinces, thus paving the way for decentralized production and marketing of basic wheat seed in Pakistan.

A new project in Ethiopia aims to improve the livelihoods of wheat farmers by encouraging the development and multiplication of high-yielding, rust-resistant bread and durum wheat varieties.

High-quality seed is the key entry point for elevating farmer productivity in Ethiopia. As Norman Borlaug, the late Nobel Peace Prize laureate and wheat breeder who worked for many years with the International Center for Maize and Wheat Improvement (CIMMYT) wrote: “Rust never sleeps.”

Stem, leaf and yellow rusts choke nutrients and devastate wheat crops without recognition of political boundaries, making it essential that global action is taken to control all virulent strains of these devastating diseases to ensure food security.

At a recent workshop hosted by the Ethiopian Institute of Agricultural Research (EIAR) in the capital, Addis Ababa, 150 participants from 24 organizations discussed the project, which builds upon the successes of a previous EIAR and International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA) program funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).

The purpose of the March workshop titled “Seed Multiplication and Delivery of High-Yielding Rust-Resistant Bread and Durum Wheat Varieties to Ethiopian Farmers” was to launch the three-year seed project, which has a budget of $4.75 million, and strengthen the involvement of stakeholders and key partners.

Aims include enhancing rust disease surveillance, early warning and phenotyping; fast-track variety testing and pre-release seed multiplication; accelerating seed multiplication of durable rust-resistant wheat varieties; demonstrating and scaling up improved wheat varieties; and improving the linkages between small-scale durum wheat producers and agro-industries.

To achieve these goals EIAR, CIMMYT and the University of Minnesota will implement project activities in collaboration with other key Ethiopian stakeholders, including agricultural research centers, public and private seed enterprises, the Ethiopian Agricultural Transformation Agency, the Ethio-Italian Development Cooperation “Agricultural Value Chains Project in Oromia” and the Ethiopia Seed Producers Association.

The project covers 51 districts in four major wheat-growing regions of Ethiopia. Milestones include the following: reaching 164,000 households with direct access to the new technology and having more than 2 million households benefiting from indirect access to high-yielding rust resistant cultivars; wheat yield increases of 25 percent for farmers with access to rust-resistant seed varieties; training for about 5,000 agricultural experts, development agents, seed producers and model farmers; more than 50 percent of the wheat area being sown to cultivars with durable resistance to current rust threats; an increased number of seed growers and associations participating in accelerated seed multiplication; and the increased participation of women farmers to lead accelerated seed multiplication and scaling up.

All partners will be involved in close monitoring and working groups related to the project.

At the workshop, a key topic was emphasizing to farmers that they must avoid susceptible rust suckers as they are pumping more spores on cultivars under production, which is one reason for the recurrent epidemics of wheat rusts and break down of resistant genes.

Delegates also engaged in discussions on the importance of cropping systems and variety diversifications. Fruitful deliberations and interactions occurred and important feedback was captured for project implementation and to ensure successful results.

A previous workshop on the surveillance, early warning and phenotyping component of the project was held at the Cereal Disease Laboratory in Minnesota.

Bekele Abeyo is a CIMMYT senior scientist based in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. He will lead the seed improvement project.

Maize, one of Africa’s most important food crops, is under real threat because of maize lethal necrosis (MLN). The disease has adversely affected maize fields in Kenya and its neighbors (DR Congo, Ethiopia, Tanzania, Uganda, Rwanda and South Sudan). There are fears that it is spreading rapidly across most maize-growing areas in the region, causing massive losses to both farmers and seed companies. Unless urgent measures are taken, it could get out of control and lead to a major food crisis in the region.

But what are the implications for farmers and seed companies currently bearing the brunt of MLN? This is a question that scientists, policy makers, regulators and seed companies tried to answer during the recently concluded International Conference on MLN Diagnostics and Management in Africa, held in Nairobi on 12-14 May 2015.

As you will see in this video, despite the grim realities of MLN, the ringing message to farmers from B.M. Prasanna, Global Maize Program Director, is “Hope, hope, hope!”

This message of optimism that a solution will be found was mirrored by others. “We will be successful; we should not feel defeated,” said Joe DeVries, Director of the Program for Africa Seed Systems in Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA).

Other key speakers at the conference included Stephen Mugo, CIMMYT’s Regional Representative for Africa, Gary Atlin, Senior Program Officer at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, George Bigirwa, AGRA’s Head of the Regional Team for East and Southern Africa, and Felister Makini, Deputy Director of Kenya Agricultural and Livestock Research in charge of cropping systems.

View the full video of key speakers above or here.

Peter Masaku walks through his farm with a far-away nostalgic look as if reminiscing about some distant good old days. His maize fields are strewn with rich residue, which to the eye indicates a possible bountiful harvest. That is until Peter, a father of six, tells of a huge loss in yields he and many other farmers in a village called Kambi Mawe, a Kiswahili name, which loosely translates into ‘Rocky Camp’, in sun-scorched eastern Kenya’s Makueni County have suffered in the just-ended long rains. “I harvested maize just enough to fill one wheel-barrow from my one-acre farm,” Peter laments, as he leads the way to show his meagre yield drying outside his store. “This maize cannot even feed my family for a month,” he adds.

A few meters away, another farmer, Jane Ndawa, observes that Kambi Mawe has not received a good harvest for two consecutive years due to very low and poorly distributed rains. However, she is yet to meet a single household in her village that does not eat maize in one form or another. “And when things are bad like this season, we have to buy maize and maize flour for our daily food,” asserts Jane. Farmers normally take some of their maize to the local mill to be processed into flour for home use. Jane adds, “Any help farmers can get to harvest more maize is most welcome, since we will keep planting it regardless of the yield because we need maize.”

Disturbingly, the trouble faced by these two farmers is all too common in most drought-prone areas in Kenya. However, the bigger problem is that farmers are not benefiting from improved drought-tolerant (DT) maize varieties that have been developed – and are in the market – for such ecological areas to help them get better yields in a bid to beat drought.

Through the Drought Tolerant Maize for Africa (DTMA) Project, the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT, by its Spanish acronym) and its partners have released 14 high-yielding drought-tolerant maize varieties in Kenya alone. These include hybrids that yield on average 49 percent more grain than open pollinated varieties on-farm, and 15 percent more than current commercial hybrids. However, these varieties are not reaching farmers in need. “It is not enough to just develop improved varieties, we have to go beyond this and work to promote and distribute widely the released varieties to ensure farmers know, access and cultivate the seeds,” says Tsedeke Abate, DTMA Project Leader.

Ngila Kimotho is the Managing Director of Dryland Seed Limited, – a major supplier of DT seeds in the eastern region. Mr Kimotho agrees that farmers are yet to fully adopt the available varieties stocked by the company. “It takes time to wean farmers off the local seeds they are used to, despite poor yields. Though some farmers are aware of the existence of the improved DT varieties, they are yet to start planting them, and one reason they give for this is that the improved seeds are too expensive,” observes Mr Kimotho.

CIMMYT’s new project, Drought Tolerant Maize for Africa Seed Scaling (DTMASS), is working with seed companies in seven target countries across eastern and southern Africa to increase awareness on DT maize varieties, and thereby increase both seed supply and demand by reaching as many farmers as possible. “CIMMYT has developed and tested excellent DT varieties over the last decade, but the seed alone is not enough. Our goal now is to get production up and running through local seed companies, raise awareness among farmers and help them find and afford these new seeds,” says Kate Fehlenberg, DTMASS Project Manager.

BMI Research, a UK-based agency that provides global markets analyses, estimates that Kenya’s maize production in 2014–2015 will be 2.9 million metric tonnes, while consumption is expected to be 3.8 million tonnes. Consequently, the expected demand for imports is 900,000 tonnes. These grim statistics will most likely remain static in the coming years if concerted efforts are not made to sensitize farmers and increase adoption of the DT maize varieties in drought-prone regions.

Such efforts will change the lot and lives of farmers such as Jane and Peter, who represent a large proportion of farmers in Kenya’s drylands, which are a large swathe of the country’s farmlands.