A delegation of 15 Nepalese seed entrepreneurs learned about various business models and innovations for seed industry development on their first visit to India. The visit, sponsored by the Cereal Systems Initiative for South Asia in Nepal (CSISA-NP), lasted from 1 to 10 June.

According to Arun Joshi, Country Liasion Officer, CIMMYT-Nepal, Nepalese seed companies are in their initial growth phase and constrained by the lack of research and development, low business volume, limited seed processing and storage facilities, and low seed capital. To help them overcome these challenges, CSISA-NP recently initiated a business mentoring initiative to build the capacity of small and medium enterprises engaged in wheat and maize seed production.

A team of CSISA-NP experts assessed the potential and challenges of Nepalese seed companies and established a good relationship with them. “After the assessment, 15 Nepalese cereal seed production entrepreneurs from Nepal’s hills and Terai (plains) were identified for a ten-day visit to India,” reported Dilli K.C., Monitoring and Evaluation Specialist, CIMMYT-Nepal.

During the visit, the Nepalese delegation observed many Indian seed business components including research and development programs, seed processing facilities and government farms at four major seed enterprise centers: Delhi, Kashipur, Hyderabad and Elluru.

The entrepreneurs received first-hand information on ways to link contract farmers with private companies, how to set up linkages for hybrid seed production, and how to enhance maize seed germination through cob drying. “We have to establish demos of our products and maintain good relations with seed producers and consumers,” said entrepreneur Tikaram Rijal, Managing Director, Global Agri-Tech Nepal Limited, after the visit.

The participants also learned how smaller seed companies that work with open-pollinated varieties can maintain seed quality and market their brand. “For our growth and sustainability, R&D activities should be promoted even in open-pollinated seeds,” said one of the participants, Subhas Upadhaya, Chairperson, Lumbini Company.

India’s private sector shared the strategies they had adopted to manage challenges during their growth period and showed a willingness to help build the capacity of Nepalese seed enterprises through internships, short-term training and collaborative research.

During discussions with the National Seed Association of India (NSAI), the visitors learned about the role seed associations play in the growth of a country’s seed industry and in implementing seed policies. A memorandum of understanding was signed between NSAI and Seed Entrepreneurs Association of Nepal (SEAN) to foster better collaboration between seed companies from both countries.

“The visit and participants’ interaction with Indian seed companies helped them realize the importance of having a clear strategy both for SEAN and their individual businesses in order to be more successful,” added Joshi. CSISA-NP will continue to strengthen its collaboration with seed enterprises and guide them in developing their business plans, according to Andrew McDonald, Project Leader, CSISA-NP.

Guest blogger from HarvestPlus

Only 20 years ago, the idea that maize could reduce vitamin A deficiency (VAD) would have been summarily dismissed. Agricultural scientists were focused on increasing yields and developing more robust varieties that could withstand the constant assault of new pests and diseases. The idea of making maize and other staple food crops more nutritious by breeding in vitamins and minerals, a process called biofortification, was a novel concept. However, with the launch of HarvestPlus in 2003, a collaborative research partnership was launched to bring together scientists across disciplines in an effort to reduce hidden hunger caused by micronutrient deficiencies. One of the fruits of this partnership were the world’s first “orange” maize varieties rich in vitamin A. This ‘orange’ vitamin A maize has been conventionally bred to provide higher levels of provitamin A carotenoids, a naturally occurring plant pigment also found in many orange foods such as mangoes, carrots and pumpkins, that the body then converts into vitamin A.

I sat down with two of the scientists who have been integral to this global effort: CIMMYT’s Dr. Kevin Pixley, who led the first 10 years of HarvestPlus’ maize biofortification project while heading CIMMYT’s breeding program for vitamin A maize, and Dr. Fabiana Moura, a nutritionist with HarvestPlus who oversees all vitamin A-related research. The question on my mind was: what does it take for scientists to break out of their disciplinary strait jackets and to look at a food with a rich and storied history thorough a different lens?

Kevin, where did the idea of making maize more nutritious come from?

Nearly a billion people eat maize as a staple food, and many of them are poor and malnourished. Maize is a great source of energy, but its protein is deficient in essential amino acids and crucial minerals and vitamins. Of course, everyone should eat a balanced, healthy diet, but poverty gets in the way. Chronic malnutrition is unacceptably common among some populations that depend heavily on staples such as maize in their diets and can’t afford more nutritious foods. Improving the nutritional quality of maize is a way to improve the health and livelihoods of many maize consumers.

Fabiana, why vitamin A in particular?

Vitamin A is essential for good vision, growth, and a healthy immune system. But, 190 million children under 5 and 19 million pregnant women are vitamin A deficient. To combat this, the World Health Organization recommends vitamin A supplementation in infants and children aged 6 months to 5 years, and the capsules are distributed every 6 months. The fix, however, is temporary. The improved vitamin A status lasts less than 2 months before wearing off, failing to cover the 6-month period. It is also not a sustainable strategy, with high costs that can affect its coverage.

Under this scenario, providing vitamin A through a typical diet is a more sustainable way to address the VAD problem. In countries like Zambia where people eat a lot of maize, orange maize could provide half of the daily vitamin A requirement. Safety is another important aspect. The provitamin A in the maize is converted to vitamin A in the body as it is needed. Supplements and fortified foods provide preformed vitamin A that, if ingested in higher doses, could cause toxicity because they accumulate.

Lastly, the orange maize will be eaten by the entire family. Women of childbearing age will enter pregnancy with a better vitamin A status and maintain this level during pregnancy. Newborns will receive the vitamin A from orange maize through their mothers’ breast milk. Everyone wins.

And, Kevin, what was the biggest challenge in breeding orange maize?

The first challenge was finding maize with high levels of provitamin A carotenoids for use in breeding efforts. They are found in a lot of foods but we had not looked in maize before.
We then needed the expertise of biochemists and geneticists to develop essential laboratory methods to precisely and affordably identify the few plants with the highest amounts of these desired carotenoids from among many thousands of plants created each year in the breeding projects at CIMMYT, IITA and elsewhere. As in every applied breeding program, orange maize breeders need to continually monitor, improve and combine dozens of characteristics – high yield, disease resistance, good food processing ability, taste, etc., into new varieties that farmers and consumers will prefer over those that they currently grow and eat. As we speak, CIMMYT, IITA and other maize breeders are working intensely to maintain a full “breeding pipeline” to continually improve upon current successes. Soon, there will be new varieties with 50% more provitamin A than those first commercialized 2-3 years ago. And there are varieties in the pipeline with double the amounts of provitamin A that will improve the nutrition and lives of farmers and consumers in decades to come.

What was the biggest challenge in working with someone from outside of your discipline?

Fabiana: Learning an entirely new vocabulary of OPVs [that’s open pollinated varieties], hybrids, etc. It was like learning a foreign language!
Kevin: My own ignorance about the complexities and importance of diverse disciplines to the success of our team; I’d never worked with nutritionists in plant breeding before. It is great fun and a big challenge to learn about other disciplines, especially human nutrition, food technology and public health, but also biochemistry, economics and even politics. A big challenge for the whole team was learning to trust the other disciplines to do their part of the job, knowing that every chain is only as strong as its weakest link.

Have any assumptions or perspectives that you had about the other discipline changed as a result of working together?

Fabiana: I learned that agriculture also faces some challenges. When planting maize for a feeding trial study I remember asking Kevin if he could assure us that there would not be major issues to deal with. His reply was, “there could be a pest infestation that has not happened for the past 20 years–so we cannot predict what might happen. We have had cases with typhoons that wiped out an entire field.” That was when we decided to have 2 two fields in 2 different provinces planted with vitamin A maize to ensure we would have enough material for the study.

Kevin: I always thought that nutrition was an exact science; I was very wrong! Nutrition is very complex; everything depends on multiple factors. Even the effectiveness of vitamin A maize depends on health status, age, other diet components, and many other factors.

Kevin, what changed about your own work as a result of working with nutritionists?

I had to accept that the goalposts would move. Many scientific assumptions fell away and were replaced with new ones. It continues to be an eye-opening experience because important discoveries are being made every year. There are many important factors to consider, e.g. which provitamin A carotenoids are most helpful nutritionally, which conversion factors must be applied when “translating” how much provitamin A content in the maize grain is needed to be useful for the consumer, how much of the provitamin A in the grain will be lost (degraded) when the maize is cooked, and more! These factors determine the amount and forms of provitamin A that we have to breed into the maize in order to improve nutrition when people cook and eat the crop.

My experiences working with nutritionists have broadened my vision about the role of plant breeding in agriculture for nutrition, health and improved livelihoods.

Fabiana, what evidence do we have that this works?

We know that the provitamin A from maize is efficiently absorbed and converted into vitamin A in the body. One study conducted in a rural setting in Africa showed that the vitamin A body stores of 5-7 year-old children improved when they ate orange maize—similar to the effect of vitamin A supplements. We also have some preliminary data demonstrating that children who ate orange maize for 6 months experienced improved capacity of the eye to adjust to dim light. That indicates an improvement in night vision, a function dependent on adequate levels of vitamin A in the body. Another study is looking at the impact of orange maize on the vitamin A status of lactating mothers and their breastfed children. In particular, we will learn how much the vitamin A contribution to the breastfed child will come through the breast milk of mothers who are fed the orange maize and how much will come from the orange maize itself that is fed directly to the children (only those above 6 months of age will be fed orange maize). All the studies cited above are using innovative and cutting edge technology applied in rural settings in Africa. They have been conducted in over 50 feeding sites and greatly facilitated by local people like Mrs. Donata Kalunga (standing next to me in the picture), who offered her school for disabled children as a kitchen and site for training and clinical assessment for the study. I’m optimistic that in the next year or two when we get the full results of ongoing studies, we will find that they reinforce the positive outcomes we’ve found so far.

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References:

WHO. Global prevalence of vitamin A deficiency in populations at risk 1995-2005. WHO Global Database on vitamin A Deficiency 2009.

WHO. Guideline: Vitamin A supplementation in infants and children 6-59 months of age. Geneva, World Health Organization, 2011.

Gannon et al. 2014. Biofortified orange maize is as efficacious as a vitamin A supplement in Zambian children even in the presence of high liver reserves of vitamin A: A community-based, randomized-placebo-controlled trial.

Go back to A Grain a Day

The good news: by 2050, world population growth will likely fall to half or less the rate of 1.7% per year witnessed over the last half of the 20th century, offering a glimmer of hope for humanity to feed itself sustainably. More troubling though is that agricultural productivity growth is also slowing in many parts of the world, often because of declining investments in farm productivity-oriented research and political indifference. Which competing trend will win out in the end?

Attempting to answer this critical question and shed light on the causes, Philip G. Pardey, Professor of Science and Technology Policy, University of Minnesota, spoke to a global gathering of CIMMYT scientists in Mexico on 15 June. His presentation gave evidence and conclusions from recently published research¹ to develop and apply the new “International Agricultural Prospects” model that projects global agricultural consumption and production to 2050.

Looking at U.S. trends over the 20th Century, Pardey said that agricultural productivity grew quickly until 1990 but the pace of growth slowed afterwards by more than half. “Data from 1910 show a curvilinear trend featuring a productivity surge in the 1950s-70s,” he explained. “This U.S. surge might be illustrative of a more general one-time phenomenon in many agricultural economies around the world. This includes widespread uptake of agricultural chemicals, improved seeds, fertilizer and other modern inputs, and a massive movement of labor out of the sector.” The implication, he said, was a need to double down on sustainable agricultural productivity growth including giving increased attention to research that maintains past productivity gains.

Other conclusions from Pardey included:

• Think long-term: it takes decades to go from an idea to a commercialized farm technology.
• The basic political economy is driving investments away from farm productivity.
• Population and demographics are major determinants of the consumption of agricultural output.
• Additional demand for biofuels may not have as dramatic an effect on food futures as some speculate.
• Available agricultural land appears more than sufficient for the projected growth in food production.

Regarding consumption, the model factored in consumption of biofuels, human food and animal feed, while considering changes in population growth, per capita income, and demographics — most notably the aging of the planet’s population. “We expect worldwide average per capita incomes in 2050 to be at the levels of more prosperous countries in 2000, but with a big spread among regions of the world,” said Pardey. “There will be encouraging reductions in people below the poverty line, but major clusters of the poor will persist in South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa.” He also observed that increased life expectancies and numbers of the elderly in countries like China would reduce the demand for calories and change the structure of diets.

The driving factors used to forecast production included the pace of crop yield growth in different regions around the world, the location and availability of agricultural land, and its agro-ecological suitability for growing specific crops. “In the U.S., the ‘average’ maize plant has moved 279 kilometers north and 342 kilometers west since 1910,” he explained. “From 16 to 21 percent of the growth in U.S. maize output is attributable to this movement.”

^[1] See A Bounds Analysis of World Food Futures: Global Agriculture Through to 2050 and The International Agricultural Prospects Model: Assessing Consumption and Production Futures Through 2050 (version 2.1).

Across Ethiopia, farmers bring a different dimension to the age-old tradition of naming children in symbolic and meaningful ways, by assigning a human name to Quality Protein Maize (QPM) that reflects its importance. In some parts of Oromia region, QPM is known as Gabissa, meaning builder, because it is believed to build bodies and make people strong. In the Amhara region, it is known as ‘Almi Bekolo’ or ‘Gembi bekolo, both names meaning building the body.  QPM has gained its fame across Ethiopia, as an affordable and viable option to alleviate protein malnutrition and reduce animal feed costs thanks to the CIMMYT’s Nutritious Maize for Ethiopia (NuME) project and many national partners.

QPM looks and tastes the same as normal maize but contains up to twice as much of the essential amino acids, lysine and tryptophan. Eating QPM is beneficial for children who survive on a maize-dominated diet. According to a study in Food Policy children who consume QPM benefit from 12% increased weight and 9% increased height.

Commitment to the agriculture sector

Around 10% of the Ethiopian national budget has been allocated to agriculture, according to the Ministry of Agriculture. As a result, the agriculture sector, which accounts for roughly 43 per cent of overall GDP, has been registering steady progress over the past two decades, landing the country on a path to food security. A number of other measures have contributed to this success, such as the availability of fertilizer, improved seed and agricultural extension services, which have currently reached more than 8 million farmers.

A focus on nutrition security

The Ethiopian government is currently stepping up nutrition interventions targeting women and children, with aims for a 3% annual reduction in the number of stunted and underweight children, according to the Government’s five-year Growth and Transformation Plan. However, the fact that 2 out of every 5 children in Ethiopia are stunted and 28% of all child mortality in Ethiopia is associated with undernutrition or malnutrition, is a clear indication that a lot still needs to be done.

To tackle the challenge of malnutrition in Ethiopia, CIMMYT takes a holistic approach to QPM and conducts a range of activities including: improved crop management practices, post-harvest handling and processing, increasing the participation of women, nutrition campaigns, as well as strengthening institutional capacity. Since 2012, 143,747 farmers, extension workers and development officials (of which 28% are women) have attended 993 field demonstrations and 240 field days on QPM utilization.

Funded by the Canadian Department of Foreign Affairs, Trade and Development, CIMMYT is working with the Ethiopian Institute of Agricultural Research, the Ministry of Agriculture and other partners to improve food and nutritional security in Ethiopian farming communities through the promotion and expansion of QPM backed by improved agronomic practices that increase productivity. NuME is building on the success of previous CIMMYT projects to bring QPM to rural maize producers in the Ethiopian maize belt and beyond where consumers, especially young children and women, are at risk of lysine deficiency.