CIMMYT E-News, vol 3 no. 10, October 2006

Improved maize makes a big difference in the lives of smallholder farmers on the slopes of Mt Kenya.

It’s 4:00 am and still pitch-black on the farm of Consolata Nyaga, but she is already busy at work. With nothing but the dim light of an oil lamp to guide her she carefully milks her two cows to be ready for the buyer who passes her house just before 5:00 every morning. She will get about a dollar for the three liters of milk, a profitable start to what will be a very long working day.

The milk cows are a very small part of her “garden”; a hectare and a quarter of land. She also grows some coffee, bananas, and beans. But what makes her farm work is the half hectare of improved maize she grows every season.

Consolata is a widow living alone, but her maize, a variety released by Kenya based on material from CIMMYT and the Kenya Agricultural Research Institute (KARI), feeds her and gives her the cash to put her 10 children through school. “This season I had thirteen bags” she proclaims. “Because it is my cash crop, I must sell and send the children to school.”

Neighbors are curious and come to field days on her farm to learn about the maize, which is not only a higher yielding variety but is also quality protein maize (QPM), meaning it has enhanced levels of the essential nutrient amino acids, lysine and tryptophan.

This is a part of Kenya where maize is not only a staple; it is the food people want to eat. Farmers store it inside their homes rather than in outside bins to prevent theft. “Actually any family that has no maize, has no food,” says Father Vincent Ireri, the Development Coordinator of the Diocese of Embu. “And anytime, even when we say as a country we have no food or there is famine, the implication is that there is no maize.” Ireri leads a team that works in conjunction with Catholic Relief Services, with farmers in the district to demonstrate the advantages of the new maize varieties.

CIMMYT and KARI have been working in this area to help farmers with maize varieties that are more drought-tolerant and insect resistant and under proper management give higher yields. Much of the work in this area has been funded by the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA). Consolata and the community group of which she is the treasurer have been quick to adopt the improved materials. Life seems to revolve around maize on Consolata’s small farm. In fact when she comes back from selling the milk each morning she immediately settles down to a hot mug of uji—a maize meal porridge. At midday she starts to prepare for the evening meal. She puts a mixture of maize and beans, called githeri, to boil on the cooking fire and then heads to her last unprepared field with a large hoe. No animal-drawn plow, just the power of one energetic maize farmer.

“Ah no! Let me tell you, if you eat potatoes and cabbages and eat rice, you cannot have energy to dig,” she says. “Yes, maize has got very big energy. You see somebody like myself after 56 years cannot dig unless you eat something good!”

Four hours later, and after a trip to the market to sell a bag of maize, dinner is ready. Neighbors, friends, and relatives have stopped by to enjoy the feast as the sun sets.

“Whenever, if I miss maize, I feel as if I am losing somehow,” Consolata says. “Maize is good. Maize is my favorite thing. And I like it. Yes.”

You can read more about the adoption of quality protein maize in the Embu district in the August E-news article The maize with the beans inside: QPM gathers a following in Kenya.

For more information contact Dennis Friesen (d.friesen@cgiar.org)

May, 2005

CIMMYT-Peru maize, Marginal 28, outstrips expectations for farmers in Peru

On a hillside that abuts more than 3,000 kilometers of Amazonian expanse beginning in Peru and reaching clear across Brazil to the Atlantic, farmer Virgilio Medina Bautista weeds his maize field under the stifling equatorial sun. He and his wife Sabina Bardales typically arise before dawn to cook a meal for their field workers, and will work all day until bedtime, around 9 p.m. “We come to the field with the food for brunch and ready to work,” Medina says. “It’s a hard life, but there’s no other way, for someone without an education.”

Like 90% of the farmers in this region of Peru—the lowland zones east of the Andes known as the “jungle”—as well as many on the coastal plains or in inter-Andean valleys, Medina sows Marginal 28. This open-pollinated maize variety, developed in the 1980s by Peru and CIMMYT, is popular for its high yields and broad adaptation. It provides two or three times the average yield of the local variety it replaced, and grows well in diverse environments. “Private companies have been trying to introduce maize hybrids here, but they yield only six tons per hectare,” says Edison Hidalgo, maize researcher from the National Institute of Agricultural Research (INIA) “El Porvenir” experiment station, whose staff help spread productive farming practices throughout the region. “Marginal 28 gives that or more, under similar management, and because it’s an open-pollinated variety, farmers don’t have to purchase new seed every season.”

Luis Narro, CIMMYT maize researcher in South America and a native of Peru who helped develop Marginal 28, says the cultivar’s adaptation and uses have far outstripped expectations. “This variety is sown most widely in jungle zones—truly marginal, lowland areas characterized by poor soils, heavy weeds, and frequent drought, to name a few constraints,” Narro says. “But I was just at a station in Ayacucho, at over 2,700 meters in the Andes, and saw seed production fields of Marginal 28 where the yields were probably going to hit seven tons per hectare.” Farmers in jungle areas use it chiefly in animal feeds or for export to the coast. Coastal farmers grow Marginal 28 because the seed is relatively cheap and yields high-quality forage for their dairy cattle. In the Andes, the grain goes for food and snacks.

Its adaptability may be explained in part by its genetically diverse pedigree, which even includes as a parent an internationally recognized variety from Thailand. “This suggests part of the value of a global organization like CIMMYT, which can combine contributions from around the world to develop a useful product for small-scale farmers,” Narro says.

Can Poor Farmers Stop Chopping Down Jungles?

Despite the clear benefits of Marginal 28, Peruvian farmers are still struggling as markets shift, production costs rise, and maize prices remain low. Farmer Jorge Dávila Dávila, of Fundo San Carlos, in Picota Province, in the Amazon region of Peru, grows maize, cotton, banana, and beans on his 10-hectare homestead. Because he is relatively far from the trans-Andean highways leading to the coast, where maize is in heavy demand for use in poultry feed, middlemen pay him only US $70 per ton of maize grain—well below world market prices. “Maize is a losing proposition; that’s why so many farmers here are in debt,” he says. “They can’t take their maize to local companies for a better price, because they already owe it to the middlemen who provide inputs.”

Unlike most peers, Dávila makes ends meet through hard work and what he calls “an orderly approach” to farming. Many in the region slash and burn new brushland, cropping it for two or three seasons till fertility falls off, and then they move to new land. Dávila has stayed put for eight years on the same fields. “I tell my neighbors not to cut down their jungle,” he says. “I’ve seen that leaving it brings me rain.” With support from INIA researchers like Hidalgo, Dávila is testing conservation agriculture practices. For example, on one plot he plans to keep maize residues on the soil surface and seed the next crop directly into the soil without plowing. Research by CIMMYT and others has shown that this practice can cut production costs, trap and conserve moisture, and improve soil quality.

For further information, contact Luis Narro (l.narro@cgiar.org)

CIMMYT E-News, vol 2 no. 10, October 2005

A new genomic map that applies to a wide range of maize breeding populations should help scientists develop more drought tolerant maize.

Throughout the developing world, drought is second only to soil infertility as a constraint to maize production, and probably reduces yields worldwide by more than 15 percent (more than 20 million tons) annually. Lines have now been drawn on a new battleground: a map of the chromosomes that shows important areas that help maize resist drought.

Of the world’s three most important cereal crops (rice, wheat, and maize), maize has the most complex genetic structure. As maize has been bred and adapted to many different growing environments, selection has produced a crop that contains significant differences in levels of genetic diversity. But many genes and genetic sequences should be the same or similar. Scientists are hopeful that genetic traits for drought tolerance can be found in such shared genomic sections, across a wide range of tropical maize types. A new consensus map of genes across maize populations may be the key to identifying universal genetic “hot spots,” those genomic regions that confer drought tolerance in diverse settings to varying degrees.

“Are there any regions in the maize genome that come out as ‘hot spots’?” Jean-Marcel Ribaut and his team have asked. Known to scientists as quantitative trait loci (QTL), these regions tell scientists approximately where the genes determining a particular plant trait are located. The QTL is not a gene itself but a genomic region in which genes of interest are probably located. Prior genomic maps of QTLs for drought tolerance in tropical maize applied only to specific maize lines or populations. The CIMMYT team and partners have developed a single map that combines available drought QTL data from many trials of different tropical maize types in diverse environments. “Having all the QTL information integrated into a single map should allow us to identify the outstanding genomic regions involved in drought tolerance,” Ribaut says.

Scientists have measured drought related traits such as ear number, chlorophyll, and carbohydrate content of maize plants in the field, and have extracted and analyzed DNA from the same plants in order to plot the traits on the genomic maps. Ribaut, now Director of the Generation Challenge Programme, and CIMMYT molecular geneticist Mark Sawkins hope to link the traits they measured in the field with regions in the maize DNA.

“The idea is ambitious,” says Ribaut, “for it should allow maize breeders to select the right parents for drought tolerant maize by ensuring they have these important regions on their genome.”

With funding from the Rockefeller Foundation, members of the project team will give courses on this approach in to NARS scientists in Kenya and China over the coming months.

For further information, contact Jean-Marcel Ribaut (j.ribaut@cgiar.org) or Mark Sawkins (m.sawkins@cgiar.org).

May, 2004

Drought, arguably the greatest threat to food production worldwide, was the focal point of a high-level, weeklong workshop supported by the Rockefeller Foundation and CIMMYT, commencing May 24, in Cuernavaca, Mexico.

Approximately 140 scientists from Asia, Africa, and Latin America–working on various aspects of drought tolerance in plants–met to present their research results and discuss ways forward with their colleagues. The meeting, entitled the “Resilient Crops for Water-Limited Environments workshop,” looked mainly at maize, rice, and wheat, which account for more than half of the calories consumed by people in the developing world, and are the basis for their food security and livelihoods. Scientists comprehensively addressed drought, looking at drought tolerance from the ground-level perspective of incorporating farmer participation into varietal development, to the heights of molecular genetics, and how plant genes interact and respond to water stress.

The workshop was opened by Dr. Gordon Conway, President, The Rockefeller Foundation, and Dr. Masa Iwanaga, Director General of CIMMYT.

Dr. Conway, in his address, declared a “war on drought.” He explained that 70% of the one billion African and Asians in extreme poverty (less than $1/day) live in rural areas, and that agriculture is their primary route to improved nutrition and income. For developing world farmers, drought wreaks havoc, forcing them to sell off their meager assets, such as livestock or their own off-farm labor, and forego health care and their children’s education. Often the results are far more dire: hunger, malnutrition, and even starvation. In the 1960s and 70s, the Green Revolution saved hundreds of millions from famine, said Conway, but many living in less favored environments were bypassed as much of the success was based on adequate water and soil fertility. What is needed now is a Doubly Green Revolution to lift up the African and Asian smallholders left behind. Drought tolerant crops are key to this cause .

Dr. Iwanaga recounted the long and close relationship between CIMMYT and The Rockefeller Foundation, dating back to the pre-CIMMYT era and the Foundation’s support for Norman Borlaug’s work on semi-dwarf cereals, leading to the Green Revolution. That success led to the birth of CIMMYT and the CGIAR, with considerable backing again provided by the Foundation.

Even today, Dr. Iwanaga pointed out, the Foundation remains one of CIMMYT’s most important supporters, both financially, but more importantly, in the confluence of the Foundation’s goals and CIMMYT’s research activities. Both institutions see drought tolerant crops, soil fertility, and the development of seed markets and distribution systems as essential pillars for improving productivity for smallholder farmers, thereby providing a path out of poverty to better livelihoods for the developing world’s rural poor.

Extended abstracts from the workshop are forthcoming and will be made available to the public before year’s end.

 Preston Auditorium, Wednesday, July 6, 2011, 9:15 a.m.
DRAFT AGENDA

Participants:

The Preston Auditorium is expected to be filled.  The audience will include CGIAR Consortium and Fund Council representatives, Directors General of Centers, agricultural research partners, IFPRI Center staff, past CGIAR chairs, World Bank staff, and other external guests.  In addition, the event will be webcast for the benefit of staff at all CGIAR Centers and other partners.

Mr. Zoellick, Ms. Andersen, Mr. Shah, and Mr. Castañeda, will be on stage in the Preston Auditorium, with the podium stage right. A backdrop will feature an image of the 40th anniversary of CGIAR.

Overall Objectives:

• To celebrate CGIAR’s tremendous achievements in agricultural research over the past 40 years
• To showcase, through the launch of a CGIAR Research Program (CRP), how the CGIAR has repositioned itself to continue to address emerging challenges for the next 40 years
• To reiterate the World Bank’s and other donors’/partners’ support to the CGIAR in its drive to enhance food security

East Africa is struggling with the worst drought in more than half a century. In Kenya, a lack of supply has pushed food prices to dangerously high levels.

In June 2010, a 90-kilogram bag of maize – the primary food for most Kenyans – cost $16. By July 2011 the same bag was $44 – a 160% increase.

Half of the people in the region live on less than $2 a day and spend about half their income on food. The rising price of staple foods has tragic consequences for the poor who must simply make do with less, or do without.

There is hope for East Africans, even in the midst of drought. CIMMYT (The International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center) has developed varieties of maize seed bred specifically for dry conditions.

Meet Philip Ngolania, an ex-schoolteacher and current maize farmer who planted the new seeds this February.

Other resources on drought tolerant maize:

• New maize varieties keeping Kenyan inmates fed
• Roger Thurow – Outrage and Inspire – “Countering Drought”
• Fighting drought in Kenya

CIMMYT E-News, vol 5 no. 9, September 2008

Looks can deceive. Striga, a deadly parasitic plant, produces a lovely flower but sucks the life and yields out of crops across Africa and Asia. A new strain of improved maize seed is helping farmers reclaim their invaded crop lands.

Striga, which typically attacks cereal crops, launches its takeover from the ground up: its deadly seedlings attach to sprouting maize plants and begin siphoning off water and nutrients before either plant emerges from the soil. The parasite also poisons its host, further stifling crop development.

Worse, Striga seems to seek out the farmers least suited to control it.

“Striga thrives in low-fertility soils, which are typically owned by the poorest farmers,” says Fred Kanampiu, CIMMYT maize agronomist. National experts estimate 14% of the maize area in sub-Saharan Africa is infested with Striga, amounting to 3.64 million hectares.

Big benefits seen for Kenya

Work by a multilateral partnership has resulted in a promising Striga control measure that has recently started moving from the laboratory to farmers’ fields. The practice is based on a type of maize with a natural mutation that allows it to resist the chemical imidazolinone—active ingredient in many herbicides. Seeds of this imidazolinone-resistant (IR) maize are coated with a herbicide and, when sown, the coated seed kills sprouting Striga, allowing the crop to flourish.

“Economic studies estimate that if a third of the Striga-infested area were planted with herbicide-coated seed, benefits to farmers in Kenya would be between USD 51 million and 102 million, after production costs,” says Kanampiu, who coordinates the Striga Management Project. “This would be topped off by a yield effect of similar magnitude, because the herbicide resistance comes in seed of improved, locally-adapted varieties.”

A complex, multilateral effort

The idea of using herbicide-resistant maize to control Striga was first proposed by the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel in the 1990s. CIMMYT worked with that organization, as well as the Kenyan Agricultural Research Institute (KARI), BASF, the African Agricultural Technology Foundation (AATF), non-governmental organizations, and seed companies including Pioneer to develop, evaluate, and spread the practice, particularly among small-scale farmers for whom other control methods, such as spraying, are expensive or impractical. A key part of the work involved developing high-yielding, locally-adapted maize varieties that were also herbicide tolerant. The coating method was fine-tuned by Weizmann and the company Hi-Cap Formulations.

Support for more recent tests and promotion came from the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ), the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), and the Rockefeller Foundation. By 2006 CIMMYT and KARI scientists had provided almost 300 herbicide-tolerant maize varieties for regional testing. Studies in randomly-selected farmers’ fields showed that with 30 grams (a little more than 1 ounce) of imazapyr herbicide per hectare as a seed coat in heavily infested fields, Striga was reduced by 81% and farmers enjoyed a 63% net return.

Striga meets its match

“The IR-maize reduces the Striga seed bank in the soil, lessening the need for future Striga control measures,” says Gospel Omanya, a Stewardship Manager from AATF, which is leading region-wide public awareness campaigns, field testing, and risk assessment. In addition, smallholder farmers who have tested the new maize and seed-coating practice on their land have obtained as much as a five-fold increase in grain yield.

Positive results like these led to the release of five IR varieties to farmers in Kenya, and nine other varieties are in performance evaluations for eventual release in Tanzania and Uganda.

More than 50,000 packages of IR-maize seed were distributed to farmers at 140 locations in Kenya for comparison with other Striga control practices. AATF surveyed more than 5,000 farmers and found they overwhelming favored the IR-maize seed. At least 10 seed companies, including Western Seed Company in Kenya and Tanseed International in Tanzania, are using IR maize and 60 tons of certified seed were marketed during 2007-2008.

“It was years of intense research and collaboration between partners dedicated to a unified objective, in addition to a willingness to invest human and financial resources, that allowed this concept to become a reality,” says Kanampiu. “The practice offers real, life-changing benefits for subsistence farmers like many in western Kenya, who tend 1.5 hectare plots of mostly maize just to feed their families. Their crops are normally so decimated by Striga that they harvest barely enough.”

Meanwhile, CIMMYT is working with the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA), a leader in the effort to identify and breed maize strains that contain genetic resistance to Striga. The aim is to offer farmers yet another way of controlling this lovely but lethal pest.

For more information, contact Fred Kanampiu (f.kanampiu@cgiar.org).

CIMMYT E-News, vol 4 no. 12, December 2007

Three high-quality wheat varieties developed by researchers from the Shandong Academy of Agricultural Science and the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Science (CAAS), drawing on CIMMYT wheat lines and technical support, were sown on more than 8 million hectares during 2002-2006, according to a recent CAAS economic study. They contributed an additional 2.4 million tons of grain—worth USD 513 million, with quality premiums.

“Improving processing quality has become an extremely important objective for sustainable development of the wheat industry in China,” says Zhonghu He, CIMMYT wheat expert in the country and researcher at the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Science (CAAS). He was part of a joint research team from CAAS and Shandong Academy of Agricultural Science (Shandong AAS) that combined Chinese and CIMMYT wheat lines to develop three outstanding varieties for making pan breads and noodles—mainstays on Chinese dinner tables.

The three varieties were sown cumulatively on more than 8.0 million hectares in China during 2002-2006, adding an additional 2.4 million tons of grain to Chinese wheat production and some USD 411 million to wheat farmers’ incomes, according to analyses by the Agricultural Economy and Development Institute of CAAS. “Farmers benefited by an additional USD 101 million in quality-based premiums,” says He, “and USD 8 million more was generated through marketing seeds of these varieties. Finally, the improved quality of these wheats has greatly benefited the milling and food industries.”

Award-winning wheat and work

The research team has received two Scientific Progress Awards from China’s State Council, as well as awards from the Shandong Provincial Government (2003) and Beijing Municipal Government (2006). In December 2007, in a ceremony in the Great Hall of the People, the team was given the 2007 Award for Outstanding Agricultural Technology in the Asia-Pacific Region of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR). “This is the only research team in the Chinese agricultural community that has produced such impact and received such high honors from the provincial and central governments in recent years,” says He.

The wheat quality research team also established methodologies to test for Chinese noodle quality and for applying molecular markers. “A total of 72 scientific papers have been published in refereed journals on this work, including 19 in leading international journals,” says He. “Besides being used throughout China, the molecular marker and noodle evaluation procedures are widely used in Australia and at CIMMYT.”

Decades of strong partnership

Chinese and CIMMYT wheat researchers have carried on joint research since the early 1970s, helping both parties to develop varieties with enhanced disease resistance and higher yields, among other traits. CIMMYT has contributed particularly to the quality of Chinese wheats. Two of the varieties emerging from the work described above were improved for grain quality through cross-breeding with the CIMMYT wheat genotype Saric F74. The breeder who developed them, Liu Jianjun, attended CIMMYT training courses and did his MSc thesis on noodle quality under the supervision of He and of Roberto J. Peña, head of industrial quality at CIMMYT. CIMMYT and China have jointly organized more than a dozen training courses, workshops, and conferences involving at least 1,000 Chinese researchers.

New CAAS-CIMMYT effort to confront climate change and killer strain of wheat disease

On 04 December 2007, CAAS and CIMMYT launched a three-year joint breeding initiative worth USD 1 million per year to develop new wheat varieties that tolerate heat and drought—helping farmers face climate change—and that resist major diseases of the crop.
“Of particular concern is the new, virulent strain of stem rust, Ug99, which appeared in eastern Africa eight years ago but has since moved on prevailing winds to the Middle East and could soon threaten the vast wheat lands of Asia,” says He. “One of the varieties, Jimai 20, developed by the CAAS-Shandong team, was the only wheat cultivar from China to show high resistance to Ug99 in field screening in Kenya.”

For more information: Zhonghu He, wheat breeder (zhhe@public3.bta.net.cn)

CIMMYT E-News, vol 4 no. 3, March 2007

Solving a major disease problem in durum wheat was not enough to satisfy farmers. They need and will get quality too.

Karim Ammar, a durum wheat breeder with CIMMYT, is proud of his new wheat lines growing green and disease-free this season in the Yaqui valley of northern Mexico. Even with the efficiency of a shuttle system between the Yaqui valley and the highland research station at Toluca, Mexico which allows wheat breeders to plant and select wheat twice a year, it still takes six years to get to where Karim is now.

“Between preliminary yield trials and elite yield trials we’ve got about 2500 lines and they are all resistant to leaf rust,” he says.

This is good news for the durum wheat farmers of the world. Durum wheat is the kind used for pasta, couscous and semolina. Today, 85% of spring durum wheat grown in developing countries traces its origins to the durum wheat program at CIMMYT in Mexico. The Center regularly sends out seed samples to national breeding programs around the developing world, and the most suitable in each region are used to breed local varieties. When mutations in the leaf rust fungus allowed it to bypass the resistance mechanisms in durum wheats, the breeding team at CIMMYT was faced with a serious problem.

“We had to rebuild the program, because you can no longer use something that becomes susceptible to a disease. That’s no service to the national programs or farmers in developing countries,” says Ammar, who comes from Tunisia. He is acutely aware that the work he is doing will have a major impact in developing countries where durum wheat is grown.

It might have been easy to look this as a single problem—producing disease-resistant plants or plants that can produce more grain—but the team realized the challenge was much more complicated. Farmers in developing countries need more than grain if their livelihoods are to improve. They need grain that is high in quality and for which there is a market.

Breeding itself is a process of combination and then elimination—selecting potentially good parent seeds with desirable characteristics and crossing them, then eliminating the offspring plants that don’t measure up. The process is cyclical and repeated until the breeder is satisfied that all required characteristics have been incorporated into the new wheat plants.

Leaf rust reduces yields enough to make growing susceptible varieties a losing proposition for farmers. Their needs were at the heart of the breeding strategy devised by the breeding team.

“So their priority becomes ours and once objectives are defined with our clients and their respective markets in mind, then I start thinking about the plants—how would a plant or a certain cross or combination of genes achieve that objective in the most efficient, fastest way possible,” Ammar says.

The breeders knew that disease resistance was vital but quality that was acceptable to farmers and their markets was equally essential. At the same time they thought they could enhance the performance of the wheats under drought stress and incorporate resistance to other diseases. In the beginning they had to sacrifice yield and other key characteristics to be sure they had resistance to the leaf rust, the biggest problem durum wheat growers were facing. But once that was done, the team focused on making the best possible wheats from all other perspectives.

“Now we’re back to the point where we can address yield, drought tolerance and quality very effectively because we know we have enough variability for rust resistance. It’s no longer the critical trait,” says Ammar.

The most critical trait now might well be the color or the quality of the gluten in durum wheat grains. Last year farmers in the Yaqui Valley of Mexico grew close to 150 000 ha of a durum wheat variety that yielded well and stood up to leaf rust. Unfortunately, because its grain did not have enough yellow pigment, desired by the export market, there was little market for the wheat except as pig feed. Many of the 2500 new lines that Ammar is testing outperform that variety in yield and in the most important quality traits

The best of the lines at the CIMMYT breeding station will be sent to national programs for evaluation. Mexico has already begun to evaluate in parallel so it will be ready as soon as possible to release new varieties based on the CIMMYT lines to the national production system .

For more information Karim Ammar, Wheat Breeder (k.ammar@cgiar.org)

CIMMYT E-News, vol 3 no. 11, November 2006

Ethiopia’s highland maize farmers now have a reason to smile—two reasons, as a matter of fact. Argene and Hora, recently released highland maize varieties, are spurring renewed hope for the country’s agricultural productivity.

Speaking at a farmer field day held in Bu’i, Oromiya, to showcase the new varieties’ performance, Economic Advisor to the Prime Minister, Neway Gebre-Ab, termed the new varieties “a great breakthrough in research,” and said the future for highland farmers looked bright. “There is great enthusiasm; the farmers told us they were expecting a bumper harvest of 7 to 8 tons per hectare this season,” said CIMMYT maize breeder and coordinator of the Highland Maize Project, Twumasi Afriyie.

For several decades now smallholders cropping the highlands of Ethiopia have wanted new, higher-yielding maize varieties. The cool, wet climate is ideal for the crop, yet varieties released in the 1970s and 80s did not fully exploit the benign climate. Indeed, the older varieties have been giving lower and lower yields in successive seasons. The old varieties also take a long time to mature. Today, many farmers here consume their entire crop green, leaving nothing to mature in the field, and thus risking their long-term food security. This long maturity period also means that farmers can grow only one crop each year.

Since 1998 CIMMYT and partners have been working to develop new, high-yielding maize varieties for the highlands. Thousands of parent lines have been tested and bred in a systematic collaboration with researchers in eastern and central Africa, with the work in Ethiopia being achieved in partnership with scientists at the Ambo National Plant Protection Research Center of the Ethiopian Institute of Agricultural Research (EIAR).

Argene and Hora have also been bred to withstand the important pests and diseases in the highlands. The new varieties mature in fewer days, and are stockier than traditional ones, which easily fall over (lodge) during storms or in strong winds.

Afriyie says Oromiya was a logical first home for the improved highland maize. The expansive state spans parts of western, central and southern Ethiopia, and is home to 26 million people. Nearly 90% are rural folk who depend on agriculture.

Higher maize production can make a real difference to the farmers in the region: The versatile crop can be eaten fresh off the cob or dried and pounded into flour to make different dishes. Poorer households are increasingly adding some maize meal to their injera batter (Ethiopia’s best-loved staple, injera is a spongy, fermented flatbread made from teff flour). This is due to teff’s high price. Surplus maize can be dried and stored for later, or sold for cash.

The farmers who are growing the new varieties plan to capitalize fully on the early maturity. “We can practice relay cropping and get two harvests in a season,” said one woman farmer—another double benefit from the new highland maize.

For more information, Twumasi Afriyie (t.afriyie@cgiar.org)

June, 2005

How quality protein maize is changing lives in one Indonesian village.

“I have farmed forever,” says Yasam Saanim. He works the steep slopes of the mountainous land near the village of Carin on the Indonesian island of Java. From childhood his life has been one of hard labor with little reward. He and his wife struggled to raise seven children on their tiny piece of rented land. With no money of his own Yasam has to borrow from the landowner every year to buy fertilizer for his third of a hectare of rice. He also grows a few bananas, cassava, sweet potatoes, and durian, a pungent Southeast Asian delicacy. In return he pays the landowner 180 kg of rice at harvest. He does not think it is a fair deal but says he has no choice. The family survives but Yasam has never had money. It has been that way all his life.

Now, at the age of seventy, he finally sees some light in the seemingly endless tunnel of hopelessness that has been his lot as a tenant farmer.

The landowner has decided to plant maize—in particular, quality protein maize—on 1.2 hectares of land adjacent to Yasam’s. Quality protein maize is a high lysine and tryptophan type developed by CIMMYT. It can enhance the nutrition of the poor whose diets depend heavily on maize and raise the quality of maize-based pig and poultry feeds. The landowner’s maize production is for seed, which markets locally at five times the value of grain and reflects Java farmers’ growing interest in quality protein maize. To Yasam’s delight, he and some village women were hired to weed, fertilize, and harvest the plot. Yasam earns 12,500 Indonesian Rupiahs (US $1.30) for each half day he works. The women are paid less (7,500 Rupiahs), but in a village with little money this new income is very welcome.

Indonesia has released two open-pollinated varieties of quality protein maize. They were developed using experimental varieties from CIMMYT by Dr. Marsum Dalhan, head of the Breeding and Germplasm Section of the Indonesian Cereal Research Institute. Marsum has benefited both from CIMMYT training activities and through support for his work from the Asian Development Bank.

Virtually no maize is grown around Carin. That is good news for landowners who produce maize seed and, especially, that of quality protein maize. Because the quality protein trait is “recessive”—that is, both parents must carry it and pass it on, for it to be expressed in offspring—any plants that are fertilized with pollen from other types of maize will not produce quality protein seed.

The economics look good to the landowner. He produces two crops of quality protein seed a year. Still there is a risk. The market for this maize is in its infancy in Indonesia where most animal feed is artificially fortified with lysine at the feed mill. Nevertheless, Yasam Saanim, a person who has farmed forever, beams with cautious optimism. “It looks like we will have a benefit from the maize,” he smiles.

CIMMYT E-News, vol 2 no. 10, October 2005

A new study from the Carnegie Institute of Washington, Stanford University, and CIMMYT shows wheat yield gains in northern Mexico could be due mostly to the weather.

Since the beginning of the Green Revolution in the 1960s Mexico has seen a continuing rise in average wheat yields. At the end of the 20th century yields were 25 percent higher than they were in 1980. It started with the improved wheat that Dr. Norman Borlaug developed during the 1940s and 50s in the Yaqui Valley of Mexico’s Sonora State.

CIMMYT scientists and partners have tracked yield trends in the area for decades, noting changes in varieties, cropping practices, disease pressures, and even policy changes that might have an impact on the final tonnage a farmer gets from the field. Trends observed here, in the cradle of the Green Revolution, may be good indicators for other parts of the wheat producing world.

CIMMYT agronomist Dr. Ivan Ortiz-Monasterio and his colleagues from Stanford University were curious to evaluate the most significant factors in that yield gain. But before they could look at the contribution of fertilizers or improved varieties, they decided to eliminate any impact that changes in climate might have had. This is no easy task, and often in calculations in the past, the weather was assumed to have been relatively constant and therefore would not affect a trend in yield.

By taking climate into account, the team came up with a surprising result, one that has long-term implications in a world where global warming is likely a major part of ongoing climate change.

Taking detailed weather data from 1987 – 2002 recorded at two weather stations close to farms whose output of wheat per hectare was well documented, they used a computer model for how wheat grows to simulate what would happen to wheat yields using the real weather data and leaving every other potential impact constant. The result was that from 85-100% of all the change in wheat yield could be explained by the climate.

“Basically a two-degree change in temperature accounted for nearly all of the yield change,” says the Carnegie Institute’s Dr David Lobell, the principal author of the study.

The study found that the nighttime temperature had the most significant impact on wheat yield. The weather data showed that over the 15-year period there had been a gradual trend toward cooler nights. During that time, farm yields in the areas studied in the Yaqui and Mayo Valleys (Sonora State) and in the San Luis and Rio Colorado Valleys (Baja California) increased from below 5 tons / hectare to about 6 tons / hectare, a significant increase.

“Although higher yielding wheat varieties were developed during the 15 years of the study, these were not widely grown by farmers in the region,” says Dr. Ortiz-Monasterio. “This was due to the breakdown of disease resistance or bread making quality limitations.”

Not satisfied with a result based on a single computer model, the team decided to try a second approach to get at the impact of temperatures on production. Again, the independent analysis produced very similar results.

The new study, published in the current issue of Field Crops Research and supported by the National Science Foundation and the Packard Foundation, has important implications for directions in wheat research. Climate changes, in particular increases in average temperatures, could have important, negative effects on wheat yields in the future.

For further information, contact Ivan Ortiz-Monasterio (i.ortiz-monasterio@cgiar.org).