Nicaragua: Quality Protein Maize and
Farmers' Fight to Stay Ahead

Jorge Luis Vanegas Ruiz is not your typical small-scale farmer. A young man living in Santa Rosa, at the rural margins of Managua, the capital of Nicaragua, Vanegas is a gallero: he breeds fighting cocks as his main source of income. “Farmers here do whatever they can to get by,” says Alberto Espinoza, maize breeder in Nicaragua’s Instituto Nacional de Tecnología Agrícola (INTA). “They also make and sell furniture, or take day jobs, if they can get them. If there were more opportunities, they’d be able to support themselves well.”

Alberto Espinoza and his colleagues work with CIMMYT maize breeders Hugo Córdova and Salvador Castellanos to provide new options for Vanegas and thousands of other Nicaraguan farmers. Their efforts recently culminated with the release of a yellow-grained variety of quality protein maize (QPM), called Nutrinta Amarillo. Grain of QPM has nearly twice the lysine and tryptophan—essential amino acids for humans, pigs, and poultry—as normal maize. “Nearly half the population of Nicaragua is rural, and nearly all rural inhabitants raise pigs, poultry, or both,” says Espinoza. “Many cannot afford animal feed, but if they use yellow QPM, the animals will be healthier and more productive, and the farm families better off.”

A third of Nicaragua’s population—more than 1.6 million out of a total 5.4 million—cannot meet the basic nutritional requirement of at least 2,200 calories a day, according to the United Nations World Food Program. Nearly 0.7 million endure “very high food insecurity.” The average maize plot is only about 1.5 hectares. Nutrinta Amarillo is the first yellow maize variety released in Nicaragua. A white-grained QPM variety released in 2000, NB-Nutrinta, is sown on nearly 10,000 hectares.

Fortifying feed

“This QPM gives the animal greater strength and is a lot cheaper and simpler to prepare,” says Vanegas, who is growing a stand of yellow QPM. “It also makes chickens lay more eggs.”

According to Espinoza, Nutrinta Amarillo has been well received, but its widespread adoption has been constrained by insufficient seed production and promotion. Only INTA is producing QPM seed, and the institute either gives it away or distributes it through a government program, in which farmers pay back loans of improved seed with equal amounts of grain. “We’ve held field days for farmers on QPM management,” says Espinoza. “We recommend that they select seed from the center of the plot and, if possible, grow the QPM in isolation from other maize fields. Farmer groups are organizing to produce lower-priced seed of improved varieties, including Nutrinta Amarillo.”

Seed production is just one of the interests of Elvis Curiel Cerratos, a farmer who lives near Managua and works at an INTA research station. He saw Nutrinta Amarillo for the first time when he attended the release ceremony, and now he is growing some for seed. “I was already aware of the experiments with pigs,” says Curiel, referring to tests in which piglets that ate QPM-based feeds grew bigger and more quickly than those raised on standard maize-based mixtures. He has 20 pigs, and also breeds fighting cocks and grows maize, beans, bananas, and squash on about 4 hectares—3 of which he rents to support a household of 20. “You can get up to two very big ears of Nutrinta Amarillo per plant,” he says.

Self-help for the inaccessible

Civil society organizations are also trying to promote QPM, particularly in remote areas. One is Self-Help International, a small, US-based organization that began working with QPM in Ghana in 1989 and brought that country’s successful QPM variety, Obatanpa, to souther n Nicaragua in 1999. “We wanted to work in a difficult area, so we chose a community at the southern tip of Lake Nicaragua, near Costa Rica,” says Merry Fredrick, Executive Director of Self-Help. “People there are very poor—the community had the second highest maternal death rate in the world. There had been lots of damage from Hurricane Mitch, and farmers had lost their seed. We realized that we needed to establish a seed base.” They launched a seed bank, giving farmers a bag of seed to be paid later with two bags that would in turn be given to other farmers. “In June of 1999 five farmers each sowed half a kilo of QPM seed,” says Fredrick. “By December of 2002, more than 7,000 were planting and using the seed.”

Self-Help staff began with Obatanpa, but they are also working with NBNutrinta and are interested in Nutrinta Amarillo. “We don’t have to promote QPM now—it promotes itself,” says Fredrick. “Women like its texture for cooking, and everyone likes its taste, and the husks in Obatanpa really cover the ears, protecting them from diseases. Farmers also tell us that QPM ears tend to have more and larger kernels per row than traditional maize, and much higher yields.”

Self-Help is branching out to new locations in the region and training farmers in seed production and improved crop management. Fredrick credits INTA with assisting her organization to disseminate QPM as widely as possible.

QPM: People-Centered
Science at its Best

 

 

 

 

In 2000, CIMMYT maize breeder Surinder K. Vasal and former CIMMYT cereal chemist Evangelina Villegas shared the World Food Prize for developing QPM. Their work, funded by UNDP, started in the 1970s with opaque-2, a naturally occurring mutant gene whose effects on protein quality in maize were discovered in 1963 at Purdue University. Vasal and Villegas overcame the agronomic drawbacks associated with opaque-2—chalky grain, low yields, susceptibility to diseases and pests—and kept the protein quality. The photo shows how chalky opaque-2 maize grain (top) compares to normal maize (bottom left) and QPM (bottom right).

CIMMYT researchers bred high-yielding QPM for nearly all developing country production niches. Sasakawa Global 2000 has successfully promoted QPM in Ghana and elsewhere in Africa. Global testing and promotion of QPM by CIMMYT and its partners is supported by the Nippon Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and CIDA-Canada; QPM is grown in 22 developing countries.

Quality protein maize improves the diets of people who consume a great deal of maize and also shows advantages in animal feed. For example, the Kenyan feed industry could save US$ 0.3 million every year by using QPM instead of expensive protein supplements in chicken feed.

A new breeding approach* uses a molecular tool called RNA interference to suppress production of seed proteins of low nutritional value. This effect resembles that of opaque-2. The new approach does not improve protein quality as much as opaque-2, but it opens an interesting possibility. Opaque-2 is a recessive gene, which makes it hard to maintain during breeding or under farmers’ circumstances. Using the new mechanism, researchers could produce a dominantly controlled protein quality trait that survives crosses with normal maize.

* Segal, G., R. Song, and J. Messing. 2003. A New Opaque Variant of Maize by a Single Dominant RNA-Interference-Inducing Transgene. Genetics 165:387–397.

 

For more information: 

 

Top Contents Next story

February, 2004