Are Researchers Giving Up on
| Africa? |
“Don’t believe it. You hear people say there’s nothing happening in Africa—no progress, no movement. But actually there’s a lot happening at the farm level, with the farmers initiating it themselves." |
Because he has worked in Africa since 1986, Hugo De Groote’s perceptions come from ground-level certainty. “When technologies are adapted to farmers’ needs and preferences, farmers generate more food, more production, and more income. When farmers see good stuff, they try it.”
De Groote, a CIMMYT economist, makes his remarks in the fields of Nguno Ndunda, whose farm is located in a dry, midaltitude region of Kenya. It was an unplanned stop. De Groote was on his way to see another farmer who was enlisted for a participatory rural assessment (PRA) when he spied deep ridges cut into the red soil of a hillside and a bounty of fruit trees, vegetables, and grain. Recognizing an innovative farm when he saw one, he decided to stop.
De Groote communicates with the farmer with the help of Daniel Mulwa, a KARI field assistant whose native tongue is the local language, Ki-Kamba. Once Ndunda learns of their interest in maize and farming, she invites them to tour the farm that she works with her daughters, granddaughters, and great-grandchildren.
Ndunda recounts that her husband, who worked on a settler’s farm in colonial days, brought back the idea of planting maize in rows tilled by ox-drawn plows, rather than hand-hoeing small hills for plants. This complemented the ridges—cut during a government project of that era—by allowing better collection of runoff and moisture and eventually the formation of terraces. The ground now retains enough water to support bananas, papayas, avocados, pumpkins, and other high-value crops in addition to pigeonpeas, beans, and cassava. But maize production is the backbone of the operation and her family’s diet. In the past, Katumani Research Station provided some new crops (cassava) and improved maize varieties that helped Ndunda’s family meet their needs. However, major threats to production still greatly concern the matriarch—specifically, stem borers and drought.
It has been by listening to farmers like Ndunda, not by chance, that CIMMYT has placed these two problems at the top of its research agenda for East Africa. De Groote and KARI economists collect and analyze the farm data needed to keep the stem borer and drought research on track. The data will also help measure whether new technologies are working for farmers.
Ground-Level Information on Stem Borers
As part of the Insect Resistant Maize in Africa (IRMA) Project, De Groote and his KARI colleagues organized and conducted PRAs in the five major ecologies where maize grows in Kenya. They are learning which maize varieties farmers prefer, what farmers consider their major production constraints, and which pests farmers believe are most damaging to their maize.
The surveys involved more than 900 farmers in 43 discussion groups, as well as intensive interviews with key informants. In addition, 5 farmers from 27 of the PRA sites agreed to plant farm plots (135 total) so researchers could assess losses from stem borers under typical farm conditions. A clear farm-level view of the stem borer problem will guide development of insect-resistant varieties adapted to Kenyan conditions. It will also provide data for impact assessment once these varieties reach the field.
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This first set of 135 on-farm studies will be followed by five more sets.
“Our studies show that farmers consider stem borers and storage weevils the top pest problems for maize. Both pests ranked within the top three constraints in all the maize ecologies,” says De Groote. (He adds that a project to address storage weevils is in the works.) Farmers’ estimates of borer damage ranged from 25% to 60% across the various regions, while actual losses measured between 11% in the highlands and 46%in the moist midaltitude areas. Unfortunately, these figures were confounded by the severe drought that hit Kenya at that time. Of the 135 plots planted, only 45 produced what could be considered a harvest. “The time and effort lost on the research were tough,” De Groote laments, “but that’s nothing compared to the effects on farmers, whose crops were decimated.”
The devastating drought and crop losses squared with the high rank (third) that farmers accorded to drought tolerance for selecting maize varieties. Early maturity ranked first, perhaps because of farmers’ desire for maize to escape drought late in the growing season by moving more quickly through its growth cycle.
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It’s a long journey from constructing latrines and wells in a small village in northeastern Thailand to conducting surveys with maize farmers in the hills of Kenya. Stops along the way have included Togo, the University of Wisconsin, Mali, and Benin—working on everything from new crop varieties to water hyacinth invasions and locust plagues.
The life of an itinerant researcher has its downside, Hugo concedes. A price is paid in terms of maintaining close relationships with family and friends. The work can be tough physically. Residing and working among people living with malnutrition, high crime, tropical diseases, AIDS, and—especially—grinding poverty can also take an emotional toll. Observing the chasm between the haves and the have-nots of the world, with an unflinching eye, is not for everyone. For Hugo, everything balances out when he goes to the field and finds farmers eager to learn and try something new. “Many times, when we go to a new village, the farmers are so anxious to help with testing a new variety or technology, ” he says. “If it’s successful, you know you’ve helped bring something positive to some very poor people.” |
Farmers’ Local Concerns Direct Research on Drought Developing drought-tolerant maize varieties for
East Africa —and promoting their use in the field —is the focus of another CIMMYT project utilizing
De Groote and KARI economists, the Africa Maize Stress (AMS) Project. More than 2, 000 experimental
cultivars have been tested by the project under drought and low nitrogen conditions, and the most
promising were bred with locally adapted maize cultivars. Although several varieties show great
potential, getting farmers, particularly in drier areas, to adopt the improved maize may be
difficult, based on their past reluctance to take on new varieties. Many believe that the failure to
deliver improved varieties to the field can be
attributed to the communication gap between To bridge this gap, De Groote and his colleagues in the project selected one or more villages near the KARI experiment stations where AMS research was done. Group sessions were convened in those villages to hear about farmers ’ preferences and production problems and gather information on farming systems, the cropping season, availability of extension, and local market conditions. At the conclusion of the meetings, farmers were asked if they would be interested in evaluating the varieties being tested at the nearby station. “At all four sites,” says De Groote, “farmers were enthusiastic about evaluating the varieties. In fact, they wanted to evaluate them twice: once during the vegetative stage and again at harvest. Some of the breeders have really caught on to this. In one instance, a group of farmers was ‘hijacked’—figuratively speaking —from our AMS plots when a KARI breeder absolutely had to get their evaluations of some varieties provided by CIMMYT–Zimbabwe that he was working on. It’s great to see that give-and-take in action.” The farmers judged 13 of 52 varieties to be significantly superior to the most popular local variety. Breeders will narrow these 13 selections down to 8 or 10, based on other performance factors, and provide them to farmers for testing. This approach also lends itself to the mother/baby trial system, which has worked successfully in Zimbabwe* and is being introduced into Kenya. "Our participatory methodology still needs some work, ” De Groote observes, “but its outline is emerging. The farmers are eager to participate in selecting new varieties, and this shows great promise for increasing collaboration between farmers, breeders, and social scientists. By learning about farmers ’ preferences at an early stage of the research, and talking to farmers as they grow and evaluate their preferred experimental cultivars on their own farms, we should be able to help adoption advance more successfully than in the past.” |
* See “Farmers’ Voices Are Heard Here, ” CIMMYT Annual Report 1999-2000 (Mexico City, CIMMYT, 2000).
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For more information: Hugo De Groote (h.degroote@cgiar.org) |
© CIMMYT October 2001