Maize research in Sub-Saharan Africa: An overview of past impacts and future prospects
1994
Byerlee, D. (Centro Internacional de Mejoramiento de Maiz y Trigo (CIMMYT), Mexico, DF (Mexico). Economics Program)
This paper reviews the current status of maize research and the degree of adoption of improved maize technology in Sub-Saharan Africa, the availability of appropriate technology for Africa's major maize-producing regions, and the extent to which the policy environment is a major constraint on the use of current technologies. Improved varieties and hybrids cover an estimated 33-50 percentage of the maize area in Africa. Of that area, just over half is sown to hybrids. Adoption of improved germplasm accounts for a little over half of the 1 annual growth in maize yields in Sub-Saharan Africa since 1970. Although maize breeding research is likely to continue providing high payoffs to African farmers, particularly in the form of more locally adapted materials and improved yield stability, appropriate crop and resource management technologies, especially for maintaining soil fertility and increasing labor productivity, are often lacking. To overcome the gaps in technology adoption, improved technology must be adjusted to better fit the infrastructural and institutional development that characterizes many African farming systems, especially lower population densities, seasonal labor bottlenecks, and poor infrastructure (which increases the cost of external inputs), and price instability. The adoption of improved technologies that depend on the use of purchased inputs, such as seed and fertilizer, is strongly conditioned by the policy environment with respect to input supply and prices. To improve the process of policy reform will require 1) information on the cost-effective mix of price policy, credit, input supply, and extension that is appropriate, given scarce human and financial resources in most countries in the region, and 2) mechanisms for ensuring that such programs are sustainable over the long term, given the short-term nature of most maize production campaigns
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