Making maize climate ready
The world is getting hotter and instances of extreme weather events are on the rise. The planet’s changing climate is impacting farmers through heat, drought, floods, storms, diseases, emerging pests, shifting growing seasons, and volatile rain patterns. From Africa to Asia, CIMMYT is working with partners to develop maize lines with tolerance to drought, heat-stress and waterlogging.
In Africa, where about a fifth of the maize crop is lost each year due to drought, over 180 CIMMYT-derived varieties have been released and 3 million farmers in 13 African countries are now using them. Farmers sowing drought-tolerant hybrids developed by CIMMYT instead of traditional open-pollinated varieties could increase their productivity by 30 percent or more. A 2014 CIMMYT study predicted that during 2007-16 drought-tolerant maize could generate US $0.53 – US $0.88 billion from increased harvests and reduced risk, cutting poverty for over 4 million producers and consumers.
For farmers such as Jane Ndawa, in Makueni County Kenya, even two years of bad rains will not put them off planting maize. “Any help farmers can get to harvest more maize is most welcome, since we will keep planting it regardless of the yield because we need maize,” she said. “When things are bad like this season, we have to buy maize and maize flour for our daily food.”
Availability of the new varieties – which also possess other desirable traits such as resistance to major diseases – has contributed to national maize productivity increases in some countries.
Sarah Nyamai, a mother of six from Machakos County in Eastern Kenya, tried the KDV 4 maize variety on her 0.5-ha farm, and harvested more than twice what she might have obtained from a local variety in a good year. “This is the first time I have harvested so much maize from my farm. This is a good variety and I plan to continue buying this seed.”
With funding from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), a seed scaling project will further this legacy through strong partnerships with private and public seed companies, community-based organizations, NGOs and national extension systems.
Over 50 seed companies have already signed up to produce and distribute 71 varieties. The project will improve the availability, demand for and affordability of drought-tolerant varieties in 7 countries representing 41 percent of sub-Saharan Africa’s maize area, partly through the production of 12,000 additional tons of certified seed. The improved availability of seed is expected to benefit 2.5 million people.
Public-private sector partnerships in Asia
CIMMYT’s heat- and drought-tolerant maize is being used to develop and deliver improved, stress-resilient and certified varieties, through strong public-private partnerships and funding from the Syngenta Foundation for Sustainable Agriculture, BMZ/GIZ-Germany, and the Generation Challenge Program of CGIAR. Five promising drought-tolerant hybrids that significantly outperform other varieties will be evaluated and deployed in the dry belt of central India.
In Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Nepal and Pakistan, a set of 24 first-generation heat-tolerant hybrids have been identified and taken forward for large-scale trials and potential scaling out. Five hybrids in Bangladesh and four in Nepal have already been identified for formal registration and deployment, with support from USAID.
Based on climate predictions showing a higher incidence of extreme rainfall or drought alongside a gradual rise in temperature, CIMMYT is also working to combine tolerance to waterlogging and drought in Asian maize. In 2014, a region of the genome that is strongly associated with combined drought and waterlogging tolerance was identified, for markerassisted selection to rapidly introduce this trait in tropical breeding programs.
Adapting farming methods
In addition to developing new maize varieties, CIMMYT research is highlighting management options to help farmers make the most of their maize. In India, for example, successive demonstrations at one site proved that bed planting of hybrid monsoon maize outperformed other options due to improved soil drainage, while elsewhere zero-till maize outperformed rice while using 90 percent less irrigation water.
