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Drought Tolerant Maize and Coping with Agricultural Risk in Sub-Saharan Africa

Drought Tolerant Maize and Coping with Agricultural Risk in Sub-Saharan Africa. Girma T. Kassie, Tsedeke Abate, Jill E Cairns, Kai Sonder , Bekele Shiferaw. Agriculture in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). Inherently vulnerable and risk prone

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Drought Tolerant Maize and Coping with Agricultural Risk in Sub-Saharan Africa

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  1. Drought Tolerant Maize and Coping with Agricultural Risk in Sub-Saharan Africa Girma T. Kassie, Tsedeke Abate, Jill E Cairns, Kai Sonder, Bekele Shiferaw

  2. Agriculture in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) • Inherently vulnerable and risk prone • Downside risk rural communities face emanates from both expected and unexpected deviations from the norm in one or more of • environmental factors, • institutions and policies, and • individual or group level circumstances. Number of poor (<2 USD d-1) in maize growing areas

  3. Agriculture in sub-Saharan Africa • The most important downside risk: • production risk manifested through unpredictably variable agricultural yield • This risk is enormously enhanced in SSA due to the uncertainty surrounding rainfall in terms of • frequency • temporal and spatial distribution • intensity of drought

  4. Drought risk Nature Climate Change (2011) 1, 42-45. For every degree day above 30 °C, yield is reduced by 1.7 % under drought (compared to 1% under optimal conditions)

  5. What does the future hold? Maximum temperature changes - 2050 Annual rainfall differences (%)-2050 Tmax difference (oC) (19 GCMs, A2 scenario) Advances in Agronomy (2012) 144, 1-58

  6. Potential contribution of improved technologies • Improved varieties and management options have offset yield losses by ~40%. • Drought and heat tolerant maize varieties will play a fundamental role. • Drought tolerance maize is of enormous global importance, which virtually no crop or farmer in the world can afford to be without. Nature Review Genetics 2,815-822

  7. What are CIMMYT and partners doing? • Drought Tolerant Maize for Africa • initiated in 2006 in 13 countries • Progress to date • 55 drought tolerant hybrids and 54 drought tolerant OPV maize varieties released Performance of new varieties in farmers’ fields relative to most popular maize varieties in Southern Africa Commercial OPVs Hybrids

  8. Facilitating farmers access to improved varieties Seed production of improved maize varieties

  9. Expected benefits of drought tolerant maize • Benefits estimated in terms of economic gains from increasing maize yields and the economic benefits from reduced year-to-year variability in yields • 532 – 870 M USD • 100% replacement of old varieties with drought tolerance maize would increase income by 0.9 – 1.5 billion USD (with most of the benefit in Kenya, Malawi, Zambia and Zimbabwe) • Largest gains accrue in the 0-20% PFS zones • Risk benefits important part of total (up to 30%) • Highest poverty reduction in Zimbabwe, Malawi and Nigeria (more than 4 M people out of poverty) • 95% return in 8-9 main countries (especially Nigeria, Kenya and Malawi)

  10. Household level drought risk management • Risk management is part of regular farm management activities of farmers • manifested through selection of enterprises and allocation of their resources. • The way farmers choose their enterprises and allocate their resources explain the intricacies of risk perception and risk efficient farm management. • Comprehensive understanding of risk perceptions and the resultant decisions is crucially important. • Examples of resource allocations based on expectations:

  11. Land allocation to crops under different levels of drought stress

  12. Land allocation vis-à-vis risk expectation in Malawi

  13. Land allocation vis-à-vis risk expectation in Zambia

  14. Conclusions • Drought and the negative risk associated withit will always be a bottleneck to maize production, particularly in SSA. • Drought is unavoidable - the focus shall be on adapting to the patterns in moisture level and coping mechanisms for erratic scenarios. • In designing and implementing interventions that aim at contributing to the risk coping ability of farmers, it is essential to take into account heterogeneity within the farming communities. • Drought tolerant maize varieties are being developed and would play a key role in enhancing the resilience smallholder farmers in SSA. • Research so far has shown yield gains are being made in maize on farmers’ fields in SSA. • That is a good news!

  15. Thank You So Much!

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