The study evaluates the potential impacts of the Drought Tolerant Maize for Africa (DTMA) project run by CIMMYT and the International Institute for Tropical Agriculture (IITA) in 13 countries of eastern, southern and West Africa: Angola, Benin, Ethiopia, Kenya, Malawi, Mali, Mozambique, Nigeria, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia, and Zimbabwe and Ghana. It describes cumulative economic and poverty-reduction benefits to farmers and consumers in those countries over 2007-16, from higher yields and from ...

Plant breeding has been one of the main drivers of crop yield gains during the past century. Breeding for yield improvement through resistance to pests and diseases and chemico-physical constraints to crop production has contributed immensely to food security, nutrition, and improved incomes across Africa. Achievements through breeding have not been evenly spread across the entire range of crops grown in southern Africa. In addition, in some locations climate change threatens to reverse some of ...

Background: Anthracnose (Colletotrichum gloeosporioides) is a major limiting factor in the production of yam (Dioscorea spp.) worldwide. Availability of high quality sequence information is necessary for designing molecular markers associated with resistance. However, very limited sequence information pertaining to yam is available at public genome databases. Therefore, this collaborative project was developed for genetic improvement and germplasm characterization of yams using molecular markers. ...

Soybean (Glycine max L.) is an important grain legume cultivated on approximately 1.24 million ha in Africa (1). Malawi ranks fourth in area of production in Africa, with 75,000 ha in 2009 (1). Soybean is also gaining importance in Mozambique and several other southern African countries due to diversification programs. During a field survey conducted in March 2010, soybean plants with phyllody and witches'-broom disorders typical of phytoplasma infection were observed in three of five fields surveyed ...

On 8 June 2013, the Vice President of Zambia stated that his government ‘is fully committed to reducing chronic undernutrition by 50 per cent in the next ten years…’ What are the challenges to meeting this goal? Zambia has both a high consumption of groundnuts and high levels of aflatoxin contamination of this commodity. Recent studies indicate an association between stunting and aflatoxin exposure. If the association exists, then Zambia faces serious challenges to reaching its target of 50 per ...

Lepidopteran insect pest species cause heavy damage to the crop yield annually around the globe. Baculoviruses, the nucleopolyhedroviruses and the granuloviruses, act as natural regulators of pest populations including lepidopteran pests, and their potential to be employed as insecticides is well reported. Baculovirus-based insecticides are safe to animal and human health and lack toxic residues. In the present chapter, a detailed review on the isolation, characterization, mass production techniques, ...

Cowpea, Vigna unguiculata, is an important grain legume adapted to the sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) where it contributes to the nutrition, health, and income of rural and suburban inhabitants. It is indigenous to SSA with both cultivated and wild relatives distributed across the whole subregion. The International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA) holds a collection of more than 15,000 accessions from 90 countries. This valuable source of traits is being exploited to address preferences of ...