Success in breeding for cowpea with drought tolerance has not been as pronounced as for many other traits. This is partly due to lack of simple, cheap, and reliable screening methods to select drought-tolerant plants and progenies from the segre gating populations and partly due to the complexity of factors involved in drought tolerance. Measuring drought tolerance using physiological parameters is expen sive, time consuming, and difficult to use for screening large numbers of lines and segregating ...

The contribution of cowpea to food security and poverty reduction can be substantial in West Africa if both biological and socioeconomic constraints are addressed. While some attention has been given to genetics, agronomy, and pest control, such economic issues as access to input, marketing, and consumer preferences are key research areas which contribute to the adoption and wide diffusion of improved cowpea technologies among small farmers. An area neglected in cowpea research but which is becoming ...

A number of recent studies have added further information on the genetics of important traits in cowpea. These include inheritance of qualitative traits such as plant pigmentation; flower colour, seed colour, seed coat texture, resistance to rust, scab, smut, nematode, severe mosaic virus, Striga, Alectra, aphid, bruchid, heat, drought tolerance, and male sterility and quantitative traits such as protein content, seed size, seed yield, and fodder quality. A few studies on linkage and mapping have ...

Ecological consideration indicate that traditional agroecosystems involving mixed cropping and genetic diversity among crop species are relatively more stable than modern agroecosystems. Modern food production technologies involving more uniform crops over wide areas, use of more costly inputs and associated pest problems are ecologically less stable. With population pressure, greater pressures on the land and shortening of periods of natural recycling of nutrients reduced yields and loss of soil ...