Maize breeding in East and Southern Africa, 1900-2000

Melinda Smale () and Thomas Jayne ()

No 12 No. 4, 2020 vision briefs from International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI)

Abstract: "During the first half of the 20th century, African farmers transformed maize from a minor imported foodcrop into the continent's principal staple food. In the second half of the century, newly independent governments launched support programs that greatly expanded smallholder production, leading to substantial production surges of 10 to 20 years in duration. Today, after widespread adoption by both commercial farmers and smallholders, farmers now plant 58 percent of all maize area in East and Southern Africa to new high-yielding varieties, which on average outyield traditional varieties by 40–50 percent even without fertilizer....Though these maize-breeding efforts were an undeniable technical success, broader efforts to support national production growth proved fiscally unsustainable, and once heavy subsidies were withdrawn, production fell (see table). This qualified success story reveals important lessons about both the strengths and pitfalls of past agricultural development efforts in Africa." From Text.

Keywords: maize; food crops; small farms; production increase; crop yield; Eastern Africa; West and Central Africa; Southern Africa; Sub-Saharan Africa; Africa (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2004
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://hdl.handle.net/10568/157542

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:fpr:2020br:1204

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in 2020 vision briefs from International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().