cgiar
CGIAR Secretariat A Unit of the CGIAR System Office 1818 H Street, NW Washington, DC 20433 USA t: 1 202 473 8951 f: 1 202 473 8110 e: cgiar@cgiar.org
October 2008
Passion Beyond Normal: how farmers and reseachers are finding solutions to africa’s Hunger
www.cgiar.org
By John Donnelly
Photography by Dominic Chavez
CGIAR Members African Development Bank Arab Fund for Economic and Social Development Asian Development Bank Australia Austria Bangladesh Belgium Brazil Canada
China Colombia Commission of the European Community Côte d’Ivoire Denmark Arab Republic of Egypt Finland Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations Ford Foundation
France Germany Gulf Cooperation Council India Indonesia Inter-American Development Bank International Development Research Centre International Fund for Agricultural Development
Islamic Republic of Iran Ireland Israel Italy Japan Kellogg Foundation Kenya Republic of Korea Luxembourg Malaysia Mexico Morocco
Netherlands New Zealand Nigeria Norway OPEC Fund for International Development Pakistan Peru Philippines Portugal Rockefeller Foundation
Romania Russian Federation South Africa Spain Sweden Switzerland Syngenta Foundation for Sustainable Agriculture Syrian Arab Republic Thailand Turkey Uganda
United Kingdom United Nations Development Programme United Nations Environment Programme United States of America World Bank
Passion Beyond Normal How Farmers and Researchers are Finding Solutions to Africa’s Hunger
By John Donnelly
Photography by Dominic Chavez
Table of Contents Foreword
v
Introduction
x
Stories & Profiles: Benin Cassava: A whodunit: Finding the way to beat back pests
3
Rwanda Rainwater harvesting: “We want to help farmers out of poverty”
34
Climbing beans: “Everywhere, every day … Beans, beans, beans”
40
Tanzania Seed systems: Getting seeds from one field to hundreds
44
Said Silim: “How can you give back to society?”
48
Nigeria NERICA varieties: “This is changing our lives”
10
Kenya Drought-resistant maize: “There is a real urgency to the work”
Malawi Fish ponds: Raising fish to feed the orphans
52
16
Judith Harry: “I’m always thinking ahead”
56
Soils: The magic of soybeans: Giving life back to depleted soils
20
Dairy farmers: Getting milk from Lulu to the market
24
Mozambique Sweet potatoes: The hidden wonders of an orange root
60
Uganda Josephine Okot: “The look on their faces says it all”
30
Zimbabwe Jemimah Njuki: “There is a way out of poverty”
66
Biographies John Donnelly Dominic Chavez
68 68
Farmers preparing to harvest sweet potatoes in Boane, Mozambique. { iv }
PASSION BEYOND NORMAL . FOREWORD
Foreword Agriculture faces drastic changes in the global economy and climate, which have enormous implications for the livelihoods of poor producers and consumers. Arguably, sub-Saharan Africa is more affected by those changes than other regions, because it has more limited resources for coping with them. Its people have already been hit hard by soaring grain prices and will most likely feel continued shocks, unless forceful measures are taken to enhance the productivity and resilience of Africa’s food systems. The food price crisis, together with the looming threat of climate change, have drawn renewed attention to a question that has haunted agricultural experts in Africa for many years: How can the region experience a Green Revolution comparable to the transformation of Asia’s agriculture in the 1970s? Many organizations, including the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR), are seeking answers, conscious all the while that another question is the one that matters most: What can be done now that will enable all of Africa’s people to enjoy their basic human right to adequate food — a right recognized by the 153 nations that have signed the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights?
That much can be done and, as seems abundantly clear from the remarkable stories told in this publication, is being done. In the face of many difficulties, farmers and researchers across the continent are working with great ingenuity and persistence, as well as a “passion beyond normal,” to find ways of overcoming hunger and poverty. Such experiences provide grounds for optimism about Africa’s agricultural growth — an attitude supported by recent trends. After two decades of declining per capita output, agriculture in the region as a whole has shown positive growth rates overthe last 10 years, “suggesting that the stagnation in sub-Saharan African agriculture may be over,” in the words of the World Bank’s World Development Report 2008.
PASSION BEYOND NORMAL . FOREWORD
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To a large extent, that growth has resulted from the expansion of cultivated area. Even so, improved crop varieties and other technologies have begun to spread more widely in Africa, as many of the stories in this volume suggest. Research carried out by the CGIAR-supported Centers and their national partners is contributing importantly to that progress. No other organization is as well equipped and resourced to help address the region’s many constraints, such as tropical diseases and pests, infertile soils, market barriers and climate change. As a result of collaborative research, numerous improved varieties of staple food crops are now sown on millions of hectares in sub-Saharan Africa. The region’s great crop diversity — sometimes seen as an obstacle to rapid progress — can now be viewed as an opportunity for widening the scope of technological innovation and multiplying the options for progress. Complementary research on crop health — focusing on measures such as biological control and genetic resistance to diseases and pests — has protected African agriculture time and again from major devastation. Clearly, such work has the capability to provide potent remedies for the increased disease and pest pressures that are expected to arise as a result of climate change.
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PASSION BEYOND NORMAL . FOREWORD
More recent research aimed at improving the management of natural resources has yielded promising options for reversing soil degradation in Africa and for using water more efficiently. By providing more sustainable ways to tap the region’s large land and water resources, those options can better enable Africa to exercise sound environmental stewardship for the benefit of all humanity, while realizing its own clear comparative advantage in agriculture.
expected to be worth about US$100 billion, double the amount in 2000.
On the basis of recent achievements, it is fair to say that the technological foundations have been laid for what the World Development Report 2008 refers to as “a smallholder-based productivity revolution” in African agriculture. The obvious question now is how best to build on those foundations across the region’s diverse agricultural systems. The report offers a kind of architectural plan for what it refers to as the “agriculture-based countries,” which are found mainly in sub-Saharan Africa and make up one of “agriculture’s three worlds.”
As the CGIAR embarks on ambitious reforms, we look forward to seeing it contribute even more successfully to innovation in Africa’s agriculture.
Within that world, staple foods account for a large share of total agricultural production. Africa’s economic development thus depends to a great extent on its ability to produce more of the food it consumes. By 2015, food demand in the region is
To ensure that its food production keeps pace with domestic demand, Africa must advance on many fronts all at once, and this perhaps is what primarily distinguishes its path to productivity growth from Asia’s. Well aware of that difference, many of Africa’s agricultural experts believe the region needs a more integrated approach to technological innovation.
Katherine Sierra
Ren Wang
Monty Jones
Chair CGIAR
Director CGIAR
Executive Director Forum for Agricultural Research in Africa (FARA)
Backs bent, eyes on the ground, Primitive Nyiramahane, right, and her friend Conolate Musaimiyimana weed in fields where they grow maize and climbing beans in Kadaho, Rwanda. PASSION BEYOND NORMAL . FOREWORD
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Introduction
In the rural community of Matuba, Mozambique, researchers supported by the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) arrived to check out a test field. Waiting for them were representatives of a company that wanted to invest many hundreds of thousands of dollars in the seed business. The groups co-mingled easily, laughing, sharing stories, and then talking about what was on their minds. But off in the distance, among rows of wheat, a second scene unfolded quietly, almost invisibly. Several people seemed to be walking aimlessly among the rows. Some whistled. One rang a bell. Their job, it turned out, was one of the more unglamorous tasks of farming in Africa. They were scaring away birds. Now, some may say scarecrows could do the job. Some may say hiring these people was a waste of money, even at their pay of US$2 a day. But the people in the field that day, all Africans, wouldn’t say that. Scientists and farmers alike know the human scarecrows play one of many roles necessary in making sure crops reach maturity.
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PASSION BEYOND NORMAL . INTRODUCTION
``Without the people to scare the birds away, the birds would ruin the crop, and you wouldn’t be able to grow rice, sorghum, wheat, barley or millet,’’ said Wilson Leonardo, a scientist with the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT). ``By controlling birds, they are adding to the value of the product. Agriculture is complicated sometimes.’’ Complicated, too, at times, is the relationship between researcher and farmer. As Leonardo put it, ``Farmers always challenge you. You learn things everyday.’’ There laid a lesson in the reporting of this book: Place your preconceived notions from university training, from field work, from office discussions, away for a minute. Now, walk into a field. Pretend you are a researcher. What do you do?
You start asking questions. Who do you ask? You ask the person in the field, the farmer. And you may want to approach the person scaring away the birds. That is what this book is about. It’s about researchers who were brilliant in the laboratory and open-minded in the fields, and about farmers who were brilliant in the fields and open-minded about researchers coming to offer help. It’s about how ``it’s better to go together,’’ as Leonardo said. And it’s about how best practices in agriculture didn’t happen easily and were often preceded by disappointment and failure. There had to be hard work and commitment. There had to be motivation and drive. There had to be, in the words of Ugandan seed entrepreneur Josephine Okot, ``a passion beyond normal.’’ The ten stories and four profiles in this book — reported from nine countries, stretching from Benin in West Africa to Malawi in Southern Africa — represent a few of the highest achievements because of those
passions in the more than three decades of the CGIAR’s work. The photographs that accompany the story show that work — from sealed rooms in laboratories to wide-open fields to chaotic marketplaces. But this book should be read with a critical eye as well, especially in terms of impact. Some of the projects — perhaps most notably the control of cassava pests and diseases — have been major successes across the continent. Others, though, have helped farmers only in certain regions or countries. I often wondered about this. Was it because the project was just starting? Was it cut short due to a lack of funding? Or was it due to a lack of vision? The answers will be critical in the months and years ahead. During this time of rising food prices and greater pressures on farmers to produce higher yields, the CGIAR obviously will endeavor to find new ways of scaling up its best initiatives, including some described here.
make a difference. This is not only about past success, but also about challenges that were unfolding on the days we were there. And so inside, you’ll find out how researchers helped a village in Malawi deal with its growing number of AIDS orphans; how researchers persuaded politicians in Kenya to allow the trade of raw milk from smallholder farmers and how researchers engineered new markets for the orange-fleshed sweet potato in Mozambique — including the baking of orange sweet potato bread (packed with vitamin A). The orange bread was delicious, by the way, something we savored. We hope these stories also give food for thought in the months and years ahead.
John Donnelly September 2008
In many respects, this small book is a marked departure from the bulk of the many important publications produced by the CG, as everyone calls it. This is not a scholarly tome; there are no footnotes on the bottom of the pages. This is about real life, real situations and real people trying to
PASSION BEYOND NORMAL . INTRODUCTION
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A Global CGIAR
CGIAR-Supported Centers The 15 Centers supported by the CGIAR are autonomous organizations, each with its own charter, board of trustees, director general and staff. Center scientists are recruited from around the world. Africa Rice Center (WARDA) Cotonou, Benin www.warda.org Bioversity International Maccarese (Rome), Italy www.bioversityinternational.org International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT, its acronym in Spanish) Palmira (Cali), Colombia www.ciat.cgiar.org Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR) Bogor, Indonesia www.cifor.cgiar.org
International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT, its acronym in Spanish) Texcoco (Mexico, D.F.), Mexico www.cimmyt.org
International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT) Patancheru (Hyderabad), India www.icrisat.org
International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) Nairobi, Kenya, and Addis Ababa, Ethiopia www.ilri.org
International Potato Center (CIP, its acronym in Spanish) Lima, Peru www.cipotato.org
International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) Washington, D.C., USA www.ifpri.org
International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) Los Ba単os (Manila), the Philippines www.irri.org
International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA) Aleppo, Syria www.icarda.org
International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA) Ibadan, Nigeria www.iita.org
International Water Management Institute (IWMI) Battaramulla (Colombo), Sri Lanka www.iwmi.cgiar.org
World Agroforestry Centre (ICRAF) Nairobi, Kenya www.worldagroforestrycentre.org WorldFish Center Penang, Malaysia www.worldfishcenter.org
Placement markers are approximate and indicate city locations, not worldwide offices.
Snapshot of Featured Stories and Profiles
A. Benin
Cassava: A whodunit: Finding the way to bpeat back pests B. Nigeria
NERICA varieties: “This is changing our lives”
c. Kenya
Drought-resistant maize: “There is a real urgency to the work” Soils: The magic of soybeans: Giving life back to depleted soils Dairy farmers: Getting milk from Lulu to the market
f. Tanzania
Seed systems: Getting seeds from one field to hundreds Said Silim: “How can you give back to society?” g. Malawi
Fish ponds: Raising fish to feed the orphans Judith Harry: “I’m always thinking ahead” h. Mozambique
Sweet potatoes: The hidden wonders of an orange root I. zimbabwe
Jemimah Njuki: “There is a way out of poverty”
d. Uganda
Josephine Okot: “The look on their faces says it all” e. Rwanda
Rainwater harvesting: “We want to help farmers out of poverty” Climbing beans: “Everywhere, every day … Beans, beans, beans”
Placement markers are approximate.
Benin
Cassava: A whodunit Finding the way to beat back pests
OGOUKPATE, Benin — The old man was elf-like. His legs were spindly and so short that when he sat on a chair they barely touched the ground. His eyes shone. And when he smiled, people smiled back at him. But asked about the pests that destroyed the cassava roots nearly two generations ago, he scrunched up his face in horror and waved his arms in front of him, as if to try to ward off an evil spirit.
It was that bad. The sources of trouble were twofold: the cassava mealybug and the cassava green mite, which were inadvertently transported into Africa as stowaways on plant materials brought from South America in the early 1970s. In the next decade, the pests spread throughout the the continent’s cassava belt, stretching from West Africa to Southern Africa. By the early 1980s, the cassava mealybug alone was causing losses of up to 80 percent to the plant roots and the leaves, which are consumed as a vegetable in many countries. For many of the 200 million Africans who depend on cassava as a staple in their diets, the infestation caused great economic upheaval and devastated poor families. Here in Ogoukpate, people depended on cassava market sales to provide for their basic necessities.
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PASSION BEYOND NORMAL . BENIN
Without that income, villagers hunted for any work they could find. They cut back on meals. A sense of dread infiltrated their lives. ``The small amounts of cassava that we always had to sell, well, we no longer had anything to sell,’’ said Alphonse Ogoule-Okpe, the old man who was somewhere in his 60s. ``We suffered so much. Oh, we suffered.’’ But then, first sometime in the mid-1980s and again a decade later, their cassava plants rebounded. The edible roots grew strong, and the plant’s stems and leaves no longer were covered by a white cottony mass, characteristic of mealybug infestations. Gradually, over the next 10 to 15 years around Africa, the same scene played out hundreds of thousands of times in villages like this one. Millions of Africans grew
Using goggles fitted with special magnifying lenses, IITA researcher Alexis Onzo examines a cassava plant for signs of pests in Ogoukpate, Benin. PASSION BEYOND NORMAL . BENIN
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huge cassava roots again. Few knew why. Was it an act of God? Was it a freak of nature? No. It was the result of investigative digging by scientists at the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA), the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) and several other partners, including national programs across Africa. A team of researchers led by entomologist Hans Herren (who received the 1995 World Food Prize for this work) discovered the pests and then zeroed in on answering one key question: What kept the cassava mealybug and green mite in check in South America? Through field work in several South American countries and extensive laboratory tests researchers pinpointed several parasites and predators — some too small to see with the naked eye. IITA scientists tested several of them until, through trial and error, they found the perfect nemeses: the encyrtid wasp for the mealybug and the phytoseiid mite for the green mite. ``In both cases, it was not easy to find the star parasite and predator,’’ said Rachid Hanna, an IITA entomologist and biocontrol specialist based in Benin. ``But once we did, and we introduced them, they spread quickly, on their own and through continued releases. They had to tolerate a wide range of environments and sustain themselves on a range of resources. They had to have the ability to locate the pest from a distance and distinguish cassava from other plants. And they couldn’t harm anything else. In both cases, the two natural enemies had an impact only on cassava.’’ Still, skeptics were around every corner. Many partners had to sign off on such a big decision as releasing the candidate natural enemies; 25 African countries had formed committees to address the cassava problem. Braima D. James, coordinator of the CGIAR’s System-wide Program on Integrated Pest Management, remembered that some senior
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PASSION BEYOND NORMAL . BENIN
politicians were alarmed about the dangers of introducing tens of thousands of foreign wasps to fight the mealybug in their nations. ``I had to convince the authorities that these wasps don’t sting,’’ James recalled, laughing. ``They don’t. But it took awhile for people to be comfortable with the idea.’’ It took only a few years for both control programs to get spectacular results. Research has found that the damage caused by the mealybug has been reduced by 95 percent and the green mite by 50 percent. One study found that the economic savings were between $7 billion and $20 billion for the control of the mealybug; another study in Nigeria, Ghana, and Benin alone estimated $2 billion in savings from the control of the green mite. At IITA’s research station in Cotonou, Benin, scientists are still studying the cassava natural enemies. They still have many questions about why the predators worked so efficiently. They also believe their work under microscopes and in cassava fields will help other efforts to control crop pests. Pests, of course, never completely disappear. Cassava still has its share. One is the very virulent form of the cassava mosaic disease, which is spread by a whitefly and in infected cuttings. It has taken root across eastern and parts of central and southern Africa, and it has reached as far as parts of the Middle East. One approach IITA is taking to combat the virus has nothing to do with finding natural enemies: It is developing varieties of cassava that are resistant to the disease. Hanna, the IITA entomologist, and Alexis Onzo, an IITA mite specialist, strapped about 300 stems of new cassava varieties atop their jeep one morning in mid-2008 and drove them to two villages in
southeastern Benin — the kind of gifts that IITA has been giving to farmers for years. In neighboring Nigeria, for instance, 60 percent of the cassava grown is from high-yielding varieties. One of the stops was Ogoukpate, where the old man, Alphonse, welcomed them under the shade of a giant ficus tree. The area has special historical significance for IITA; only a few kilometers away was the first release in Africa of the phytoseiid mite, the predator of the green mite, in October 1993. The village of roughly 130 people, which had no cars, four motorcycles, no electricity and no television sets within five kilometers, depended greatly on cassava. Alphonse told his visitors that cassava yields had been decreasing — apparently because of depleted soils. He and others asked the scientists for help. Hanna told them the new varieties of cassava would ``fight off diseases and attract the predators of the green mite.’’ Each stem, he said, could give them five plants. Villagers lined up to shake the hands of the scientists and thank them. They had not known about the long-ago release of the natural enemies of the cassava mealybug and the cassava green mite. But the plant stems, in front of them, were something tangible, a source of new hope.
Elder Alphonse Ogoule-Okpe, right, says the cassava mealybug devastated the livelihoods of villagers a quartercentury ago in Ogoukpate, Benin.
Workers at Gavi Industry take cassava and process it to flour in Ita-Bolonia, Benin.
Rachid Hanna, an IITA scientist, takes a close look at a cassava leaf in an IITA test field in Cotonou, Benin.
A young man in Ogoukpate, Benin, carries a gift from IITA researchers: new cassava stalks to plant in villagers’ fields.
PASSION BEYOND NORMAL . BENIN
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Nigeria
NERICA varieties “This is changing our lives”
OGBESE, Nigeria — The men swung their machetes into an island of tall grass. Sweat stained their shirts. In the heat of midday, their task was simple: Scatter the rats.
The rats, which had found safe harbor in the grass, were raiding the surrounding field of rice at night to eat the grains. The job was clearly disagreeable — one worker inadvertently hacked into a wasp nest, causing predictable chaos and pain — but the men also clearly had strong reasons to protect the crop. Here grew a variety of the New Rice for Africa, known as NERICA, which was developed and bred by scientists at the Africa Rice Center (WARDA). It has been one of the most successful new crop varieties to be introduced in Africa during the last quarter-century, and the farmers in this southwestern Nigeria region can’t get enough of it. ``This is changing our lives in many ways — how we move around, how we dress, how we learn,’’ said Sunday Olajolumo, 57, chairman of the Anuoluwapo Farmers Cooperative, a group of 26 farmers who planted 69 hectares of the NERICA variety in 2008, up from 30 hectares in 2007. ``Because of this new rice, I had enough money to buy a motorbike, buy clothes for my family and pay school fees for children.’’
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PASSION BEYOND NORMAL . NIGERIA
Center scientists, led by breeder Monty Jones, began crossing Asian with African rice in the early1990s to develop the NERICA varieties. The African rice, although low yielding, gave them several strengths: resistance to pests, early growth, good ground cover to reduce weeds, and good tolerance to drought and salinity. Asian rice produced other-worldly yields. The researchers first created NERICA varieties for uplands, which produced much higher yields than African rice, retained the pest resistance and matured in just 90 to 110 days. African upland rice matured in 150 to 170 days. NERICA varieties allow farmers to sell the crop earlier (often for higher prices) as well as plant another short-duration crop, such as soybeans or potatoes, after the rice harvest. By 2001, several African countries had released NERICA varieties for production, and the positive results began arriving from the first season onward. In Uganda, which introduced NERICA in 2002, the new varieties yielded 2.2 tons per hectare, on average, and some farmers reported yields of up to
In Ogbese, Nigeria, Farmer Fadile Ojo gingerly walks through a calf-high NERICA field, which is just one month away from harvest. PASSION BEYOND NORMAL . NIGERIA
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5 tons. Around Africa, the average upland rice yield had long stood at 1 ton per hectare. Burkina Faso, in just a few years, reported a 102 percent increase in rice yields, directly due to the new varieties. And here in Nigeria, the country’s rice harvest increased every year after the introduction of NERICA varieties. In recognition of such results, Jones, a Sierra Leone native, won the 2004 World Food Prize. But it wasn’t just the scientists who were responsible for the success of the new varieties. National agricultural organizations had to approve it. Farmers had to be convinced. ``It’s an evolving system,’’ said Mande Semon, an Africa Rice Center rice breeder based in Nigeria, who worked with Jones on NERICA varieties. ``National programs are an integral part of the process, and farmers are directly involved in choosing varieties of rice they want.’’ The release of the new varieties came at an opportune time. Africans’ rice consumption has vastly outpaced local production, leading most countries to import rice from Asia. But the demand came with a cost. Rising imports meant increased costs, especially following the global food crisis in 2008, which greatly increased the price of rice. Nigeria, which has been increasing rice consumption by 6 percent annually, hopes to produce enough to meet domestic needs and stop importing rice. In 2006, it imported 2 million tons of rice from Asia, at a cost of US$700 million. Olupomi Ajayi, coordinator of the Center’s station in Nigeria, believes the country can do it. First, Nigeria
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PASSION BEYOND NORMAL . NIGERIA
has enough arable land and a variety of ecosystems conducive to growing rice. And second, he hopes the country soon will allow the cultivation of new NERICA lowland varieties, which will enhance rice production in the extensive inland valleys. After the release of these varieties, he said, ``that’s when we expect the revolution.’’ But in Ekiti state, a mini-Green Revolution already is under way. A study in 2006 found that nearly 97 percent of Ekiti’s rice farmers were using NERICA varieties, a stunning number considering that they were introduced only three years before. In Ogbese, dozens of farmers said the new varieties not only produced higher yields but had a safeguard against birds, which frequently snatched much of the grains from other varieties. The main reason is that the NERICA plant’s ``flag leaf’’ — the plant’s tallest shoot — stands much higher above the grains than ones on other varieties, keeping birds away. The farmers believe even better days are ahead. The Anuoluwapo Farmers Cooperative in 2008 decided to invest $8,500 as a down-payment for a tractor; the federal government contributed $17,000, leaving the farmers with a $17,000 loan. With a new tractor, Sunday, the cooperative leader, said the group hopes to plant 200 hectares next year — more than triple current cultivation. Janet Olatunji, one of three women farmers in the cooperative, planted one hectare of rice in 2007. That earned a profit of $1,200. All her other crops combined brought in half that much. In 2008, she planted three hectares, and she hopes to grow much more in the future.
``I was skeptical when I first tried it,’’ Olatunji said, standing in the middle of her rice field. ``But I saw that God is great. The rice did very well. I think now that I can do even better. Maybe someday I can do so well that I will be riding in a Range Rover to my farm.’’ She and a few other farmers laughed. But they knew that in the time of NERICA, many things, even a Range Rover, were now possible.
Mercy Oladi Meji, 32, left, planted two hectares with a NERICA variety in Ogbese, Nigeria, and wished she could have planted more. ``Others did so well,’’ she said.
Treasured rice seeds: A bowl of a NERICA variety.
Hoping to drive out rats from tall grass, a farmer in Ogbese, Nigeria, cuts down brush next to his NERICA rice field. At night, rats emerge and eat the seeds. PASSION BEYOND NORMAL . NIGERIA
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Kenya
Drought-resistant maize “There is a real urgency to the work”
KIBOKO, Kenya — There was an edge about him. He moved with a sense of purpose through the fields of maize, as if he didn’t have enough time to deal with all the problems in his head. Dan Makumbi, a maize breeder for the past 15 years, finally stopped next to rows of healthy- looking maize plants. ``This field is still looking happy,’’ Makumbi said, fingering a stalk. ``It still is getting water. But it won’t be for long.’’ It seemed an ominous note — for the maize, though not for Africa’s legions of maize growers. This was an experiment station for the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT), which tests 3,000 varieties of maize every year here. Even after thousands of tests over the past years, Makumbi and his peers aren’t satisfied — not even close. The trials would test new varieties of maize under drought conditions, which periodically but unpredictably occur in large parts of eastern, western and southern Africa. Makumbi’s plan was to shut off the water just before the flowering stage, the most critical time for the plant’s development, and then monitor different varieties to see which would still produce maize even as the soil turned dry.
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Maize may be Africa’s signature crop, grown in virtually every village with tillable soil. In southern Africa alone, it is the main staple food, grown on more than 12 million hectares. But maize also is extremely vulnerable to periods of drought, and in seasons with little or no rainfall, farmers who depend on maize to feed their families or earn money have suffered terribly. In the mid-1990s, scientists, led by CIMMYT’s Marianne Banziger, began experimenting with drought-tolerant varieties in southern Africa. Within one decade, the researchers’ work in creating new maize varieties began to show dramatic results. In some fields, the new drought-tolerant maize produced 40 percent higher yields than older varieties. Anecdotally, many farmers learned the impact was even greater: the drought-tolerant varieties, in years with little rainfall, still produced maize when other varieties didn’t.
In a field many kilometers from the nearest village, Kiboko, Kenya, farm worker Miunda Tuti strips ears of maize from withered stalks. The drought-tolerant variety produced a high yield despite poor rains. PASSION BEYOND NORMAL . KENYA
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``The most truly rewarding thing is when you talk with farmers,’’ said Banziger, director of CIMMYT’s global maize program, whom many farmers call ``Mama Maize’’ because of her contributions in their fields. ``The new varieties are the difference between harvesting something or harvesting nothing. If you harvest something, you have something to eat, you can sell it, you can send your kids to school. In Malawi, they say maize is life — that’s how important it is.’’ Some of these varieties have spread rapidly and have become some of the most frequently traded varieties used by non-governmental organizations for seed relief in drought-prone areas. In the village of Muisuni in southeastern Kenya near Kiboko, farmers said they had just begun using the drought-tolerant maize varieties. It took one dry season to make them ardent supporters. ``This new variety can handle the hot sun,’’ said Virginia Nthambi, 22, a mother of two young children, as she walked along rows of green maize plants. She pointed out an adjacent field that had rows of wilted stalks. ``See the difference? You can see it clearly,’’ she said. ``When it’s dry, those stalks over there dry up. And these ones here stay green.’’ Nthambi was growing the new varieties to sell as seeds. George Muthama, a representative of Freshco Seed Company, said he hoped to buy 150 bags of seed from her; each bag would weigh 100 kilograms. Those bags, he said, could contain enough seeds to plant 1,500 hectares of maize.
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PASSION BEYOND NORMAL . KENYA
``We have a huge demand for it,’’ he said. ``We’ll sell all of it.’’
The maize breeders have registered success, but they know they have potential to do much more.
At the Kiboko maize-testing fields, where the snow-capped Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania is visible to the southwest on clear days, Makumbi, the breeder, watched workers carefully cross-breed maize plants. On one row, workers placed brown paper bags over the stalk’s tassels, shook the bag and tassel and then placed the bag — now full of pollen — over an ear on another plant. The workers then put a plastic bag around the ear to ensure that no other plant could pollinate it.
``We have a daunting challenge ahead of us,’’ Banziger said. ``There will be an increase in the demand of maize — a 3 to 5 percent increase annually for the next several years, from population growth, from economic growth in Asia and Africa, from people becoming wealthier and eating more meat. Add climate change to it, and we will need plenty of tricks to stay ahead of the game. Improvements in drought-tolerant maize will be crucial.’’
Supervising the work was Dorcus Gemenet, 29, a young breeder for the Kenyan Agricultural Research Institute. A major part of the drought-tolerant maize project involves training scientists from national research programs, which builds capacity around Africa on cutting-edge breeding techniques. ``I was brought up in a village, and I know what those people are going through when there is no rain,’’ Gemenet said. ``Most of the country is dry — more than 80 percent is classified as arid. The work we can do with maize will really touch the lives of people.’’ Many parts of Kenya in the middle of 2008 were suffering from drought conditions. ``In many areas, farms look really pathetic,’’ she said. ``The environment is changing, and we need to have these varieties that will change with it. So we always need new varieties.’’ That spoke to the research always ongoing, the drive behind Banziger’s work, the stride in Makumbi’s walk.
For Gemenet, the young Kenyan breeder, the incentive to bring the research to the field comes from another source as well: It provides a safety net to farmers — farmers like her own parents in western Kenya. ``There is a real urgency to the work,’’ she said. ``We are developing varieties that could be the only option to the bulk of people in the countryside who are poor. These are people who cannot afford an irrigation system. They rely just on rainfall. If it doesn’t rain, we have to have a variety of maize that still will produce.’’
Different varieties of drought-tolerant maize are laid out to dry in the sun at the Kenya Agricultural Research Institute (KARI) in Kiboko, Kenya. On a light table, a KARI scientist examines kernels that were striped from drought-tolerant maize varieties.
In a CIMMYT research field in Kiboko, Kenya, worker Amoshe Omar checks the progress of a drought-tolerant variety of maize. Workers place paper bags over the ears of maize in order to prevent cross-pollination. PASSION BEYOND NORMAL . KENYA
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Soils
The magic of soybeans: Giving life back to depleted soils
ESHIVANZE, Kenya — The crust of the earth here is so thin that it slides through your fingers. It contains no rich black clumps. Rain isn’t the culprit; this part of western Kenya gets lots of it. Instead, overpopulation and the relentless dicing up of farmland into smaller and smaller chunks with each generation means that cultivation on each plot never slows and always intensifies. The soil, once fertile, is becoming barren through over-use. Ali Watiti Rapando knows. His farm, once his father’s, has been plowed under for decades to grow millet, cassava and maize. But recent harvests became more meager by the season, making him worry that he wouldn’t be able to support his two wives and 10 children. So Watiti devised a survival plan based on two principles: He would diversify his operations to seek new ways to earn money, and he would seek out agricultural researchers to learn ways to improve his farm. He started a beehive operation. He grew sugarcane. He added 50 chickens and gave them free run of the place.
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And then he found a true gem: soybeans. Soybeans had not been popular in western Kenya. They were a novelty, an unknown. Around Africa, though, the crop has begun to make strong inroads among farmers in recent years, particularly in Nigeria and Zimbabwe. Over the last several years in Eshivanze, researchers at the Tropical Soil Biology and Fertility Institute of the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (TSBF-CIAT) showed Watiti and neighboring farmers why the crop would be advantageous to them. They laid out three major reasons: it is nutritious and a good source of protein; they can make money selling soy products in the market;
On this farm in Eshivanze, Kenya, belonging to Ali Waiti Rapando, these children’s diet has improved dramatically because he started planting soybeans — on the advice of CIAT scientists. Speaking of the scientists, Rapando said, ``We love them.’’ PASSION BEYOND NORMAL . KENYA
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and, perhaps best of all, soybean plants capture nitrogen from the air and transfer it to the soil. When the soybean plant dies, it leaves more nitrogen in the soil than what was there before. Soybeans gave life to Watiti’s soil. After one season of planting soybeans alongside maize, his maize production tripled. ``It’s wonderful,’’ said Watiti, 52, sitting in his yard next to a pile of white-kernel maize drying in the sun. ``We really like the researchers — no, we love them. Without their information, you cannot make it. They have given me the technical knowledge for improving fertility in the soil.’’ Restoring Africa’s well-worn soils has become a major focus of the work of the CGIAR, including important research by the World Agroforestry Centre (ICRAF) and the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT). In addition, two major charities — the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation — recently created the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa, which has put soil fertility near the top of its agenda.
don’t have enough space. So anything they plant to help the soil also has to give them other benefits as well.’’ First, farmers had to be persuaded that soybeans could become part of their diet. Margaret Musambi, an extension officer with the Kenya Ministry of Agriculture, showed them how to turn soybeans into soy milk, soy yogurt, soy beverage, soy crisps, soy sausages and even soy meatballs. She also latched on to the potential of soybeans as a way to bring new income into families and as a protein source for members of an HIV-positive support group in the western Kenya town of Mumias. Musambi said she has been particularly happy with the benefits members of the HIV-positive support group have reaped from soybeans. “These people are becoming so healthy,” Musambi said. “Their drugs are helping them, and the soybeans are as well. It’s true. You eat soy, and it will cheer you up.”
CGIAR scientists have found, for example, that several varieties of fodder shrubs can also add nutrients to the soil, as well as provide nutritious feed for livestock. That kind of dual purpose also made soybeans attractive to farmers.
For Chianu, the scientist, soybeans also inspire dreams. ``When I read about soybean development in Brazil and Argentina, I shake my head,’’ he said. ``Soybeans came to Brazil in 1950. They came to Kenya in 1904. Brazil is now the second largest producer. In Brazil, the average farm is 800 hectares. In Kenya, we are dealing with a mass of small farmers. That’s the difference.’’
``For farmers, if you want to do something about soil fertility, you need to start talking about the soybean,’’ said Jonas N. Chianu, a Nairobi-based scientist in socioeconomics at TSBF-CIAT. ``Farmers here have very little land. Many don’t have trees because they
Several Kenyan factories import soybeans because farmers domestically are not growing enough. Chianu calculated the annual demand in Kenya at 150,000 tons; farmers in 2008 were producing 7,500 tons. In order to meet the demand, he estimated he
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would need 300,000 smallholder Kenyan farmers to grow soybeans on roughly half a hectare each. He understands that may seem unattainable to some, but he points to West Africa, where more than 500,000 farmers in Nigeria, Côte d’Ivoire, and Ghana are growing soybeans; almost all have started soybean cultivation in the last 15 years. Chianu is particularly excited about soybeans’ potential in significantly improving the yields of maize and other crops. ``You look for what else you can do for these farmers,’’ he said. ``They need a cash crop. They need to get higher yields.’’ Watiti, the western Kenya farmer, said that is true always, but it’s even more critical in times of crisis — such as the period of violence that swept through his country following the disputed presidential election in late 2007. During the clashes, Watiti and other farmers couldn’t access fertilizer stores. They had to rely on natural fertilizer, such as manure and soybean plant residues. ``I was very grateful for my soybeans during the clashes,’’ he said. ``Many farmers who weren’t planting soybeans did very poorly with their crops. But because I had soybeans, my crops weren’t that bad. I was lucky to have them.’’
A cluster of soybeans in Sidada, Kenya.
After working in the morning sun, Hadija Auma Hassan, far right, leads her family out of their field of soybeans in Eshibanze, Kenya. PASSION BEYOND NORMAL . KENYA
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Dairy farmers
Getting milk from Lulu to the market
NGECHA, Kenya — At first light, the farmers, bundled in warm clothes to ward off the morning chill, started appearing on the dirt road. They walked up and down the hills, a steady parade, all carrying tin milk cans. Songbirds sang. Those who wore shoes softly crunched gravel underfoot. These were the only sounds. It seemed a moment from another time, but actually this represented something fairly new — and something better for the farmers, the nation’s 30,000 informal milk traders and Kenya’s legions of milk drinkers. The farmers were delivering their milk to a collection point in Ngecha, a village outside the capital Nairobi, where their cooperative was selling the milk to a network of informal traders and to a dairy company that pasteurizes it. Only a few years earlier, this simple country trade couldn’t have happened. Informal traders, who handle more than four-fifths of all milk sold in Kenya, were outlawed and continually harassed by police, forcing them to work on the sly. Some were jailed; some skipped out on farmers without paying them; and some ended up with spoilt milk. Kenyans, who drink an average of 100 liters of milk annually, could never be sure their milk was good.
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Help arrived from an unlikely source: scientists. Researchers at the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI), based in Nairobi, along with colleagues from Kenya’s Ministry of Livestock Development and the Kenya Agricultural Research Institute, formed the Smallholder Dairy Project in 1997. Over the next eight years, the group’s work created scenes like the one in Ngecha. First, ILRI research showed the raw milk sold by the informal traders was not hazardous to public as long as farmers and traders followed hygienic practices. The partners then devised a system in which trainers would teach traders the safest ways to handle and test milk. In return, the traders would receive licenses to sell the milk. Still, policymakers opposed the idea. They wanted all milk pasteurized. ``We fought some with ILRI over this,’’ acknowledged Machira Gichohi, managing director of the Kenya Dairy Board. ``But we agreed
Every morning just after dawn in Ngecha, Kenya, a village just outside Nairobi, milk buyers pick up fresh milk from neighboring farmers. PASSION BEYOND NORMAL . KENYA
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in the end that this system of training the informal traders was the best way ahead.’’ Gichohi said the key turning point was ILRI’s research showing that raw milk was safe, especially with safeguards on the farm and with traders.
For example, they taught her proper feeding for her cows, including giving them Napier grass and doses of store-bought grains right after the cows gave birth. She said it increased one cow’s output to 25 liters a day, up from eight liters.
Research highlighted multiple beneficiaries — at least US$33.5 million annually to Kenya’s economy, with more than half of that amount going to the country’s 800,000 smallholder farm households that depend on dairy income. Informal traders not only created competition in the market but the traders generally offered higher prices. In turn, the traders sold unpasteurized milk at much lower prices to consumers, sometimes half as much as pasteurized milk.
``Before, I had to do lots of work and not earn much,’’ she said. ``Now I work less and earn more.’’
The research also has helped indirectly to bolster reform for informal milk markets throughout the region. In Rwanda, Uganda and Tanzania, informal markets handle more than 90 percent of all milk sold, and regulators have taken steps in recent years to oversee the informal sector — but not to stop it. They knew Kenya data proved unpasteurized milk was safe when handled properly. Ngechi farmer Margaret Nungari, 52, greatly benefited from the new system. Nungari, a single mother of four, said that previously she had some bad experiences with milk traders, who did not pay for her milk. But that stopped after the licensing of traders. ``My children were educated with milk money,’’ she said, walking along rows of carrots, kale and spinach on her farm, which is just 0.8 of a hectare. She said that researchers also helped her in other ways.
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Joseph Kibunja, 55, a nearby farmer, said research assisted him in other ways. He said scientists advised him to mix chicken droppings into feed for cows. Kibunja now has 400 chickens; his five cows — Lulu, Nyagaki, Genesis, Suzie and Beauty — eat grains and grass mixed with the droppings, and the cows are now producing more milk, he said. After listening to Kibunja, Francis Wanyoike, an ILRI researcher who studies livestock markets, said farms need such integration. ``This farm is a great example — dairy, poultry and horticulture, all interacting so well,’’ he said. Kibunja said that fixing the informal milk trade was a big boost for farmers. ``They created competition by building up the informal milk traders,’’ he said. ``Now we can get a better price for our milk.’’ The system is not without flaws. Some traders have declined to go through the licensing process. The government is considering whether to give the licensed sellers a brand name for their milk in hopes of creating loyalty among consumers. Still, the new way of doing things works remarkably well.
It starts with someone like trainer Teresia Wanjiku Kamau. ``I train the traders for several days in how to safely handle the milk,’’ she said. ``That also means the proper way on the farm to handle the milk. I’ve also trained them on how to test the milk. This has increased the quality.’’ Such training has helped traders such as Gabriel Karanja, 53, father of eight children, who now sells 90 liters of milk daily, up from just five or six liters a day during the time when his work was illegal. ``It’s so different now,’’ he said. ``I don’t fear anything. Before it was like you were a thief in your own country. Now we are selling milk freely.’’ Consumers seem happy. Mohamed Shuria, 38, buys two liters of milk daily from Karanja. He said his trust in the milk trader was so great that ``when our youngest child stopped receiving mother’s milk, I asked Mr. Karanja for milk from his own cow to feed my boy.’’ Karanja beamed, remembering Shuria’s request. ``This research helped me a lot,’’ he said later. ``Four of my children are already through secondary school. Milk income has given me this — milk and the researchers.’’
These cows at the Muchina farm in Gitangu, Kenya, produce milk that is sold to informal traders — an arrangement partly brought about by ILRI scientists.
At Limuru Dairy Farmers Cooperative, young men load fresh milk onto the bed of a truck in Ngecha, Kenya.
Maragaret Nlungari, patting her cow, says milk money has put her children through school in Gitangu, Kenya.
Helped by his donkey, a farmer transports about 25 kilograms of milk to a local collection point in Ngecha, Kenya.
PASSION BEYOND NORMAL . KENYA
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Uganda
Josephine Okot KAMPALA, Uganda — Josephine Okot has handled extraordinary challenges. Her father died when she was six. A civil war broke out around her hometown in northern Uganda when she was 19 — and didn’t stop for 20 years. And at age 37, she started a seed company here, fighting her way into a male-dominated industry.
“The look on their faces says it all”
But four years into her business, she had finally faced an obstacle that seemed to take all the energy out of her: the high cost of loans from banks. Sitting in her small office at Victoria Seeds Ltd., Okot said she wanted to keep expanding her company — she had already passed US$2 million in turnover — but banks were killing her business.
``It wasn’t unusual,’’ Okot said. ``Most of my friends didn’t have fathers — many were killed during a brutal regime. As I was growing up, I noticed the women were always working so hard, and it was so hard for them. If they got married, all their assets belonged to their husbands. In old age, their assets were controlled by their sons.’’
``Do you know the interest rate they are charging?’’ she said. ``Twenty-two to 24 percent!’’ Furthermore, she said, venture capital investors want 16 percent of her profit.
Okot, who is single and has no children, called it a ``life of injustices.’’ But then she found a way to improve their lives: start a business that would give the most vulnerable farmers something they could sell — seeds, the most essential building block for farming. With training and mentoring from the CGIAR Gender and Diversity Program, she started the company and began teaching smallholder farmers how to run productive operations. Then, she bought seeds from them. By mid-2008, she had 41 full-time staff and 39 part-time (70 percent were women), and she was buying from roughly 800 growers (the vast majority of them women).
Still, Okot, 41, wasn’t signaling defeat. That would be out of character. It would mean abandoning hundreds of people that she cares deeply about. Rather, it signaled another fight in a long line of them. She was born in Gulu, the middle child of seven. Her mother, a teacher, raised all of them alone.
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For her work, she was one of two people to receive the prestigious Yara Prize 2007 for a Green Revolution in Africa. She took her mother, Rose Ethel, to the award ceremony in Oslo. ``She was very happy,’’ Okot said. ``When she came back to Uganda, her friends treated her like the mother of the Savior!’’ She laughed, relishing the memory of giving something back to her mother — just as she has to other rural women. ``When I go see these women growers, the look on their faces says it all,’’ Okot said. ``All of them are sending children to school with money they make with their seed businesses. Some have even built houses from it.’’ Despite high bank interest rates, Okot recently built a new seed factory in Gulu. She hopes it helps spur a surge in farming. ``I just have to keep on fighting,’’ she said. ``It can be difficult — unless you have a passion that is beyond normal.’’
Seed entrepreneur Josephine Okot’s philosophy: ``I just have to keep on fighting.’’ PASSION BEYOND NORMAL . UGANDA
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Rwanda
Rainwater harvesting “We want to help farmers out of poverty”
NTARAMA, Rwanda — The farmers were skeptical. Who grew crops during the dry season? No one in their neighborhood had, nor any ancestor before them. But scientists were telling them they could do it — as long as they built a pond that collected rainwater during the rainy season. Sixty-two farmers in this tiny central African country agreed to give it a try — workers dug out ponds and put in pumps, and farmers planted vegetable seeds in the ground. And were they surprised. The well-irrigated vegetables produced bumper crops — and farmers had enough pond water left over to offer to neighbors, a gesture of goodwill and a gift of good business. ``You don’t see very many vegetables or fruits growing in this area because it is so dry,’’ said Aime Marie Kayigwisagye, 27, a mother of one, who stood next to the banks of her new rainwater collection pond, which was lined with a black plastic sheeting that retained the water. ``But during this dry season, I was getting cabbage. That didn’t happen before. I planted tomatoes after the cabbages on this same piece of land, and you can see what is happening.’’
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All around her bare feet lay fat tomatoes — red ones, orange ones and unripe green ones. In another field, new papaya trees were growing the juicy fruit, while dwarf mango trees were sprouting new growth, still another season away from production. In the coming days, Kayigwisagye said the garden would provide her with a surplus of tomatoes, which she planned to sell in the market at a time when almost no one in the area was growing fresh vegetables. Cabbage, which normally sold at USUS$0.10 per head, was selling for double that in the market. Tomatoes, which in season sold for US$0.75 per kilo, now were going for US$1.10. Kasigwisagye said the earnings from the vegetables allowed her to buy items she never had in her home.
After building a rainwater collection pond, farmer Edith Nyiramana says she has been able to greatly improve the nutritional value of the food eaten by her children in Ntarama, Rwanda. PASSION BEYOND NORMAL . RWANDA
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Like something as simple as sugar. ``I take it with my tea,’’ she said, almost apologetically. ``I really appreciate it.’’ The government of Rwanda underwrote the US$300,000 rainwater harvesting project, which was run in part by scientists at the World Agroforestry Centre (ICRAF). The ICRAF researchers provided technical support and training, supervised the use of the ponds and helped the farmers put in new mango and papaya trees. ``This project helps farmers in several ways,’’ said David Kagoro, ICRAF’s head of operations in Rwanda. ``By collecting the rainwater, it protects the soils from washing away, and it also provides water for them to use in irrigating their crops. Farmers can harvest crops even in drought conditions.’’ The project, which was completed in 2007, was so successful that the government almost immediately embarked on a US$200 million rainwater harvesting project that will span the next decade. The government quickly secured roughly half of the funding for the project. It plans to construct 190 lakes or small dams; each one will be able to irrigate about 100 hectares of land. The project overseen by ICRAF, by comparison, irrigated about a half-hectare per pond. ``The first project was very successful,’’ said Oda Gasinzigwa of the Ministry of Agriculture and Animal Resources, who helped coordinate the initiative. ``At the beginning, our farmers did not understand what would happen. They could not imagine that during the dry season they could grow vegetables. Now, with this security of water, they have new dreams.’’ The Rwanda project is just one of several water-harvesting initiatives started by Centers supported by CGIAR. Many of the most ambitious
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projects have been done by the International Water Management Institute (IWMI), including work on several water-harvesting projects in some of Africa’s biggest water basins — the Nile in East Africa, the Niger in West Africa and the Limpopo in southern Africa. ICRAF, working in concert with IWMI, also has had several successes in parts of Ethiopia and Kenya. In southern Kenya, for instance, a project that constructed 80 rainwater harvesting tanks resulted in multiple benefits for the farmers in a Maasai community. Most importantly, the tanks eliminated the need to walk far for water, saving women an average of three hours per day that had been used to collect water. Other benefits: the women’s health, which was no long compromised by walking long distances with 20 liter jugs; and the women’s safety, as they no longer faced sporadic attacks by wild animals, including leopards and buffalo, during their walks at dawn to collect the water. Maimbo Mabanga Malesu, ICRAF’s program coordinator for eastern and southern Africa and India, said that the projects needed to be substantially scaled up. ``Most governments are tapping less than 5 percent of the potential of capturing rainwater,’’ Malesu said. ``There is a great need for investment in terms of knowledge, skills and infrastructure to realize this potential.’’ In Ntarama, about 20 kilometers south of the capital of Kigali, the impact of the ponds seemed far reaching. Several villagers were considering putting in a pond themselves. ``The challenge is getting the equipment — as well as coming up with the money,’’ said Jean Pierre Mbonigaba, 38. The ponds cost about US$1,000 in
materials. ``You see so many improvements in people’s lives because of the ponds. There is more vegetable consumption in the homes. Buying soap used to be too expensive — but no longer for the people with the ponds. There’s a great interest in getting more of them.’’ Nearby, Edith Nyiramana, 33, said her vegetable garden had so far greatly improved the nutritional value of her meals at home. She has three children of her own, and also is supporting three orphans, whose parents died in the 1994 genocide, which left an estimated 1 million people dead. ``I’ve harvested onions, carrots, eggplants and tomatoes,’’ she said. ``Having them at home has really increased the variety of foods that I can feed to the children. I’m very happy about it.’’ Kogoro, the ICRAF researcher, said the project produced results quickly. He said it took just a few months during the dry season for farmers to see the benefits. ``The government here has been so supportive — and they don’t want to wait. They want to move fast,’’ he said. ``These ponds have produced vegetables and fruits that no one was seeing before. It’s really important work. We want to help farmers out of poverty, and this project is doing that.’’
Aime Marie Kayigwisagye, 27, has grown cabbages and tomatoes during dry season in Ntarama, Rwanda — something she could do only with the help from her new rainwater collection pond. PASSION BEYOND NORMAL . RWANDA
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Climbing beans
“Everywhere, every day … Beans, beans, beans”
CYANIKA, Rwanda — For a Rwandan, a meal without beans really isn’t a meal at all. A farmer who doesn’t plant beans is seen as foolish, even a bit reckless — after all, how will he or she put beans on the table twice a day? People in this small central African country love their beans so much that they eat, on average, 60 kilograms of them each year — the highest consumption in the world. And so when an agricultural extension agent brought seeds of high-yielding climbing beans to this hilly and intensively cultivated community in 1996, villagers viewed him as bearing a gift that was priceless. ``Before then, I was growing bush beans and climbing beans,’’ said Augustin Shiragahinda, 51, head of a local farmers association. ``But after the agent came, I switched only to climbing beans. How couldn’t you when you saw the new plants and how many beans each one produced?’’ Climbing beans had their first big breakthrough here in the mid-1980s. Since then, scientists at the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) have helped spread the pole beans to 18 countries in Africa. In many places, they didn’t need much of a sales job; the product spoke for itself,
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producing three to four times the yield of bush beans. ``When we brought new varieties of climbing beans to one place, a farmer told us, `It’s like God sent you from nowhere’,” said Robin Buruchara, a plant pathologist and CIAT’s coordinator for sub-Saharan Africa. ``It’s just like in cities: When you don’t have enough land, you construct high-rise buildings. So when you don’t have enough land for beans, you grow climbing beans.’’ The CGIAR has for over three decades sought ways to produce higher-yielding varieties of beans. CIAT, one of 15 Centers supported by the group, not only introduced climbing beans to Africa, but it also has done ground-breaking research to fight bean root rot, which plagued crops in Rwanda, western Kenya and beyond. Another CGIAR center, the International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA), introduced Faba beans
In the beautiful hills of western Rwanda, outside Cyanika, a farmer walks past mounds of newly planted climbing beans, which produce three to four times the yield of bush beans. PASSION BEYOND NORMAL . RWANDA
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and new lentil varieties in some of the poorest and drought-stricken areas of East Africa; research showed the Faba bean, which fetched higher prices at markets than other beans, helped reduce poverty by 12 percent in Sudan and 3 percent in Ethiopia.
in his cooperative switched immediately to climbing beans, and the positive results quickly followed. Before 1994, he said, his bush beans produced 400 kilograms per acre; now, his climbing beans yield 1.5 tons — nearly four times as much.
Serukata, the farmer, said beans have helped him and his wife, Alphonsine, buy two goats and put two children through secondary school. He said they have used several of ISAR’s varieties, which have greatly increased yield.
Around Africa, beans are a staple crop for many families. In Rwanda, that would be an understatement.
With his earnings from beans, Shiragahinda, like others here, has done well. He is building a new house (giving his old one to his son), purchased two cows (they produce 18 liters of milk a day, with 15 liters going to the market, three consumed at home) and paid the school fees for his eight children.
But for many farmers, the delight in bringing in more money from their crops is matched by the delight in eating beans for lunch and dinner.
The reasons for the bean love make a long list: It tastes good; it’s an important source of protein; beans don’t need expensive fertilizer; and there’s no shortage of Rwandans who will buy them in the market. Plus, many simply say it’s their traditional food — in other words, their mothers served it from the days they started to crawl. Periodic drought and pest infestations, though, sharply curtailed production at times. Then, the genocide in 1994, which left an estimated 1 million people dead, changed everything here — from the structure of power to social interaction to livelihoods. For farmers, one basic concern after the genocide was trying to make a living off the land once again. And one big problem was that the country’s stock of germplasm — the building blocks for creating new varieties — was virtually wiped out. Farmers had seeds, but most were poor quality. In 1995, CIAT scientists moved quickly to start bringing quality seeds and materials to Rwanda. They gathered improved bean germplasm kept by bean networks in eastern and central Africa. They brought new germplasm from Latin America. When the extension agent arrived in Cyanika, which is located in the shadows of the Volcanoes National Park in northwestern Rwanda, he was carrying seeds that originated from somewhere else, perhaps as far away as Mexico. Shiragahinda, the head of the farmers’ association, remembers the time well. He said almost everyone
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In the nearby village of Cyuve, farmer also have built their lives on beans. Emmanuel Serukata, 71, emerged from the back of his five-room house, where hundreds of dried stalks of climbing beans rested against two sides of the structure. ``He has beans everywhere!’’ said Mukishi M. Pyndji,a CIAT plant pathologist and coordinator of the Eastern and Central Africa Bean Research Network. ``You know, it’s true. There’s no life without beans in Rwanda.’’ ``Everywhere, every day,’’ said Felicite Nsanzabera, head of Rwanda’s bean program at the National Agricultural Research Institute (ISAR), who walked alongside him. ``Beans, beans, beans,’’ Pyndji replied. Both laughed heartily. Nsanzabera snapped open a bean pod with her fingers, revealing five beautiful red-speckled beans — technically known as RWV-296, one of the country’s highest producing climbing beans. ``Farmers go like this when they see a good variety,’’ she said playfully, opening another pod and pretending to slip the seeds in her shirt pocket. ``That’s how they multiply all over the country.’’
In Cyanika, Shiragahinda, the farmer, said he has had bean meals two times a day for as long as he could remember. ``Well, maybe I missed beans in some meals before the harvest during a drought in the 1990s,’’ he said. Sitting nearby, his wife, Janine Nyirabakwiye, quickly replied, ``No, you didn’t miss a day then.’’ ``Well, I think …’’ ``Never,’’ she said. ``You never had a day without beans.’’ The couple laughed, acknowledging the staple of their lives.
A farmer holds up a vine of a climbing bean plant, showing off its bounty.
Emmanuel Serukata, 71, says climbing beans have helped him and his wife buy two goats and put two children through secondary school. PASSION BEYOND NORMAL . RWANDA
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Tanzania
Seed systems
Getting seeds from one field to hundreds
MKONOO, Tanzania — It started with one farmer and a handful of chickpea seeds.
Almost a half-century ago, the farmer received the seeds from India, and when they produced mounds of chickpeas, he passed on seeds to five other farmers. Those five passed their seeds to 20, 20 passed them to 50, and soon chickpeas were the rage of this region in northern Tanzania near the famous Serengeti wildlife preserve. The Arusha region became a chickpea capital, and farmers used their profits to buy tractors, build houses and pay people to weed their crops. But this informal way of building a system of distributing seeds, beautiful in its simplicity, couldn’t shake one problem: diseases. Every season, diseases such as Fusarium wilt evolved and found new ways to attack what had now become the local chickpea variety. The crops literally wilted. Farmer groups, horrified, turned to experts — plant breeders supported by the CGIAR, who developed varieties that were resistant to diseases and pests. But the scientists had a problem of their own: They could create the most magnificent seed in the world, but how were they going to get it to farmers?
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Getting this right couldn’t be more important. It is hard to underestimate the value of seeds. During a natural disaster, African old-timers say, farmers will save their family first and their seeds second. Seeds are so vital that seed banks from around the world sent hundreds of thousands of varieties to a seed vault with great fanfare early in 2008; the vault was dug deep into a mountain in the Arctic Circle — experts wanted as cold and remote a place as possible to ensure the seeds would survive all manner of threats. The history of countries setting up seed systems, as well as donors giving seed aid during emergencies, is not sterling. Still, some successes have emerged, and given their importance, scientists are building on them. In Tanzania, and in several other African countries, researchers helped set up seed systems that allowed wide distribution of what they call source seeds — seeds produced with great care by breeders, who pass them on to farmers or companies for further multiplication. For many of these new seed systems, scientists gave the seeds away to farmers
In an ICRISAT test field of pigeonpeas in Sakila, Tanzania, Mary Zakaria, left, and Elishilia Mollel closely examine the different types of varieties in hopes of choosing one that will produce the biggest yield. PASSION BEYOND NORMAL . TANZANIA
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in return for one promise: Farmers would give at least as much seed to other farmers after their first harvest. In that sense, they were following in the footsteps of the farmer who planted the first chickpeas in Mkonoo. Several CGIAR Centers — the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT), the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT), and the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) among them — have spent more than two decades researching and helping build seed systems around Africa. ICRISAT, for instance, began operating a revolving fund in Malawi in 1999, into which revenue from the sale of seed has been pumped back to pre-finance production for the following season. Research found that the fund has had sustainable results: 80 percent of farmers in two regions in Malawi were able to access seed of CG7, an improved variety of groundnut, when it was first released and have since started adopting a newer variety with better disease resistance (Nsinjiro). In Mozambique as well, ICRISAT researchers helped build an entire seed system — all the way up to securing funding for a seed processing plant and then agreeing to temporarily operate the factory as it helped build local knowledge so that others can take over. In the village of Leonde, about 200 kilometers north of the capital, Maputo, ICRISAT scientists also have been working with an agricultural company, Mocfer Industrias Alimentares (MIA), to test new varieties of chickpeas and pigeonpeas in hopes of helping the industry build a seed business around these crops.
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``It’s the first time that we’ve tried to grow pigeonpea in the southern part of the country,’’ said Wilson Leonardo, a Maputo-based seed specialist at ICRISAT, as he looked over a test field with thriving pigeonpea plants. ``I’m really happy it’s doing well. Farmers here don’t trust the crop yet, so if you want to make a difference, you have to show that farmers can make money with it.’’ Standing nearby, Lorena Pedro Francisco, an MIA research technician, said the partnership with ICRISAT and Mozambique’s national agricultural research institute, IIAM, had greatly helped the company. ``They have helped us choose the best varieties,’’ she said. Richard Jones, ICRISAT’s assistant regional director for East and Southern Africa, said such relationships, while distant from laboratories, can be critical in developing a seed system chain — links that are made among scientists, producers, farmer breeders and buyers. ``We are looking at opportunities in each country,’’ Jones said one day in August 2008 in a field of chickpeas in Mkonoo. ``If you look at Malawi, which has been going on for several years, it shows the benefits of scaling-up strategies.’’ In Mkonoo, Godson Laisser, 65, father of eight, and a farmer for 45 years, said when researchers brought new chickpea varieties to test plots in recent seasons, he and others wanted the seeds as soon as possible. ``They were so much better than the old seed,’’ he said. But scientists brought them more than seed. They also taught families how to make different foods out of chickpea (sliced fried potatoes dipped in chickpea
flour is one favorite) and then helped them form an association. ``Forming an association grouped us together, and it helped us get a good price for the chickpeas,’’ Laisser said. ``We weren’t selling individually anymore.’’ The enterprise has gone so well that Mkonoo’s chickpea farmer association is looking into selling seeds across the border to Kenya. Jones said the farmers here are great entrepreneurs — a trait that helps build a seed system. ``We have done well with these new varieties,’’ Laisser said. ``But we hope to do even better.’’
Farmer Elishilia Mollel lifts a branch of pigeonpeas in Sakila, Tanzania.
Goats stream past an ICRISAT test field of chickpeas in Mkonoo, Tanzania.
A woman farmer walks through a field of chickpeas in Mkonoo, Tanzania while balancing water on her head, carrying a bowl of vegetables, and keeping a baby goat in check. PASSION BEYOND NORMAL . TANZANIA
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Said Silim SAKILA, Tanzania — In 1990, at the age of 40, Said N. Silim could look back on his life and see many accomplishments, especially considering the hardships of his childhood. He had grown up in rural northern Uganda, one of nine children. When he was still young, his father, a trader, died.
“How can you give back to society?”
He believed the only way out of poverty was through books, and so he worked his way through the education system, focusing on agriculture, graduating from Makerere University in Kampala and Khartoum University in Sudan, and then achieving his doctorate in crop physiology at the University of Nottingham in the UK. That education had helped him secure great jobs: first, as a crop physiologist and agronomist for the International Centre for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA), based in Syria; and then, in late 1989, he was posted to India with the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT).
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him — and helped initiate a process that led Silim and his family to Africa, where he thought he could give back. He has. Almost two decades later, Silim is ICRISAT’s eastern and southern Africa regional director, based in Nairobi, overseeing the work of 37 scientists in Kenya, Malawi, Mozambique and Zimbabwe. As a manager, he has helped train a cadre of African scientists and helped push programs to give greater economic power to women farmers.
But one day that next year, his five-year-old daughter, Amna, asked him, ``Dad, how can you give back to society?’’
But his research work has attracted wider notice. Silim was one of the first field scientists in Africa to recognize that the temperatures were warming in many areas on the continent. As early as 1994, only three years after moving back to Africa, he began studying climate change’s impact on crops.
She apparently had been hearing him talk about his desire to do more. The question stopped
He examined the complex connections of temperature, crop flowering, elevation and duration of sunlight,
using the crop pigeonpea — a popular food in Southeast Asia that makes dal. Silim poured over rainfall patterns in eastern Kenya and northern Tanzania. ``The patterns were changing quite a bit,’’ he said. ``The durations were becoming shorter. At that time, no one was talking about climate change. But I could already see that we had to target different varieties for changing environments. We needed a suite of varieties that we knew could be adapted to changing temperatures and rainfall.’’ Silim and his team of scientists collected pigeonpea germplasm from different parts of the region. They developed different varieties that match local conditions — as well as local needs. Here in northern Tanzania, for instance, many farmers plant pigeonpea alongside maize. They want a variety that will blossom after they harvest the maize, not beforehand. In a demonstration field in Sakila, Silim walked among pigeonpea plants, which towered over him. He had helped create two of the varieties. So this was his field, and farmers told him they wanted his seeds. ``The impact is there,’’ he said later. ``But one of the things I tell people is that success is 10 percent intelligence and 90 percent really putting a lot of effort into it. I‘m not intelligent. I’m just hard working.’’
Many years ago, Dr. Said N. Silim’s daughter asked him: `Dad how can you give back to society?’ He says he has spent the years since answering her with his actions. PASSION BEYOND NORMAL . TANZANIA
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Malawi
Fish ponds
Raising fish to feed the orphans
CHIUNDA, Malawi — In this green village of flowering trees and shrubs, bordered to the west by the majestic Zomba Mountains, the bicycles were the first tip-off that something had gone well. It wasn’t the condition of the bikes; many had chipped paint and fenders that rattled. It was the number of them. Dozens of people were out riding. And in this part of rural southern Malawi, about an hour north of Blantyre, that was unusual. Owning a bike means there’s enough money to feed the children, buy them clothes and pay school fees — often a struggle here. The reason for this relative wealth lies in plain view along the road: a series of 47 fish ponds, owned by 32 farmers. They serve as a major source of income and nutrition for the majority of people in Chiunda, population 225. ``Because of our fish ponds, all of these people bought bicycles, and most of us have cell phones,’’ said Agnes Kanyema, 59, a retired schoolteacher. ``Two of us even have televisions in our houses! But most importantly, we don’t starve anymore, and we don’t have boys going into town to find work. They find employment here, and it is better for them.’’
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The success in fish farming here and several dozen other villages stemmed from an idea by researchers with the WorldFish Center. In 2003, they studied past efforts to start these ponds, learned why other projects failed and determined that they could do much better. They found that existing fish ponds in Malawi yielded an average of one ton of fish per hectare per year, compared to up to 20 tons per hectare per year in Asia. They laid out three basic principles: One, teach farmers how fish farming could be an integral part of their operations, including becoming a new source of fertilizer and irrigation for crops. Two, make the project sustainable by giving 1,000 small fish to each farmer, who would then pass on 1,000 small fish to other farmers after the fish had repopulated. And three, show farmers that fish not only provide a great source of nutrition for themselves
In the village of Mawila, Malawi, young boys captured a net-full of fish — and then showed off their catch. PASSION BEYOND NORMAL . MALAWI
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but also can fetch a high price in the market if they learn to grow large fish with proper feed. Then they found a partner — World Vision, an international humanitarian aid organization — and defined who primarily would benefit: those affected by the AIDS epidemic, particularly the legions of orphans left behind. WorldFish scientists saw the program as a new way to give economic and health benefits to those affected by AIDS. ``The key issue for us was supplying high-quality protein to families,’’ said Dr. Daniel Jamu, the regional director for WorldFish in eastern and southern Africa. ``But it was also important that we increase the yields of the fish ponds, so they could help HIV-affected households earn money.’’ The positive results came swiftly: In roughly three years, the project, on average, doubled the income for 1,200 families affected by HIV and AIDS in Malawi, as well as greatly increasing fish and vegetable consumption among people in rural communities. Families increased their fresh fish consumption by 150 percent, boosting their intake of protein, calcium, vitamin A and micronutrients. In 2005, the World Bank cited the program’s success, giving it a US$20,000 Development Marketplace award for offering a cutting-edge solution to pressing social and economic concerns.
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In Chiunda, the project not only helped the diets and livelihoods of families but also played an important role in bringing people closer together. Villagers formed the Mawila Fish Farmers Club, set a membership fee of 300 kwachas (US$2.25) and then helped each other. It is hard work to dig fish ponds, which are a meter deep and occupy an area of about 200 square meters. But people here and elsewhere joined together to dig each other’s ponds. ``We had 30 members out digging together, and they would build three ponds in two weeks,’’ Kanyema said outside her house. ``We work from morning to sunset. Females do all the cooking, men the digging.’’ The help doesn’t end there. ``One day there was a very heavy rain. One of my ponds was damaged,’’ she said. ``When people saw the problem, they came in large numbers, and all of us repaired the pond.’’ Asan Chiunda, the chief of the village, which is named after him, stood next to one of his ponds, which he had just drained. Two boys were loosening rich dirt with their shovels; they would eventually take the nutrient-rich soil to the chief’s maize fields. Because of the fertilizer and better irrigation, some farmers now are harvesting three plantings of maize a year instead of two.
``The village is changing because of these fish ponds,’’ the chief said. ``People have money now. They have enough food. Some even have new roofs with iron sheets!’’ But the villagers know they must keep close watch over the ponds — especially monitoring the source of water, which comes from the nearby Zomba Mountains. Joseph Nagoli, a senior research analyst at WorldFish, said that villagers now are trying to make sure others don’t cut down trees for charcoal on the mountains, which creates erosion and depletes the water source. ``People are really understanding why they need to conserve the forests on the mountain,’’ he said. The other issue is the frequent hardships experienced by villagers. Kanyema, the former schoolteacher, was preparing a funeral on the next day for a woman named Mariana, who died of an AIDS-related illness in the nearby village of Kapito. Kanyema said the woman, who was not married, left four orphans. All were moving in with a relative in Chiunda village. ``We will do our best for those children,’’ she said. ``We now have to come together to talk about how we can help. But we know that we can help them — because of the fish.’’
A farmer repairs a leak in his fish pond in Mawila, Malawi.
A young boy prepares to fish in Mawila, Malawi; the fish have become a major source of protein in villagers’ diets.
Fitting neatly in the palms of his hands, a young boy shows his catch of fish in Mawila, which will be his dinner that night.
In Mawila, farmers catch fish by dragging long nets through the ponds, aided by boys who tug the nets along to the other side.
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Judith Harry Mkanda, Malawi — Women surrounded Judith Harry. In her field in the western Malawi village of Mkanda, her mother, daughter and two women villagers patiently twisted groundnuts off vines. In her front yard, next to the orangered clay road, women stood talking about the prices at market for crops. But inside her brick house, a lone man was hunched over — her husband, who was helping tie up bales of tobacco.
“I’m always thinking ahead.”
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Asked about his help, Judith smiled. ``Don’t give him too much credit,’’ she said. ``We were married only a month ago. I’ve been doing this all alone for years.’’
``Judith is a risk taker,’’ said Harliex Chimutu, a business manager for NASFAM, a national organization of farmers. ``Whenever there’s a new innovation, she’s willing to try.’’
Ever since she was in her teens, when she left school to support her family and also when she gave birth to her daughter, Judith has been very much on her own. But even with a strong will to succeed, her advancement wasn’t fully realized until the late 1990s, when she met with researchers from the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT).
The CG-7 variety flourished in her fields. In 2002, she became the highest groundnut producer in NASFAM’s Mchinji Association, harvesting more than 4,000 kilograms of the crop. That year, the association’s 15,000 members elected her as their chairperson. She was just 28, a single parent supporting not only her daughter but two orphans and her mother.
The scientists introduced her to new varieties of groundnuts, including a drought-resistance type called CG-7. Judith and a few other farmers, sensing opportunity, embraced it, even though many neighbors continued growing the traditional varieties.
Only five years earlier, she had almost nothing to her name. Now, not only was she leading a large farm organization and out-producing other farmers, but marketers chose to put a picture of Judith on packages of groundnuts sent to Europe. She had
become the face of groundnuts from Malawi to the larger world. She gave credit to the ICRISAT researchers. After introducing her to new varieties of groundnuts, they also educated her about markets and how to get updated information on the price of crops. That gave her newfound bargaining power and knowledge. ``We learned new ways of farming from them,’’ she said. ``And they helped us get a better price for groundnuts.’’ On one part of Judith’s 11 hectares of farmland, her mother, Esther Banda, 68, marveled at the changes in farming since she was a young woman. Now, she said, women farmers had a chance to flourish. ``In the old days, you could not speak freely,’’ Esther said. ``I’m not surprised at her success, because now we can organize more easily.’’ Her daughter said the change results from a number of factors. But foremost, Judith said, a farmer has to be passionate about the work. ``I love farming,’’ she said, walking across her fields of maize, tobacco, groundnuts, pumpkin and cassava. ``I love everything about it. I’m always thinking ahead.’’ So what’s next for her? Judith, 33, knew immediately. ``Refining groundnuts into cooking oil,’’ she said. ``Then I will sell it. I hear there’s a good market.’’
Judith Harry, a farmer-entrepreneur who grows groundnuts, says she learned ``new ways of farming’’ from ICRISAT researchers. PASSION BEYOND NORMAL . MALAWI
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Mozambique
Sweet potatoes The hidden wonders of an orange root
BOANE, Mozambique — Farmers hoe dirt to the horizon here, only a few kilometers south of Maputo, the capital. A canal delivers water to irrigate the crops. And in the midday heat, people seek each other’s company under the broad canopies of mango trees. But first appearances are deceiving in Boane. It has recently undergone great change, and one of the unlikely drivers is an orange root growing deep in the soil — sweet potatoes.
A group of researchers at the International Potato Center (CIP), based in Peru, has been seeking wider cultivation of the sweet potato across Africa because of its marketing potential and nutritional benefits. The orange-fleshed sweet potato contains high quantities of vitamin A; vitamin A deficiency — an estimated 71 percent of Mozambique’s children under the age of five have it — can stunt growth, weaken immunity, increase mortality and cause a condition that leads to blindness. Following the 2000 floods in Mozambique, which devastated farms over wide swaths of the countryand disrupted informal and formal seed systems, researchers grasped opportunity out of disaster. With so many farmers starting anew, they promoted something new: the sweet potato, which had been grown only in small quantities before.
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In Boane, researchers showed farmers dozens of test varieties. The village’s farmer cooperative, consisting of 38 families, was sold. ``It was easy to persuade us,’’ said Alfredo Chavanguane, 60, the cooperative’s secretary. ``If you see where it’s grown, you can see how well it does. In the past, we were mainly producing maize. But we realized we could do both. I think the sweet potato is really going to revolutionize farming in this place.’’ But the success of the sweet potato here and in many communities in Mozambique and other African countries didn’t come simply. Researchers devised a multi-faceted strategy. First, scientists from CIP and the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA) entered the realm of social marketing in an attempt to
In a busy market in Bobole, Mozambique, a woman peddler sells some of her hottest items: orange-fleshed sweet potato.
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figure out ways to promote sweet potatoes to the general population. Maria Isabel Andrade, 50, a Maputo-based sweet potato breeder and seed system specialist at CIP, took on an unofficial title in the campaign: sweet potato cheerleader. Orange became the color of her life. She ordered thousands of orange T-shirts and orange wrap-around skirts as giveaways. She orchestrated orange-flesh sweet potato media campaigns in newspapers and radios. She hired an artist to paint orange murals depicting sweet potato-shaped humans that are smiling as they farm. She painted her file cabinet orange. She even got a bright orange Toyota Land Cruiser. ``You know, you’ve got to believe in what you do,’’ she said, explaining herself. ``Then people will go with you.’’ CIP scientists also set out to document sweet potatoes’ benefits to children whose families were growing the crop. In a study led by Jan Low, CIP’s sub-Saharan Africa regional leader in Nairobi, researchers found over a two-year period in the central Mozambique province of Zambezia that their efforts paid off in educating parents about the crop’s nutritional benefits. The sweet potato not only has beta-carotene, the precursor of vitamin A, but also is a good source of vitamin C, manganese, copper, dietary fiber, vitamin B6, potassium and iron. Children living in households that were taught about the benefits of sweet potato consumed
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nearly eight times more vitamin A than children in households that were taught nothing. At the end of the study, prevalence of wasting and low weight for age were substantially higher in the group that hadn’t been encouraged to eat sweet potato — 6 percent were diagnosed as wasting, compared to 3 percent in the educated group, and 34 percent had low weight for their age, compared to 24 percent in the trained group. Then, with a US$3.5 million grant from the US Agency for International Development and the government of Mozambique, CIP and IITA distributed 813,568 sweet potato cuttings for planting from 2000 to 2007 to families around the country. Nearly 500 hectares were planted for seed, resulting in 2.9 million kilograms of cuttings. They also used the money to educate farmers on the multiple uses of sweet potatoes, including bread, flour, biscuits, fries, pudding and cake. People also eat sweet potato leaves. At Alianca Padaria, a Maputo bakery, the owners decided to start baking sweet potato bread after a CIP outreach specialist, Cheila Martins, persuaded them that customers would like it. After successful sweet potato bread projects in upland districts in Mozambique, Martins was able to sign up 10 bakeries around the country to start as well. The Alianca bakers, like the others, used sweet potato flesh, not flour, because, as Andrade told them, the flesh contained more vitamin A than the processed orange-fleshed sweet potato flour. ``This bread is another option for people here — and maybe a
cheaper one because of the rising price of wheat flour,’’ said Victor Miguel, one of the bakery owners. On the first day of sales, 90 sweet potato rolls sold out in a matter of minutes. ``The taste is very good,’’ said baker Elias Manhique, 35. ``And it’s a very practical bread. You don’t need to add butter or jam. You just eat it. It tastes that good.’’ In the village of Boane, such reviews are good news. Bakeries give farmers another market for their sweet potatoes. The local cooperative will be planting five hectares of sweet potatoes in 2008, double the amount from the previous year. Sweet potatoes, along with high-yielding tomatoes, cabbage, pepper and cucumber, have helped elevate the standard of living for the members of the cooperative. They are still far from rich — not one owns a car — but their horizons have expanded. In previous years, just two people from the families belonging to the cooperative studied at a university, but now six young adults are getting ready to enter higher education. One benefit was directly attributable to the sweet potato: for children, it has become an important part of their diet. ``I’m starting to feed sweet potato to my baby,’’ said Deolinda Charles, 32, who carried her four-month-old baby, Carlos, on her back inside a wrap. ``The researchers told me that it would help him grow up well, that he would get vitamin A from it. That makes me very happy.’’
In the village of Boane, Mozambique, Alice Machava, right, helps harvest sweet potatoes, which have improved the finances of her farmers’ cooperative.
Maria Isabel Andrade, a CIP scientist, says sweet potatoes have many benefits — even using them to bake bread.
Sweet potatoes can be an important source of Vitamin A for children. Deolinda Chad, left, says she is starting to feed sweet potato to her baby, Carlos. PASSION BEYOND NORMAL . MOZAMBIQUE
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Zimbabwe
Jemimah Njuki Jemimah Njuki remembers well the woman in Malawi who named her son after a legume.
“There is a way out of poverty”
She called him Nyemba, which in Chichewa means beans. The mother’s reason was simple: After Njuki’s project helped her find better markets for her beans, the woman’s standard of living greatly improved — so much that she wanted to celebrate it every time she would call her child’s name. ``She said it completely changed her,’’ said Njuki, based in Zimbabwe. ``When we first held a meeting of women farmers, she didn’t come because she had nothing to wear. But after she started getting better prices for her beans, she came to the next meeting wearing a white blouse, a skirt, and shoes — she was a transformed person.’’ Njuki, 36, has a doctorate in development studies, and her work is based out in the fields with the farmers. Her days as a social scientist with the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) have given her a perspective close to the land. She has been working with the Enabling Rural Innovation (ERI) initiative, which has spread in only six years to 10 countries and has helped several thousand groups of farmers through partnerships with national
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research and development organizations. Its main focus has been to teach farmers, especially women, to find new markets themselves and participate in research and development. ``You have to build farmers’ capacity so they can go out and look for markets,’’ she said during a visit to South Africa. “They have to organize and produce what the market needs.’’ She mentioned a group of pig farmers in Malawi who were trained through the program. ``They were very ambitious’’ she said. ``They went to the supermarkets, they went to a pork factory, and then they started talking to NGOs. They learned that the NGOs wanted to buy piglets to give to other farmers. We never envisioned they would be selling piglets to NGOs, but that is what they are doing.’’ In addition, she said, the NGOs now hire the experienced pig farmers to teach the novices how to raise pigs — at a wage equal to their profits in selling piglets. The farmers now make
more than US$1,000 a year, roughly triple their earlier incomes. Njuki was the seventh of eight children born to a farm family in a central Kenya village. ``We weren’t badly off, but we weren’t rich either,’’ she said. She said that background of growing up amid poverty made her sensitive to those who have little — especially other women who farm. They motivate her. ``When I go to a village and see the poverty there, I know they don’t have to live that way,’’ she said. ``There is a way out of that poverty. If you put money into the hands of women, that money goes a long way to improving the household. Children, especially girls, get to go to school. This is the way to improve their lives.’’
Dr. Jemimah Njuki, a CIAT social scientist based in Zimbabwe, says the way to improve lives in villages is to ``put money in the hands of women.’’ PASSION BEYOND NORMAL . ZIMBABWE
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Biographies John Donnelly John Donnelly is a writer based in Washington, D.C., specializing in international development issues that range from agricultural practices in the developing world to global health. He is currently vice president and senior editor at Burness Communications in Bethesda, Maryland. From 1999 to early 2008, he was a reporter with The Boston Globe. He worked for six years in the newspaper’s Washington bureau and for three years based in Africa, opening it’s first-ever bureau on the continent. Prior to joining the Globe, he worked for four years based in Jerusalem and Cairo covering the Middle East for Knight Ridder and the Miami Herald. He has won many awards for his work, including being part of the Pulitzer Prize-winning coverage of Hurricane Andrew for the Miami Herald; and individual awards from the Global Health Council, RESULTS, InterAction and the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene. He was a Kaiser Family Foundation media fellow in 2007-08. He is married to Laura Hambleton, and they live with their three children in Chevy Chase, Maryland.
Dominic Chavez Since 1991, free-lance photographer Dominic Chavez has covered a wide range of domestic and international issues. From 1997 to 2008, he was a staff photographer at The Boston Globe. He has reported from the front lines of Iraq and Afghanistan to the war-torn streets of Angola. He has recorded the effects of the ongoing drug war in Colombia and in the United States, and documented many health issues facing the nations of Africa. Presently, he is focusing on domestic and global health. He has received many awards for his work, including the Boston Press Photographers Association (BPPA) photographer of the year in 2000; and first place in the Pictures of the Year International Competition (POY) for his work during the Iraq War in 2004. Chavez lives in Chelsea, Massachusetts, with his wife Silvia Lopez Chavez.
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PASSION BEYOND NORMAL . BIOGRAPHIES
CGIAR Members African Development Bank Arab Fund for Economic and Social Development Asian Development Bank Australia Austria Bangladesh Belgium Brazil Canada
China Colombia Commission of the European Community Côte d’Ivoire Denmark Arab Republic of Egypt Finland Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations Ford Foundation
France Germany Gulf Cooperation Council India Indonesia Inter-American Development Bank International Development Research Centre International Fund for Agricultural Development
Islamic Republic of Iran Ireland Israel Italy Japan Kellogg Foundation Kenya Republic of Korea Luxembourg Malaysia Mexico Morocco
Netherlands New Zealand Nigeria Norway OPEC Fund for International Development Pakistan Peru Philippines Portugal Rockefeller Foundation
Romania Russian Federation South Africa Spain Sweden Switzerland Syngenta Foundation for Sustainable Agriculture Syrian Arab Republic Thailand Turkey Uganda
United Kingdom United Nations Development Programme United Nations Environment Programme United States of America World Bank
cgiar
CGIAR Secretariat A Unit of the CGIAR System Office 1818 H Street, NW Washington, DC 20433 USA t: 1 202 473 8951 f: 1 202 473 8110 e: cgiar@cgiar.org
October 2008
Passion Beyond Normal: how farmers and reseachers are finding solutions to africa’s Hunger
www.cgiar.org
By John Donnelly
Photography by Dominic Chavez