Adapting maize production to climate change in sub-Saharan Africa

Cairns, Jill E.; Hellin, Jon; Sonder, Kai; Araus, José Luís; MacRobert, John; Thierfelder, Christian; Prasanna, B. M.

doi:10.1007/s12571-013-0256-x

Cited by 377 publications

(291 citation statements)

References 63 publications

(69 reference statements)

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“…Policymakers also support this approach: a UN General Assembly resolution in 2009 emphasized development of crop varieties that tolerate environmental stresses, including drought (Westengen and Brysting 2014). New varieties of staple crops, many still under development, provide drought and heat tolerance, as well as early maturation (Cairns et al 2013;Karaba et al 2007). The reviewed studies reveal that improved short-season varieties were available and farmers were growing them to escape drought (Thomas et al 2007;Fosu-Mensah et al 2012;Fisher and Snapp 2014;Westengen and Brysting 2014).…”

Section: Switching Crop Varietiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Drought tolerant maize for farmer adaptation to drought in sub-Saharan Africa: Determinants of adoption in eastern and southern Africa

Fisher

Abate

Lunduka³

et al. 2015

Climatic Change

327

231

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In sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), Bmaize is life,^due to its importance to food security and economic wellbeing. Around 40 % of Africa's maize-growing area faces occasional drought stress, resulting in yield losses of 10-25 %. Around 25 % of the maize crop suffers frequent drought, with losses of up to half the harvest. To reduce vulnerability and improve food security, the Drought Tolerant Maize for Africa (DTMA) project has made releases of 160 drought tolerant (DT) maize varieties between 2007 and 2013. These have been tested in experimental and farmers' fields, and disseminated to farmers in 13 African countries through national agricultural research systems and private seed companies. Yields of the new varieties are superior to those of currently available commercial maize varieties under both stress and optimum growing conditions. Although the benefits of DT maize for African farmers have been repeatedly predicted, realization of those benefits depends on farmer uptake, which has received limited empirical study. We use new plot-level data from surveys of 3,700 farm households in six countries (Ethiopia, Tanzania, Uganda, Malawi, Zambia, and Zimbabwe) to measure DT maize adoption rates and their determinants. The data reveal considerable inter- country variation in farmer uptake of DT maize, from 9 % of maize plots in Zimbabwe to 61 % in Malawi. The major barriers to adoption include unavailability of improved seed, inadequate information, lack of resources, high seed price, and perceived attributes of different varieties. Based on the results, we recommend that seed companies and agro-dealers ensure adequate supply of DT maize seed in local markets and sell seed in affordable micro-packs (1 or 2 kg). Furthermore, the DTMA project and partners should ramp up promotional efforts to ensure widespread awareness and understanding of the benefits of the new DT maize varieties.Climatic Change (2015) 133:283-299 DOI 10.1007/s10584-015-1459-2 Electronic

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Section: Switching Crop Varietiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Drought tolerant maize for farmer adaptation to drought in sub-Saharan Africa: Determinants of adoption in eastern and southern Africa

Fisher

Abate

Lunduka³

et al. 2015

Climatic Change

327

231

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“…Crop breeders have long been aware of the need to develop new crop varieties that are suited to future climates, particularly with respect to heat and drought stress 8,9 . Heat stress impacts are evident in our analysis.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Current warming will reduce yields unless maize breeding and seed systems adapt immediately

et al. 2016

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The development of crop varieties that are better suited to new climatic conditions is vital for future food production 1,2 . Increases in mean temperature accelerate crop development, resulting in shorter crop durations and reduced time to accumulate biomass and yield 3,4 . The process of breeding, delivery and adoption (BDA) of new maize varieties can take up to 30 years. Here, we assess for the first time the implications of warming during the BDA process by using five bias-corrected global climate models and four representative concentration pathways with realistic scenarios of maize BDA times in Africa. The results show that the projected di erence in temperature between the start and end of the maize BDA cycle results in shorter crop durations that are outside current variability. Both adaptation and mitigation can reduce duration loss. In particular, climate projections have the potential to provide target elevated temperatures for breeding. Whilst options for reducing BDA time are highly context dependent, common threads include improved recording and sharing of data across regions for the whole BDA cycle, streamlining of regulation, and capacity building. Finally, we show that the results have implications for maize across the tropics, where similar shortening of duration is projected.By 2050 the majority of African countries will have significant experience of novel climates 1 . However, precise information as to when novel climates will occur has not been available until the recent development of techniques to identify the time of emergence of climate change signals 5,6 . These techniques quantify the signal of a change in climate relative to the background 'noise' of current climate variability. Metrics that capture the response of crops to single or multiple aspects of weather or climate (crop-climate indices 7 ) are another tool that has been developed intensively in recent years. Alongside crop yield modelling, these techniques now enable assessments of the projected times at which climate change will alter crop productivity. These alterations are mediated through both crop growth (that is, photosynthesis and biomass accumulation) and development (phenological and morphological responses).We use seven crop-climate indices (Supplementary Table S2) to identify when heat stress, drought stress and crop duration (that is, time from germination to maturity) become systematically and significantly outside the ranges at present experienced by maize cultivation in sub-Saharan Africa. Crop breeders have long been aware of the need to develop new crop varieties that are suited to future climates, particularly with respect to heat and drought stress 8,9 . Heat stress impacts are evident in our analysis. However, heat stress indices are not sufficiently constrained at present (that is, uncertainty in their values is too great) for detection of a climate change signal; only the signal in crop duration changes exceeded the noise of climate variability and thus showed a time of emergence within this century (see...

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“…Breeding for developing stress tolerance in crop plants is the most important method to manage with growing environmental tasks in agriculture. Significant investigation has been carried out for dissecting plant responses to environmental stresses (Urano et al, 2009;Obata and Fernie, 2012), but the interactions amongst diverse stresses and what mechanism controls inert-stress tolerance mechanism has been far less studied (Cairns et al, 2013;Suzuki et al, 2013). Due to complexity, especially stereo-chemical orientations of atoms, the structure of metabolites is less understood than genes and proteins (Lewis and Garrod, 2002).…”

Section: Synergistic Effects Of Metabolites On Stress Tolerancementioning

confidence: 99%

Advances in detection of stress tolerance in plants through metabolomics approaches

Khan¹,

Ali²,

Shahid³

et al. 2017

Plant Omics

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Heat and drought stresses are presently the principal risk on world's food quantity, limiting yield. Both of these two stresses affect plants metabolism, physiological and morphological processes, which ultimately reduces the productivity. The plant cell develops different stress induced self-defence mechanisms to reduce the effect of stresses. These defence mechanisms are developed by modifying gene expression pattern, which results in qualitative and quantitative deviations in proteins synthesis, leading to the modulation of certain metabolic and defensive pathways. New metabolic profiling technologies offer a great opportunity for biologist to understand defence mechanism of plants under stress conditions. Metabolomics technologies presently enabled the using of different multi-variate analyses, generated from various hyphenated and chromatographic discovery systems, such as gas or liquid chromatography together with mass spectrometry, or nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) based methods. Investigation and mining of metabolomics data can be done through a blend of different statistical methods, such as independent component analysis and analysis of variance. Metabolomics in combination with gene expression, protein interaction and other different regulatory pathways can be useful to diverse organisms with trivial alterations. In recent time, this technology has been used to investigate drought tolerance in plant crops to find particular stress related patterns in metabolic expression. These studies identified the vital roles of primary and secondary metabolites associated with abiotic stress tolerance.

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Adapting maize production to climate change in sub-Saharan Africa

Cited by 377 publications

References 63 publications

Drought tolerant maize for farmer adaptation to drought in sub-Saharan Africa: Determinants of adoption in eastern and southern Africa

Drought tolerant maize for farmer adaptation to drought in sub-Saharan Africa: Determinants of adoption in eastern and southern Africa

Current warming will reduce yields unless maize breeding and seed systems adapt immediately

Advances in detection of stress tolerance in plants through metabolomics approaches

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