Participatory maize improvement for enhancing yield and production

Abstract

Most of the data on different types of farmer participation in selection of better plant ideotypes suggest that there is little to lose and much to gain by involving farmers, and more generally the users, in the process of plant breeding. Decentralized-participatory plant breeding should not be seen as “an alternative” type of plant breeding, but rather as an approach to specifically address situations such as marginal environments, or where there is a variety of different requirements (quality, crop duration, management, etc.). In the past, researchers have relied heavily on the extension department of the Ministry of Agriculture to transfer technologies to the farmers. Without intensive interaction with farmers in the development of maize varieties, there is a possibility of ignoring certain characteristics that would be of importance to farmers in their decision making process of whether to adopt a variety or not. In the very poor, rain-fed rice-growing areas of South Asia that the green revolution passed by, participatory plant breeding is now paying off with strong early adoption of farmer selected varieties that provide 40% higher yields in farmers’ fields. The approach needs to be more widely tested in the heterogeneous rain-fed environments of Africa, where involving farmers, especially women farmers, in selecting varieties has shown early successes for beans, maize and rice. The cost effectiveness of the approach for wider use also needs to be evaluated.