Maize Revolutions in Sub-Saharan Africa

By M. Smale, D. Byerlee, T. Jayne. 2011

287 citations recorded by the source corpus.

There have been numerous episodes of widespread adoption of improved seed and long-term achievements in the development of the maize seed industry in Sub-Saharan Africa. This summary takes a circumspect view of technical change in maize production. Adoption of improved seed has continued to rise gradually, now representing an estimated 44 percent of maize area in Eastern and Southern Africa (outside South Africa), and 60 percent of maize area in West and Central Africa. Use of fertilizer and restorative crop management practices remains relatively low and inefficient. An array of extension models has been tested and a combination of approaches will be needed to reach maize producers in heterogeneous agricultural environments. Yield growth overall has been 1 percent over the past half-century, although this figure masks the high variability in maize yields, as well as improvements in resistance to disease and abiotic pressures that would have caused yield decline in the absence of maize breeding progress. The authors argue that conducive policies are equally, if not more, important for maize productivity in the region than the development of new technology and techniques. Currently popular, voucher-based subsidies can “crowd out” the private sector and could be fiscally unsustainable.

Subfields: General Agricultural and Biological Sciences, Soil Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e7ca7e7fde7a212d5ec70194449dc3f73e687a05

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In General Agricultural and Biological Sciences

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Citations in the corpus

Integrated Seed Sector Development in Africa: A Basis for Seed Policy and Law (2013, background): “However, for most other crops and countries in other regions of the continent, the seed system remains at stage 1 or stage 2 of seed sector development in the informal seed supply systems (Smale et al. 2011).”
Adoption of improved maize variety among farm households in the northern region of Ghana (2017, methodology): “The Tobit model and the fractional response model Following Taha (2007) and Awotide et al.”
Seed systems smallholder farmers use (2016, background): “…in farmers’ sourcing of maize seed, analysis was explicitly narrowed to countries within the data set where: a) maize is the most important crop, as measured in hectares sown (Smale et al. 2011) and where: b) agro-dealer networks are relatively more developed (Chisinga 2011; Odame and Muange 2011).”
Organic Farming and Small-Scale Farmers: Main Opportunities and Challenges (2017, background): “This trend in some regions like sub-Saharan Africa is as low as 25% of the 544 population (Smale et al., 2011).”
Understanding the agricultural input landscape in Sub-Saharan Africa : recent plot, household, and community-level evidence (2014, unknown): “For example, for maize, Smale, Byerlee, and Jayne (2011) aggregate data from 1 One major reason for different rates of use found throughout studies, we find, is that some researchers refer to the total kilograms of inorganic fertilizer applied while others refer to only the actual nutrient…”
Integrated Seed Sector Development in Africa: A Conceptual Framework for Creating Coherence Between Practices, Programs, and Policies (2012, background): “Smale, Byerlee, and Jayne (2011) and Scoones and Thompson (2011) question whether the maize model is economically viable and institutionally sustainable, and point out that it is not applicable to other seed systems or food crops.”
The Drivers of Maize Area Expansion in Sub-Saharan Africa. How Policies to Boost Maize Production Overlook the Interests of Smallholder Farmers (2020, unknown): “Unlike high-income countries, where more than 70% of maize is grown for livestock feed, in subSaharan Africa, more than two-thirds of produced maize is grown for human consumption [9,16].”