More than 300 million people in Africa depend on maize as their main food source, but it is a crop severely affected by occasional drought in the areas where it is grown.
With funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Howard G. Buffett Foundation, the African Agriculture Technology Fund is leading a public/private partnership to develop drought-tolerant maize using conventional breeding, market-assisted breeding and biotechnology.
The countries participating are Kenya, Mozambique, South Africa, Tanzania and Uganda.
Monsanto is providing proprietary germplasm and advanced breeding tools and expertise, as well as so-called ‘drought-tolerance transgenes’ developed in collaboration with the large agrochemical company BASF.
The new varieties developed by the project will be distributed to seed companies and made available to smallholder farmers. The companies and farmers participating in the scheme will contribute in field testing, seed multiplication and distribution.
