Producing drought tolerant hybrids for Water Efficient Maize for Africa


Image by CIMMYT
Joel Mbithi, farm manager of the Kenya Agricultural Research Institute’s Kiboko Research Station, on an experimental maize plot. He collaborates in producing drought tolerant top-cross hybrids as part of the Water Efficient Maize for Africa (WEMA) project. This is run by the African Agricultural Technology Foundation (AATF) in partnership with Monsanto and CIMMYT, which supplies germplasm and expertise.

Photo credit: Anne Wangalachi/CIMMYT.

Somalia Suffers from Worst Drought in Century


Image by United Nations Photo
A woman holding her young malnourished baby queues for food at the Badbado camp for Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs). Famine has been declared in two regions of southern Somalia – southern Bakool and Lower Shabelle. The United Nations indicates that 3.7 million people across the country, that’s nearly half of the Somali population, are now in crisis and in urgent need of assistance. An estimated 2.8 million of those are in the south.
Photo ID 480645. 20/07/2011. Mogadishu, Somalia. UN Photo/Stuart Price. www.unmultimedia.org/photo/

Countries in the Sahel region of Africa are facing chronic drought, which human rights advocates say is causing a severe food crisis. In Chad, humanitarian experts estimate tens of thousands of children will experience malnutrition and hunger this year. For more, UN Radio’s Derrick Mbatha spoke with Bruno Maes with the United Nations Children’s Fund. More at fsrn.org
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Ears of ZM 309, drought tolerant maize variety for Southern Africa


Image by CIMMYT
Ears of the drought tolerant maize variety ZM 309 grown during a trial in Zimbabwe. ZM 309 was developed for drought-prone areas with infertile soils in Southern Africa, based on material from CIMMYT-Mexico, CIMMYT-Zimbabwe, and Malawi’s national program, in a collaboration between CIMMYT, Malawi’s Ministry of Agriculture and Food Security, and the Chitedze Research Station, through CIMMYT’s Drought Tolerant Maize for Africa (DTMA) project. It has been released for sale in Malawi and Zimbabwe. The research was supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Howard G. Buffett Foundation.

For more about ZM 309, see CIMMYT’s 2010 e-news story "Maize farmers and seed businesses changing with the times in Malawi," available online at: www.cimmyt.org/en/about-us/media-resources/newsletter/715….

For more about DTMA see: dtma.cimmyt.org/.

Photo credit: CIMMYT.

Somalia Suffers from Worst Drought in Century


Image by United Nations Photo
A malnourished child waits for emergency medical assistance from the African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM), an active regional peacekeeping mission operated by the African Union with the approval of the United Nations. Somalia is the country worst affected by a severe drought that has ravaged large swaths of the Horn of Africa, leaving an estimated 11 million people in need of humanitarian assistance.
Vulnerability to diseases is also of grave concern – according to the UN Refugee Agency UNHCR, hundreds of Somali children are dying from a combination of acute malnutrition and measles.
Photo ID 480271. 16/07/2011. Mogadishu, Somalia. UN Photo/Stuart Price. www.unmultimedia.org/photo/