Print This PageHybrid Maize Seed Transforming Villagers' Lives
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Drought-Tolerant Corn Promises to Aid Sub-Sahara African Farmers
Hybrid Maize Seed Transforming Villagers’ Lives
Biotech Cotton Improving Lives of Farmers, Villages in India
Monsanto & NGO ISAP Launch Project Share - Sustainable Yield Initiative To Improve Farmer Lives
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Helping farmers meet the needs of a growing planet.
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Like millions of other farmers in southeastern Africa’s Republic of Malawi, 62-year-old Mary Katsonya finally is celebrating improved harvests on her small maize farm. In 2007, maize yields on the widow’s 4.9 acres produced a record 260 bags of maize, up from just 10 bags two years earlier. Her latest harvest supplied her family with enough maize for a year and another 200 bags to sell. Profits paid for new schoolbooks and clothes for her five grandchildren.
What proved decisive in 2007 were three critical ingredients: hybrid maize seeds and top-grade fertilizers supplied by the Malawian government and private donors, and much-needed rain. In contrast, her disastrous 2005 crop saw few ears of corn harvested from traditional seed in her arid soil.
As part of a large-scale action plan to promote self-sufficiency farming, the Malawian government supplied Mary Katsonya and an estimated 140,000 other resource-poor farmers with all necessary fertilizers while Monsanto donated more than 700 metric tons of conventional hybrid maize seed. The dramatic difference in harvests is critical since with each generation, Malawian farms are shrinking as the country’s population – now 13 million – expands. As a result, farmers are expected to produce larger harvests on less land each year.
Farmers in Mwandama, Malawi, and other parts of the vast sub-Saharan Africa also are benefiting from the United Nations’ Millennium Project. [1] The UN is partnering with governments and private companies such as Monsanto to provide affordable and science-based solutions to help the poor, village by village. In Mwandama, funding amounts to $110 (U.S.) per villager per year.
Villagers there receive extensive training in health and nutrition, agriculture and the environment, and water resources and sanitation, among other things. Their first year, with improved seeds, free fertilizer and more rain, farmers produced more than five times the maize per acre as compared to the year before. Villagers foresee rich rewards from the five-year program. Josephine Smoke, 41, anticipates putting a metal roof on her grass-roofed house. Others residents anticipate a paved road, a health clinic, a school and safe water. [2]
1 Doug Pike, “Big Changes in Poor Villages,” Philadelphia Enquirer, July 20, 2006.
2 Ibid.
