Zambia is among the countries in the southern Africa region that has suffered from severe drought in three out of the last four seasons, the worst having occurred during 1991/92. The drought resulted in low production of maize, the staple food of the country, necessitating imports of the commodity. Low maize production was also exacerbated by a reduction in fertilizer usage, a result of removal of fertilizer subsidies. The solution in the agricultural sector has been to advocate crop diversification to encourage the growing of crops that are drought tolerant and those that can grow under low N or without additional fertilizer application. The latter can have detrimental effects of depleting soils through mining of nutrients. Since maize remains an important crop, efforts should be made to breed varieties that are drought tolerant or can lese N efficiently. The Maize Research Program in Zambia has not initiated a breeding program for drought and nitrogen use efficiency (NUE) as such. The program uses earliness as a drought escape mechanism. Selection of drought tolerant genotypes has been done in drought years and areas because of the lack of controlled environments for drought work. Collaboration with CIMMYT has resulted in selection of material from its drought tolerant populations that are undergoing population improvement and are being used to develop inbred lines. Similarly, populations from the NUE project have been obtained recently from CIMMYT and are being used in the breeding program. As an additional strategy, the performance of finished products (including released varieties) is being evaluated under low and high N conditions, with the hope of identifying the most NUE varieties.

English

9801|AGRIS 9702

Jose Juan Caballero

CIMMYT Publications Collection