Breeding climate-resilient maize for food security in semi-arid sub-Saharan Africa: strategies and future directions
Maize is the most staple food crop produced in sub-Saharan Africa which its cultivation has been expanding with time however, the productivity remains low. Low productivity of maize in Africa is contributed by different challenges such as pests and diseases, drought, floodings which are associated with the effects of climate change. Drought is among the critical constraints in maize production causing yield loss up to 100% under extreme conditions. With these challenges researchers have come with some of the promising technologies that help to reduce the effect of climate changes for instance breeding new climate resilience maize varieties which using modern breeding tools like marker assisted backcrossing, quantitative trait loci, genomewide association studies, double haploid, gene editing, genomic selection and high throughput phenotyping. These tools map traits of target for introgression to recipient varieties thus reducing time of breeding cycles. Some of the climate of improvement for climate resilience include drought and heat tolerance, high stay green with low less leaf rolling, stemborer and fall armyworm tolerance, water-use efficiency and high grain yield. Effort have been done by CIMMYT in collaboration with National Agricultural Research Institutes have developed climate resilient crop varieties, however, with pace of climate change there is more effort to diversify varieties for sustainable climate resilience that will strengthen food security in sub-Saharan Africa which is the most vulnerable to climate change. There is a need to integrate approaches to cope with climate change such as use of next-generation genomic technologies, digital agriculture and data-driven approaches, strengthening seed systems, integration of farmer preferences and socioeconomic factors into the breeding process, and adaptive breeding programs based on climate scenarios. These will shorten breeding cycles and come up with new technologies that cope with variation of climate at certain intervals.