Project to save farmers from bogus agricultural commercial products launched

Most small holder farmers in sub-Saharan Africa are struggling to make ends meet and are always on the lookout for ways to boost their production. And they are even more desperate now in the face of unpredictable weather due to climate change.

Unfortunately, they sometimes fall prey and loose huge sums of their hard earned money to unscrupulous companies selling them ‘miraculous’ products that promise to increase their yields but which turn out to be fake or sub-standard and do  not live up to their claims.  

Moreover, the regulatory bodies established to control these products and safeguard farmers’ investments are often poorly funded, poorly equipped and the regulations are not up to date to include some of these new innovative products coming into the market such as bio-fertilizers and bio-pesticides.

To address this, the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA) recently launched the second phase of the Commercial Products (COMPRO-II) project that aims to benefit two million smallholder farmers in East and West Africa by providing information on which agricultural products are genuinely effective to boost their production among the myriad currently available in the market.

IITA's Director General Dr Sanginga speaking during the project launch. 

 “We have all these products in the market which, like the witchdoctors’ potions, promise to solve all the farmers’ problems. Our concern therefore is that our poor small-scale farmers are using their little hard earned money to pay for products that do not produce results. So we first set out to understand the problem then see how to help them,’ said Dr. Nteranya Sanginga, Director General for the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA) during the launch that was held in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania on 16 May 2012.  

‘Under phase I of the project, with a grant from the Bill &Melinda Gates Foundation, we screened over 100 such products in the market to see which ones are useful. And out of these only three were found to be really effective,” he said.

The three were Rhizobium inoculants for legumes, mycorrhizal inoculants for tissue-culture banana, and fertilizer seed coating of for maize.

Rhizobium and mycorrhizal are bio-fertilizers that make use of useful micro-organisms that are naturally found in the soils. Rhizobium is a bacterium that converts the free nitrogen in the air into a form that plants can absorb from the soil. Mycorrhizal fungus assists plants to absorb nutrients from the soil and strengthen their resistance to soil-borne pests such as nematodes.

Fertilizer seed coating for maize on the other hand, avails essential nutrient to the crop on germination making it grow better, have better root development and become better established.

Participants drawn from the six project countries at the its launch.

The second phase will primarily focus on creating awareness and disseminating to farmers these tried and tested quality products to increase their production and building the capacity of national systems to continuing screening such products coming into the market.


“The project will engage with and support national institutions to put in place systems to continue screening these products to check their quality. This will ensure farmers are not wasting money on fake products that do not work,” said Dr Prem Warrior, a Senior Program Officer at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

At the end of the project, more farmers are expected to confidently use these products because their safety, efficacy, and quality will be ensured through institutionalized regulatory and quality assurance mechanisms.

“We want to make farmers’ life better. Using some of these productions that we have checked and ascertained their quality together with other good farming practices such as use of fertilizers and improved varieties, they can get better yields of maize, soybean and banana and improve their lives,” said Bernard Vanlauwe, IITA Director for Central Africa and the project team leader.

The project is targeting small-holder farmers in six African countries: Tanzania, Kenya, Nigeria, Ethiopia, Ghana, Uganda, and Tanzania.

Making food safe: Two projects to combat mycotoxin contamination in Tanzania launched

Project partners pose for a group photo at a meeting to
launch and plan for the implementation of two projects to
control mycotoxin contamination in Tanzania 

The International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA) and its partners recently launched two new research projects in Tanzania aimed at understanding the extent of mycotoxin contamination and developing a comprehensive and lasting solution for reducing contamination to improve the health and livelihoods of millions of families in the country and reduce loss of income. 

Mycotoxins are poisonous chemicals secreted by naturally occurring fungi which colonize key staple crops while in the fields and during storage. In high concentrations, they make them unfit for human and livestock consumption and for trade. The most common are aflatoxins and fumonisins which have been shown to cause cancer and stunt growth of children.

They are a great constraint to improving the health and wellbeing of people in Africa where testing contamination of agricultural crops is generally not routinely carried out unless it is intended for export. As a result, millions of people living in Africa are chronically exposed to aflatoxins and fumonisins through their diets. 

Preliminary studies by the Tanzania Food and Drugs Administration (TFDA) have documented levels of aflatoxins and fumonisins in maize – the country’s number one staple food- that are way above the recommended maximum limits.

The first project, a six-month research funded by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) under the Food the Future (FtF) initiative, will establish the extent and spread of mycotoxin contamination of maize and cassava at the homestead and in the markets in Dodoma and Manyara.

The second initiative seeks to introduce a safe and natural technology developed by the United States Department for Agriculture – Agricultural Research Services (USDA-ARS) and IITA that can effectively reduce aflatoxin contamination of maize and groundnuts in the field and during storage.

Aflatoxin is produced by a fungus, Aspergillus flavus. Luckily, not all strains produce the toxin. The innovative biocontrol solution being proposed in the project therefore works by identifying and introducing the naturally occurring non-toxic strains ‘the good fungus’ that can out-compete, displace and drastically reduce the population of their poisonous cousins ‘the bad fungus’. 

It has been successfully piloted in Nigeria under the name Aflasafe where it has been shown to reduce contamination by 99%. Country specific biocontrol products are also being developed for Senegal, Burkina Faso, Kenya and Zambia.

This project therefore aims at extending the technology to Tanzania. Four non-toxic strains of the fungus that are most effective in displacing the toxic strains in the country will be identified and formulated into a biocontrol product. Its effectiveness in reducing aflatoxin contamination will then be evaluated under farmers’ field conditions.  If it is found to be effective, it will then be submitted to the Tropical Pesticide Research Institute (TPRI) for registration as a biopesticide for aflatoxin reduction.

The development of the biocontrol technology for Tanzania is funded by Meridian Institute on behalf of the Partnership for Aflatoxin Control in Africa (PACA) which was created at the recommendations of the 7^th Comprehensive African Agriculture Development Program (CAADP) partnership platform where the urgent need to control mycotoxin contamination was emphasized. 

The two projects were launched at a two-day meeting from 18 – 19 April in Dar es Salaam organized by the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA) that brought together all the partners to plan for their implementation. 

Project partners: MAFC, IITA, Sokoine University of Agriculture (SUA), Tanzania Food and Drug Administration (TFDA) and Tropical Pests Research Institute (TPRI).

Farmers in Africa should switch to biopesticides - SciDev.Net

Farmers in Africa should switch to biopesticides - SciDev.Net

Biopesticides are better and safer than chemical pesticides — policymakers must do more to promote them, says insect ecologistManuele Tamò.

Agriculture is, and will remain for years to come, the main driver of economic development in Africa. Vegetables such as cowpea in West Africa and the common bean in East Africa are an important source of cash and nutrition.

Vegetable and horticultural crops will soon become more important due to increasing urbanisation. But they are plagued by insect pests and diseases that can reduce yields by up to 80 per cent.

Farmers often resort to using chemical pesticide sprays to mitigate the problem. But pesticides are usually applied without taking basic safety precautions such as protecting oneself against the spray mist, or using the correct dosage and intervals between applications.

The problem is compounded by aggressive selling strategies, where retailers target barely literate growers to market toxic pesticides of dubious quality that are sometimes inappropriate — for example destined for use on cotton, not vegetables.

As a result pesticides can pose risks to the health of consumers, theenvironment, and producers. They include acute and chronic side effects including the development of skin and neurological disorders. And indiscriminate use of broad-spectrum insecticides can wipe out pests' natural enemies.

Most growers ignore the natural ways in which pests and disease can be managed. Yet biopesticides — derived from plants as well as microorganisms such as viruses and fungi — have virtually no adverse impact on environmental and human health.

Biopesticide benefits

If prepared and used correctly, biopesticides can be as effective as conventional pesticides. But their killing action is a few days slower, and for farmers accustomed to seeing dead insects an hour after a chemical pesticide has been applied, this can be a critical concern that needs careful explanation.

Training programmes in using biopesticides often provide plots where farmers can compare chemical against biopesticide treatment — an essential tool for education about the effectiveness of biopesticides.

At the end of the cropping season biopesticides protect crops well, providing the same yield as chemical treatments. This has been shown by on-farm trials using the fungus Beauveria bassiana against the diamondback mothPlutella xylostella, a serious cabbage pest.

And the issue of 'slow kill' has now lost some significance because some of the most important agricultural pests have developed resistance to chemical pesticides.

Insects have developed detoxification mechanisms as a result of farmers'overreliance on the same chemical substance. This is particularly well-documented for the diamondback moth; it is now resistant to almost all commercial insecticides.

By contrast, resistance is not a problem with bio-pesticides and there are no signs of it so far. There are two good reasons for this.

First, if living organisms are deployed as biopesticides against pests, the insect-specific fungus or virus can co-evolve to counterattack if the target organism begins to develop resistance.

Second, the plant extracts used in biopesticides contain several different active substances, which are much more difficult for insects to develop resistance to than the one or two active molecules present in most chemical pesticides.

The development of insect resistance to chemical pesticides has been extensively reported, so that even farmers with low literacy are becoming aware that it is better to use a slow killing biopesticide than a chemical insecticide.

Local production

Bio-pesticides can be produced locally with cheap materials and simple equipment, and can generate additional household income by engagingwomen groups or unemployed youth.

Recent examples of the production of a baculovirus to attack the cotton bollworm in India clearly demonstrate the feasibility of this approach.

Community-based production of this virus was initially funded by a grant from the UK's Department for International Development. But it has continued beyond the end of the project, prompting nongovernmental organisations (NGOs), the private sector and even the government to set up production units.

In another example from Benin in West Africa, the international NGO SENS is encouraging community-owned enterprises to help farmers co-invest in producing biopesticides.

One of these start-up enterprises, Phileol-HVC is already marketing a mixture of neem oil and essential oils branded BioPhyto. Designed for spraying horticultural crops, it costs a fraction of the price of synthetic pesticide, yet still provides the desired pest control and environmental benefits.

Scaling up

So why aren't more farmers using bio-pesticides in Africa?

In West Africa, the main reason is the lack of 'off the shelf' availability. Some farmers may know the advantages of using botanical extracts, such as the absence of hazardous side-effects, but are reluctant to invest extra time and labour to produce them by themselves during the peak cropping season.

This is particularly true for male farmers. So engaging women groups or unemployed youth in producing biopesticides, as well as making them affordable and of good quality, helps promote their use.

Research institutions and NGOs need to develop appropriate training materials to support the use, production, and quality control of biopesticides. Because there is no lab accreditation for quality control of biopesticides in Africa, it is currently done by producers in Africa — and they need appropriate training materials.

Similarly, vendors, consumers and policymakers need to be made aware of the higher quality and safety of products treated with bio-pesticides.

Manuele Tamò is the Country Representative of the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture in Benin. He can be contacted at: m.tamo@cgiar.org.

IITA-DR Congo sets up meteorological stations to monitor climate

Stefan Hauser (left) training foresters on the use of meteorological equipment

IITA DR Congo has set up a network of meteorological stations to monitor climate and contribute to research on climate change. As a result, the DR Congo foresters have joined this effort and have purchased a meteorological station in their YOKO forest reserve. IITA Scientist, Stefan Hauser installed the station and trained eight young forestry students in the management of the climate sensors, the programming of the data logger and in handling and analyzing the meteorological data collected by the electronic station.
The Congo basin is the largest contiguous forested area in Africa, and is being threatened by agricultural practices such as logging and slash-and-burn. Climate change as a consequence of deforestation has been documented in African history 3000 years ago. Today the combined effects of greenhouse gas emissions and deforestation may cause stronger and highly undesired effects on agriculture and livelihoods.
The REFORCO project in Kisangani, DR Congo is training foresters to build capacities in protecting forest resources and engendering sustainable forest use. The impact of climate on forests plays a major role in conservation efforts, and IITA's capacity in climate research and monitoring will make a significant contribution in improving the knowledge on forest management under changing climatic conditions.

Stakeholders meet to harmonize protocol on fertilizer analyses

Participants at the workshop on Harmonization of Analytical Methods for Fertilizers in Ibadan

Stakeholders in the agricultural sector converged on the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA) to harmonize methods for fertilizer analyses. The workshop was organized by the Federal Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development in collaboration with IITA.
The participants, who were drawn from key institutions including universities and research institutes, deliberated over issues involving the evaluation of the quality of organic and inorganic fertilizers. General laboratory practices that affect the quality of analytical results were also discussed.
Declaring the training forum open, Dr. Stefan Hauser, IITA Systems Agronomist underscored the importance of fertilizers to agricultural productivity.
He said the growing world population demanded agricultural intensification to produce more food without compromising forests, water and land resources.
Fertilizers today may contain undesirable additives that may be harmful to crops and the environment. Hauser emphasized that the issue of examining the quality of fertilizers and their impact on environment was imperative to safeguard ecosystems and biodiversity.
According to him, protocols on fertilizer analyses need to be verified and harmonized for efficient and effective quality control.
He commended the Nigerian government for supporting the training forum, adding that recommendations from the meeting would assist the government in her agricultural transformation action plan.
The meeting was facilitated by Mr. Joseph Uponi and Mrs. Lola Idowu. Lead Presenter, Professor G.O. Adeoye of the University of Ibadan said the workshop came at the right time when the issue of food security is hot on the table.
He urged participants to examine current methods of fertilizer analysis and come up with standard methods for use in Nigerian laboratories.