New project links indigenous rainmaking knowledge and scientific weather forecasting

Indigenous knowledge on changing weather patterns will be used to inform Western scientific weather forecasting in a new Sh 18.8 million project that was launched recently in Kenya.

The 2-year project, funded by the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) aims to help local communities adapt to climate change.

Scientists from the Kenya Meteorological Department and the National Museums of Kenya will work with Western Kenya’s Nganyi community that is renowned for its traditional rainmaking prowess.

The project also hopes to demystify the rainmaking practices of the Nganyi people who predict rainfall patterns by noting various environmental changes, e.g. changes in air currents, the pattern of flowering and shedding of leaves from certain trees, changes in behaviour of safari ants and the different songs of some birds, as well as croaking of frogs and toads.

Jatropha: The answer to Kenya’s fuel problem?

Jatropha (scientific name Jatropha curcas) has been hailed as the ideal biofuel crop that holds the promise of reducing dependence on fossil fuels in a world that is grappling with the effects of global warming.

Mature seeds of the jatropha tree produce up to 40 percent oil. When the seeds are crushed, the resulting inedible oil can be used to run a diesel engine. Among jatropha’s key attractions are its ability to grow in arid wastelands and its resistance to drought. Jatropha can also be used to reclaim eroded land because it stabilizes the top soil.

As they grow, biofuel crops take in carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, thereby cancelling out the carbon dioxide released when the biofuel is burned. In this way, biofuel is considered more environment-friendly than fossil fuel.

Countries like China, India, Malaysia and the Philippines are making plans for huge plantations of jatropha. In India, over 30 million hectares of wasteland have been identified as suitable for jatropha cultivation. China is planning an 80,000-acre jatropha plantation in Sichuan.

British biofuel company D1 Oils, the world’s leading developer of jatropha biodiesel, signed a deal with multinational petroleum company BP in July 2007 to invest £80 million in jatropha over the next five years, with plantations in India, South Africa and Southeast Asia.

Interest in jatropha is also growing locally and from the look of things Kenya could soon be joining the jatropha bandwagon.

Last week, the Daily Nation carried two articles that detailed plans by Japanese investors to start large-scale commercial production of jatropha trees within six months. The Kenya Investment Authority reportedly said it would fast-track the necessary paperwork to see that the operation gets underway “with minimal delays”.

Biwako Bio-Laboratory Incorporated, one of Japan’s largest biodiesel producers, is reportedly planning to establish an initial 30,000-hectare plantation of jatropha trees in Kenya, increasing this to 100,000 hectares in 10 years. This initial investment is expected to translate into 200,000 tonnes of biodiesel per year.

Considering that the tree has a lifespan of up to 30 years and can survive up to three consecutive years of drought, jatropha presents an attractive picture indeed as the country’s next wonder cash crop.

However, there is another side to this rosy picture… another side that is not so rosy.

Some experts have warned that jatropha does not provide an easy answer to the biofuels problem because it is toxic and yields are low and unreliable. Also, because each fruit on the tree ripens at a different time, harvesting must be done separately. This makes jatropha growing a highly labour-intensive exercise.

Concerns have also been raised in some countries with regard to the potential environmental impacts of jatropha cultivation. In 2006, Western Australia banned the tree because of its capacity to quickly become a hard-to-control weed. There are also no scientific studies on the long-term impacts of large-scale cultivation of jatropha on soil fertility.

Lessons on long-term environmental impacts can be learned from Kenya’s recent experience with the Prosopis juliflora shrub, locally known as “mathenge”, which the government and the Food and Agriculture Organisation introduced into the country in the 1980s to prevent soil erosion in arid and semi-arid marginal lands.

Twenty years down the line and “mathenge” has turned into an invasive weed, overgrowing much of the land it was meant to reclaim. Its thorny seeds have crippled people and killed livestock.

Earlier this year, a group of pastoralists from the Ilchamus community in Baringo, one of the areas where the shrub was grown, sued the government for loss of livelihoods occasioned by the weed and questioned why studies were not carried out on the potential negative impacts of the plant at the time it was brought into the country.

Another concern is that jatropha could have far-reaching socio-economic impacts especially in countries where subsistence agriculture is an important economic activity. Some fear that farmers may replace food crops with jatropha, resulting in increased risk of food insecurity.

Other questions concern the production arrangements, with pertinent implications as regards land ownership and land use. Exactly who will grow jatropha? Will it be grown by small-scale farmers as a supplemental crop? Or will jatropha growing be a large-scale plantation-based agribusiness? Will it be grown under contract production systems, and if so, how much say will the farmers have?

Such concerns led a recent United Nations report on biofuels to conclude that “the benefits to farmers are not assured, and may come with increased costs. At their worst, biofuel programs can also result in a concentration of ownership that could drive the world’s poorest farmers off their land and into deeper poverty”.

As Kenya seeks to enter into large-scale commercial production of jatropha, a cautionary approach is needed that takes into account the potential environmental and socio-economic impacts in the long term.

New course to improve agricultural communication in eastern Africa

A new postgraduate course for agricultural scientists will be launched in 2008 in eastern Africa to help improve the way agricultural scientists communicate research information to the region’s small-scale farmers.

The Association for Strengthening Agricultural Research in Eastern and Central Africa (ASARECA), through its Regional Agricultural Information Network (RAIN), is finalizing plans to launch a new Master of Science program in Agricultural Information and Communication Management.

The two-year program will initially be offered at Uganda’s Makerere University and Sokoine University of Agriculture in Tanzania. Other universities that plan to launch the program are Alemaya University in Ethiopia and Kenya’s Egerton, Maseno and Moi Universities and University of Nairobi.

“Participating universities from the Eastern and Central Africa region are undertaking various procedures to roll out the programme in their respective universities in the coming academic year,” says Jacqueline Nyagahima, an Information Officer at ASARECA.

The proposed program hopes to fill a gap in most agricultural training programs in African universities, whose graduates lack adequate capacity to integrate information and communication technology in communicating agricultural knowledge.

The course is designed to produce experts in agricultural information and communication management who are competent to develop and operate agricultural information systems, carry out research on issues relating to the use of agricultural information and provide professional agricultural information support.

Kenyan scientists develop new insect-resistant maize variety

Kenyan scientists from the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Centre (CIMMYT) and the Kenya Agricultural Research Institute (KARI) have developed a new maize variety that is significantly resistant to the larger grain borer, which attacks the stored maize crop.

In just six months, this insect pest can destroy more than a third of stored maize. The new maize variety will benefit farmers in Kenya by reducing the levels of postharvest maize losses and help improve Kenya’s food security by reducing dependence on imported maize.

“This is a major achievement and will be of great help to farmers in Kenya and more than 20 African countries, who have had few options to control this pest for nearly 30 years,” says Stephen Mugo, the CIMMYT maize breeder who led the CIMMYT-KARI collaboration.

The larger grain borer is native to Central America and was first observed in Africa in Tanzania in the late 1970s. It is thought that the borer may have inadvertently been introduced to the continent via a shipment of maize food aid during the 1979 drought in eastern Africa.

Previous attempts at biological control of the borer using its natural predators have been largely unsuccessful. Researchers therefore studied the habits of the borer, hoping to find ways to reduce the damage it causes. They discovered that it needs a solid platform, such as that provided by maize kernels still on the cob, before it will bore into a kernel.

Unfortunately farmers in Africa often store maize on the cob, increasing the potential for borer damage. Shelling the maize and storing it off the cob can reduce the damage but postharvest losses are still very high.

This is what makes the newly developed variety, where the resistance lies in the seed, so exciting.

“Having the solution in the seed itself makes adoption much easier for farmers,” says Marianne Banziger, director of CIMMYT’s Global Maize Program.

But Banziger cautions that the insect-resistant maize is not a silver bullet solution to the grain borer problem and strongly recommends that the new variety be used together with other pest-control measures.

CIMMYT researchers found resistance to the borer in the Centre’s germplasm bank, in maize seed originally from the Caribbean. By using conventional plant breeding techniques — crossing the Caribbean maize with maize already adapted to conditions found in eastern Africa — the researchers were able to combine the resistance of the Caribbean maize with key traits valued by Kenyan maize farmers.

The new maize variety will undergo performance trials by the Kenya Plant Health Inspectorate Services (KEPHIS) and other national seed authorities outside Kenya. Testing is expected to take 1-3 years, after which seed of the new maize hybrids and open pollinated varieties will be made available to seed companies for seed production and sale to farmers

Source: The International Maize and Wheat Improvement Centre (CIMMYT)

Super bugs in local milk

The Daily Nation’s Horizon magazine of 1 November 2007 carried an article titled Super bugs in local milk. The article cited a study by researchers from Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology (JKUAT) which revealed that raw milk hawked in Nairobi’s Kahawa West area contained harmful bacteria with high levels of resistance to commonly used antibiotics.

I was drawn to this article largely because of my professional interest in microbial food safety in general and the safety of milk and dairy products in particular.

While the article is an eye-opener to potential milk-borne public health risks, I felt that there were a couple of issues that were not very clear.

First, one of the researchers argued that the high levels of drug-resistant pathogens in milk poses a major health risk because 90 per cent of milk sold in Kenya is raw. While it is true that the sale of raw milk is predominant in Kenya, almost all consumers who buy raw milk boil it first before they drink it, often together with tea leaves.

And boiling of milk effectively kills all pathogens, whether drug-resistant or not. Thus the question of consumption of contaminated milk being a likely cause of emerging multi-drug-resistant pathogens, as reported by the study, does not arise.

The same is true when milk is pasteurized (heated to 72 degrees centigrade for 15 seconds). Indeed, as would be expected, the JKUAT team did not find drug-resistant pathogens in the pasteurized milk samples.

Still, that is not to say that high levels of pathogens in raw milk are acceptable because the milk will be boiled anyway. On the contrary, good quality raw milk is necessary in order to prevent it from getting spoilt quickly. Training of milk handlers and traders on milk hygiene is therefore imperative in order to improve the quality of marketed milk in the country.

Another issue is that the article didn’t say whether the raw milk samples were tested to see if they actually contained antibiotic residues. This is a more likely cause of the emergence of drug-resistant bacteria, especially because neither pasteurization nor boiling will get rid of antibiotic residues in milk.

Drug residues can end up in raw milk if a dairy cow is on antibiotic treatment. After such treatment, there is a specified milk withdrawal period when the milk should not be sold in order to protect consumers from being exposed to the high levels of antibiotic residues.

It would be useful to know more about the prevalence of antibiotic residues in marketed milk (both raw and pasteurized) in Kenya, as this poses a worrying prospect of consumers unknowingly ingesting small amounts of drug residues as they drink their daily chai ya maziwa. Such a scenario can only worsen the existing problem of antibiotic-resistant super bugs.