Assessing the effectiveness of agricultural R&D for groundnut, pearl millet, pigeonpea and sorghum in West and Central Africa and East and Southern Africa.

Abstract

AbstractAn understanding of the performance of sorghum, pearl millet, and groundnut programmes from the perspectives of scientific capacity, output of released varieties and the level of adoption of these improved varieties is not as comprehensive as in other staple food crops such as maize. This chapter attempts to systematically improve coverage on these aspects and thus inform on the performance of research on crop improvement for these staple food and cash crops in Africa's semi-arid tropics (SAT). This chapter is organized along regional lines. In presenting and discussing research results in each of the sections that follow, findings are reported separately for West and Central Africa's SAT and for the SAT of East and Southern Africa. This regional orientation is preferred to a crop-wise organization because several of the major findings are regional and apply to the same crops within a region of Africa's SAT. Teasing out lessons from a comparison of regional findings leads to a more fundamental definition of the problems, opportunities and successes of and from crop improvement than a comparison of results across crops. These lessons are described in the concluding section of the chapter.