ABOUT |
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Dr. Jane Ininda is the head of the Plant Genetics and Physiology Research Program and coordinator of the Coordinated Ecosystem Breeding Project in Kenya. Born to peasant farmers in the remote village of Kangeta, Dr. Ininda knows firsthand the challenges of growing food in a region plagued by drought.
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Not only was food a rare commodity, but education as well. It was her parents' determination to educate their children that enabled Dr. Ininda to complete school. She then went on to earn her undergraduate and graduate degrees at the University of Nairobi and her PhD at the Iowa State University. Upon completion of her doctorate, Dr. Ininda returned to Kenya to work with farmers to improve their crops.
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She specializes in plant breeding, maize in particular, and variety improvement, with emphasis on resistance to pests and diseases. Dr. Ininda works closely with farmers and believes there needs to be a closer contact between the experts in agriculture and the farmers.
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She once was a member of Crop Science Society of America and a founding member of Plant Breeders Association of Kenya.
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| INTERVIEW |
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When I left university with a Bachelor of Science in Agriculture, I went into agriculture research. It was really not a matter of choice about what crop you do, what crop you work on. They just assigned us duties depending on the number of crops that were being worked on in the country. My first two years I worked on wheat. I then went for further training, and I studied a crop called, amaranth, which is a vegetable but it produces a grain. Later when I went for my PhD, I conducted my research on soybean, a crop that I studied a lot in the U.S.
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When I came back to Kenya after my PhD degree, they needed somebody to work on maize, and I really did not mind doing research on corn. So that's how I got into maize research. I would not say it was a matter of choosing. I would say that it depended on the needs of the country at that time.
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My main focus is on variety improvement. That is making sure that the farmer has the right variety. We know that irrespective of how much fertilizer you put in your soil or how much you try to control the environment, if you don't have the right variety there's no way you can access the potential of that crop. So my main focus is on getting the best genetically adapted maize variety for a particular environment.
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"Maize production faces a lot of problems in Africa."
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Maize is the most important crop in Africa and in Kenya. Whether you are a small scale farmer or a large scale farmer, many farmers grow maize. But maize production faces a lot of problems in Africa. The first constraint is low soil fertility. There is also a lack of improved seed because farmers don't have the right variety for the right environment. There are problems in marketing, and problems with pests and diseases.
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The main focus of my work is on better varieties resistant to pests and diseases. I am using the conventional way of breeding to prevent attack by pests and diseases in maize. But, of late, we have just initiated a very small project for biotechnology to address this issue.
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In addition to maize, we have other crops, like beans. Beans are actually a crop that we only grow when there's high rainfall. We also grow cowpeas. Cowpeas are a more drought tolerant crop and can survive with less water than beans. We also have other crops like sorghum and millet which need little water. These are very popular crops in this area because families are sure that they will have something, even if the rains fail.
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"There were many times when I was small that we really did not have food."
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There were many times when I was small that we really did not have food. The weather here is not all that favorable for crop production. You only get a crop in three out of five seasons and that means that almost half of the time you are not getting a crop. And when I talk about not getting a crop, I mean total crop failure.
The other factor is that our parents were only doing this farming based on their traditional knowledge. They don't know the right plant spacing for maize, for example. They don't know how they can improve their soil fertility. They don't know how they can harvest water. This is why the plant population is so low. So just imagine if you had a field with such a low plant population, and then there's crop failure, of course you are not going to have any food.
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"You have to guard your crops."
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There is also the risk of loosing crops to wild animals. If you look across this side, you see just a lot of bushland. There are not many people around here. And if there are not many people, and there is bushland, then there are wild animals. And so the wild animals will want to come and eat.
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Actually, there are a lot of monkeys around here. When the maize is at grain filling stage, you have to guard your farm. If you don't guard your farm, you are going to lose your crop, and then your family will not have food. Guarding has to be done during the night and during the day.
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"If you sleep in your house, your crop will be eaten by animals and your family will go hungry."
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When I was small, whenever the crop was in season, my father would never sleep in the house. If you sleep in your house, your crop will be eaten by animals and your family will go hungry. So you just have to come to the fields at night and find out different ways of scaring animals. Either light fire to scare the buffalos, or make noise to scare antelopes or find another way of trapping them. The family that never does that is always hungry. You have to guard your crops.
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"There was no surplus to sell for money with which to buy clothing or pay for education."
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My family was not well-to-do. They were peasant farmers-they grew traditional crops for food only. There was no surplus to sell for money with which to buy clothing or pay for education. The most critical thing was to have food for the family. And so, at that time, there were very few people who were educated. My parents never went to school. There were no schools.
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In the early 1960's, the missionaries came and set up a school. It was a little difficult to convince the community that they needed to take their children to school. My parents were among the people who were contacted about whether they wanted to take their children to school. My father wanted us go to school and he also wanted to be an example.
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"It was good luck that my parents put education as a priority."
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Going to school was not easy. I am sure you have seen the children in the school; they just do not have shoes. Even now, there are still families who cannot even afford shoes for their children. You can imagine how it was thirty years ago. The situation was just very difficult. My parents could only afford to buy each of us one uniform. That was it. You just go to school like that. You just wash your uniform over the weekend and put it on every day of the next week. We did not have any other clothing, because there was really no money to purchase anything. It was good luck that my parents put education as a priority. They forgot everything else to send their kids to school.
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"In the back of our minds, we knew that if you go to school you can change your life around."
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Very few pupils were enrolled in school. Many of them did not have the incentive to go ahead in school. They didn't know what this education was all about. Well, some of them understood that if you get educated, you could get a job. We knew this because some people who went from other areas, who maybe had gone to school just a little bit before the country got independence, they had managed to get some jobs. So back in the back of our minds, we knew that if you go to school you can change your life around.
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But the environment was such that people were not going to school, so it was very difficult even to get sincere diligent students to follow through. The teachers were not even motivated to have their children perform better. The children, they didn't care whether they pass or fail the exams. And so you really had to make extra effort to pass an exam and be accepted in to a government high school. Only a few people qualified. You had to be a very good student for the government to sponsor you to a high school. And so that is what happened when I reached class seven. I was one of two students who managed to get into a government high school.
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"You can change people's livelihood."
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I really did not know a lot about agriculture. Even by the time I was finishing high school, I really did not want to do agriculture at all. I used to hate agriculture because I thought it was only about digging a hole and plant. I wanted to go into another career. I wanted to do medicine.
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But during my studies at high school, I came to learn what agriculture was about. It was all about crop improvement. And I thought this is a good career. I can improve a maize crop, and get a different variety. So that is when I started understanding agriculture. By the time we were choosing what we want to do in the university, I was very sure I wanted to do agriculture. I knew I did not even want to do the medicine anymore.
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"I think things can improve."
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I am glad that I am in agriculture, because I can see how you can change people's livelihood just by changing a variety, or showing them how to manage their farm well, or how to harvest water. It has such an impact. If you have food, you will not go to school on an empty stomach.
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I think things can improve. What we need here is a closer contact between the experts in agriculture and the farmers. I think that is the knowledge that we do not have. I have even seen it in my own village. These days when I talk to people about agriculture, they sit and they listen because they know that I have the knowledge. They ask, what variety should I plant, how should I space my crop, how should I intercrop maize and beans? The farmers are willing to learn. Every time my relatives see me they want to ask me about how they can solve a problem in agriculture.
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"There is a lot to be learned from the farmer."
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There is also a lot to be learned from the farmer. You develop ideas about what you think the farmer should do to solve their problem, but maybe that is not the farmer's problem. For example, just the other day, I was talking to some farmers and they were saying that they were having problems with storage pests, that they just don't know how to handle them.
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Then one of them suggested, 'Maybe we should go back to our old way of storing our grain, the way we used to store our sorghum and millet.' Instead of storing it in exposed place, they would make a round hut made of mud and the granary would be air tight. They used to have very little damage from storage pests.
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So, for us agriculturists, we may be telling the farmers what chemical to use or how to control the storage pests or how we can develop a resistant variety, but the farmers know what they have been doing, and they may have abandoned a method that works.
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This is also true in terms of seed variety. You may go talk to the farmer about a very high-yielding maize variety. You may think it's good for the farmer, but the farmer is not always looking for high yield. He is looking for a tasty variety, which can make good ugali (cornmeal porridge). Maybe they are looking for sweet maize which, when you roast it, has a true taste of maize.
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So if you have an interaction between you and the farmer, you will come to learn what the farmer really wants. And that way it is easier to really change their livelihood, by incorporating their interests.
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"You need the African scientists"
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You need the African scientists because they understand the environment better. Like me, I have grown up here. I can tell you the field looks good because we had higher rainfall. The scientists, especially the African scientists, they definitely understand the problem better.
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Jane Ininda can be reached at jininda@todays.co.ke
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