ABOUT |
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A plant breeder and geneticist, Dr. Moses Onim is a strong advocate for working with farmers and utilizing their knowledge to find solutions to their problems.
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It was during his doctoral work that Dr. Onim developed a drought resistant pigeon pea variety. Working closely with farmers, he went on to develop and a higher yielding double cobber maize crop, Maseno Double Cobber (MDC), for western Kenya.
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Dr. Onim earned a BSc in Agriculture and a MSc in Genetics and Plant Breeding from Makerere University in Uganda. He completed his doctorate at the University of Nairobi in Kenya. Dr. Onim was the first Kenyan to be hired to teach genetics and plant breeding at the Faculty of Agriculture, University of Nairobi.
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In 1991, he started his own seed company Lowlands Agricultural and Technical Services Limited (LAGROTECH) which provides the double cobber maize seeds at low cost to the farmers.
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I was born the fourth child and the third son to my parents. My dad worked as a peasant farmer and improved his income by growing vegetables. The walk to town to sell his vegetable was about seven kilometers. Because there was very little money, they were not able to send my brothers to school for very long. When I came along, I was also going to stop, but my dad sold the only three cows that he had so that I could continue on to secondary school.
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The following year, my dad could not raise any more money. Again, I was going to have to stop but the Pentecostal missionary school accepted me into their program. In exchange for my school fees, I gardened and was in charge of the biology laboratory. This is what led me to liking biology and eventually liking agriculture very much.
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I was the first African student to go into an exclusively white, upper secondary school in Akulu. I was again put in charge of the biology lab because I had some experience in that.
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"When you work with poor communities, you get attached to them."
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While working on my PhD, I decided to do research on the pigeon pea. Pigeon pea is a green legume which is very important source of protein for many poor nations in Asia and Africa.
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I worked with women's groups. They were the ones who told me what type of variety they wanted. Therefore my breeding was not based on what I wanted to do; it was what they wanted to do. They wanted large grains, they wanted a variety that would cook fast, take less fuel and taste good. They wanted so many things that you would never get to explore doing normal university research work. When you work with poor communities, you get attached to them.
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There is a lot of knowledge out there in the villages, if researchers can care and be humble enough to listen to the villagers. Too few people are doing this and a lot of research goes to waste. You can achieve all sorts of progress with yields, etc., but if the crop is not tasty or does not cook fast enough, then the ladies will continue to grow their traditional types, even if they are low yielding. For them quality is more than just high yield.
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"The farmers told me that their maize was better than the best hybrids in the country. "
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I had a similar experience when I joined Winrock International in western Kenya. I was an agronomist and we were working on farms with farmers developing varieties and listening to their problems: the constraints of production, crop fertility, lack of labor, and all sorts of things. The farmers told me that their maize was better than the best hybrids in the country.
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I tried to tell this to colleagues from Ministry of Agriculture, to get them to listen to what the farmers were saying. But they said that the farmers do not know what they are talking about and that the country hybrid maize was the best. I wanted to know why the farmers were saying that theirs was better. So we looked into their reasoning, and they said that these soils are so poor that hybrids won't perform here. Any time we tried, we got nothing.
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They said that they did not have enough land to grow the crops and therefore they were forced to intercrop extensively. In one household, we were able to count fifteen different crops planted in the same field. The ladies said that it was part of risk taking. If there was a drought, something would go through. It also diversified their diet: At any given time, they had vegetables, grains and just about everything you can imagine.
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They asked me to help them develop a variety that produces more than one cob. I started by having them give me cuttings from the plants in their fields that had more than one cob. We did that in about five or so villages.
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"The farmers said, 'We told you this can be done.'"
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We started improving it by growing it, putting it together and growing it again. The initial frequency was one or two percent of double cobbing. Suddenly we were hitting ten, fifteen, twenty percent. The farmers said, 'We told you this can be done.' They asked me to invite someone from the Ministry of Agriculture to come and see what I was doing.
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A high-powered team of research scientists working on maize came and agreed that our variety did look like it was better than theirs. But they did not believe it and asked us to try their very best hybrids for the country, even though they were not meant for this area. So the following year we grew the hybrids that they gave us. The farmers' materials still beat the hybrids.
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I decided to hand over these five or six populations from the farmers to the research division so that they would be multiplied and made available to more farmers. The research division said, 'No.' The government policy was no maize variety can be planted in this country other than those from Kenya Seed. So, for us, who were nonentities, small individuals, we had to go underground.
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"Seed companies from all over the world were rushing into Kenya."
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The government eventually did liberalize the seed industry and in May 1991, I was able to start my company, LAGROTECH. We have grown very fast, from about a few kilos of seed that we were selling up to a level of four hundred tons.
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I am very pleased to say that the government has become very supportive. The Kenyan government, after liberalizing the seed industry, realized that the floodgates were open. Seed companies from all over the world were rushing into Kenya. The government started supporting the local seed industry. They were saying, 'We must help you do the very best to compete.' So right now there are laws in this country which help the breeders like us, or seed companies, to protect their varieties, property rights, and so on.
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"The characteristics that the farmers look for in their crop are very different from a commercial person."
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My maize variety was developed from the farmers' germplasm. Everything the farmers liked in their maize is what they retained for their seed and that is what they gave me.
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The characteristics that the farmers look for in their crop are very different from a commercial person. And one of the things that they like about my maize is that it's not bred to be a commercial crop. The farmers do not necessarily think of maize in terms of yield. The moment the maize is green, they harvest it; it is ready for roasting and grain cooking and they need the food. The maize should be tasty and sweet when you roast it or you cook it.
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The hybrids are very plain, very flat, because they were developed only for grain yield. The commercial person is probably looking for milling the corn into flour and selling it then to supermarket or to other bargain systems, where taste may not necessarily be important. The small growers look at maize very different. When they eat it green, they mix it with beans, boil it, and that is a complete meal. The beans provide protein, the maize provides energy.
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My maize is different from the hybrids in the quality sense, but is also very different from hybrids in that the seed can be planted again. With the hybrid you have to buy seed every planting season. The farmers tell us that they are poor and they cannot buy seed every season.
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"As a seed company, we know we would like to make profit like any other company, but when you factor in all these other social issues, you start thinking differently."
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As a seed company, we know we would like to make profit like any other company, but when you factor in all these other social issues, you start thinking differently. You think kind of like a missionary but, at the same time, you want to make a little money because you have to pay salaries and so on. We combine the two by being both profit and non-profit. This allows us to survive in a poor community, grow with them and develop with them.
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"How do you decide who you give it to for free and who you don't give it to for free? Everybody is poor."
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My idea is to work with groups, like women groups, and give them credit facilities. They can go and buy seed, but then they will pay back within a certain time the credit that they have taken. Then, there is nothing for free. Because how do you decide who you give it to for free and who you don't give it to for free? Everybody is poor. I am talking a sixty-six percent poverty level in this country. You cannot supply all of these people with free seeds.
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"Relief should only be for a short period of time. Otherwise people should get back on their feet."
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A model needs to be found where more credit is available. If the people are so poor that they need help, then they should be helped. But relief should only be for a short period of time. Otherwise people should get back on their feet.
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You have to get out there and say, 'You are distorting the market. You cannot supply everybody with seed or fertilizer for free.' This is a discussion that we are now taking on with the NGOs. The seed companies are coming in, the government is participating, donors are participating, and it is very healthy.
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We start the farmers off with a little non-profit, but we move them very quickly to profit. This way the farmers can make some money. We help them grow more so they have surplus that they can sell.
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Right now we are working with the Rockefeller Foundation on a number of projects, including getting our seed to the poor households. We are getting pressure to packet our seed from ten kilos to two kilos, now we are down to one kilo, because the farmers cannot even afford two kilos. The amount of money they have is so little that they can only afford a kilo. We have to listen to them. And by listening to them, by addressing those issues, we are penetrating the possibilities and the progress is massive. Because the improved varieties can perform very well, we are not pushing fertilizer as a package that must go together with seed.
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All our bags are very well labeled with instructions for spacing and fertilizer rate. Right now we have one hundred and fifty stockists who we train to talk to the farmer at the shop when they come to buy the seed.
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"Farmers usually have very good reasons for what they are doing."
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Farmers usually have very good reasons for what they are doing. Their knowledge is developed in the particular natures and environments where they live, to suit those particular challenges in those environments. Scientists are only coming up with and emulating what the farmers have been doing.
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The farmers' crops are very stable in terms of pest attack. They exploit the soil environment very differently. There are some that are deep rooting. There are some that are shallow rooting. There are some that are nitrogen fixing and some that add fertility to the soil. Some crops shed a lot of leaves that mulch the soil. The farmers know it all and that is why they were doing it. They have food security, balanced diet, and everything else.
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"There are many different types of environments, and the people who live there know them best."
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You take the Masais who are pastoralists in Kenya. They always consult pasture. There are sections that can be grazed; there are sections that are spared for the dry periods. They are not going to call for the FDA to bring in grass leaf. They know when to graze and where because they are livestock people.
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There are many, many good things that should be documented about different environments. It is not the same for every environment. When you go to different environment, if you mix too many things, then they will probably dry out or the moisture too quickly will grow there. So every environment has evolved over the years with certain type of constrictions of plant and so on.
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If you take the dry areas of Kenya, or any other part of Africa, the rains fall and immediately grass sprouts where there was no grass. It was somewhere, but it was waiting for rain. There are some places where the rain falls and nothing germinates until three or four good rains. In other words, if a plant seed sprouts too quickly and falls in rain, then it will die. So there are many different types of environments, and the people who live there know them best. Telling the people that you know it all is not always the solution.
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"Food dumping is really depressing agriculture in this country and other countries as well. In Asian and African countries it is a big problem. A big problem."
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Food dumping is really depressing agriculture in this country and other countries as well. In Asian and African countries it is a big problem. A big problem.
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For example, Kenya has been the net importer of rice. The Lit region is very suitable for rice production and so the Lit rice mill complex was developed to buy rice from local farmers, process it and sell it at the market. But then, as the government was trying to do this, a lot of traders and senior people in government and the private sector decided to bring in cheap rice from Thailand, India and Pakistan.
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We were getting the broken, low-grade rice from those rice eating cultures that only eat good, whole-grain rice. In our country, people have just changed over to eating rice very recently, and they don't have a very good sense of rice grading. The cheap rice comes here and sells at about the same price as rice produced here. This kind of dumping is happening in other areas like sugar.
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It makes production in African countries very, very tough. There are countries in Africa where the poultry industry is suffering or dying, because poultry meat is coming from Europe. And they're bringing the bits and pieces of chicken that cannot be sold in Europe--necks, legs and heads and for an average poor family in Kenya that is a chicken.
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"We cannot repeat the Green Revolution in Africa."
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The Green Revolution worked best when there was knowledge, water, improved variety, fertilizer and the willingness of people to experiment. There was a huge food shortage in India. The challenge drove them into using these improved technologies. And now, India is feeding its people much better than ever before.
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We cannot repeat the Green Revolution in Africa where there's no water generally, fertilizers are not available generally, the infrastructure is very poor, and so on. There are so many forces--socioeconomic, environmental, etc.--that need to be right for a Green Revolution to be repeated. And this is something that many scientists are grappling with all over the world. It is difficult to do what India did.
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"The biggest problem with the biotechnology is that it is working with sciences that not everyone understands."
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As scientists, we use biotechnology in breeding all the time, but using natural means. I think the biggest problem with the biotechnology is that it is working with sciences that not everyone understands. There is a lot of uncertainty and unknowns.
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Take BT cotton for example. It was developed for American cotton and to repel just one pest, the American bollworm. And now they are trying to use it in Africa. Unfortunately, in Africa, the pests are more than just the American bollworm, we have stain, we have everything. In order to deal with these other pests, you are still going to have to spray. So the biotechnology needs to be evaluated very quickly.
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Priorities should be set right and we should hit areas that would give the best returns. But I do think biotechnology should be readily accepted.
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"As a scientist, I think people may be justified in having a little fear when companies rush a biotechnology product that could hurt your family or hurt you, especially when there were alternatives."
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The problems arise when scientists will not listen to criticism and just push their technologies hard so that they can just patent them and make money.
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Recently in Kenya, we had a massive vaccination against measles. Bill Gates provided funds for this project. The age group that was to be vaccinated went up to seventeen years old, at which age measles is not an issue. Measles is not a big killer in Africa. Why measles?
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South Africa refused the measles program. They said that it's not a priority in South Africa. They chose pneumonia. Then the vaccines for pneumonia were brought in from Germany. The Germany strain is different from the South African pneumonia. So, the strain of vaccine brought in was not working.
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Bill Gates was good enough to have provided the funds, but why couldn't they have had the right vaccine for the target population. Some vaccine manufacturer said, 'Hey, there's a market. Bill Gates has the money. And they pump the vaccines in.'
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These are the kinds of things that are being questioned. As a scientist, I think people may be justified in having a little fear when companies rush a biotechnology product that could hurt your family or hurt you, especially when there were alternatives. That is the problem.
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"Political instability creates refugees and stops people from staying, working on and solving their own problems."
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Political instability creates refugees and stops people from staying, working on and solving their own problems. Poor people are displaced all the time, and it is that that makes our effort in agriculture very futile a lot of times. I think political stability, peace, should be the most important parameter so that we can work on development, on food, on research, and so on.
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I worked in Angola to improve cassava. Angola is probably the third largest oil producer in the world. The people are so poor that they need American funds to support them. Chevron, an American oil company, is shipping oil out every minute, but all the money that comes back into Angola is in arms. And, you know, the people trading in arms do not care. They want money. The oil factories manufacturing guns and bullets go and sell them. So when there is a war, they know there is a market there. It is a contradiction in the world. And that contradiction is what worries me most.
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"The effort in food production, research and training just go up in smoke when there is instability in a country or a region."
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When I worked in Mozambique, the stations were I worked were bombed. Churches were bombed. I mean, they just blew up Catholic churches. I cannot stomach what I saw in Mozambique. Why should you bomb a church? How mad you must be to bomb a church. But that is where we are. So, the effort in food production, research and training just go up in smoke when there is instability in a country or a region.
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We are so lucky in this country that we had a peaceful election. But it could have been otherwise. There was no reason why it should have been peaceful. It was just luck.
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Lack of peace and lack of stability are the biggest challenges to our country's development. The poor are the likeliest to be displaced. And they cannot buy a plane ticket and go running back to their family. You get nowhere if there is no peace.
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Moses Onim can be reached at onim@lagrotech.org.
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