A modern breeding project to improve the yield of various crops in Africa

Yield improvement of important African food crops will get a boost with the launch of the Modern Breeding Project, to be implemented by the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA) in collaboration with Bayer. The research will focus on ensuring that cassava, maize, cowpea, banana, yam, and soybean achieve the highest yield possible, leading to increased crop productivity on farms. The project’s beneficiaries are the over 100 million smallholder farmers who grow these crops on about 60 million hectares in the humid to semiarid zones of sub-Saharan Africa.