Maize and Grace, Africa’s Encounter with a New World Crop by James C. McCann. Photo/JENNIFER MUIRURI
As we move deeper into the new millennium maize may turn out to be the engine of Africa’s economic growth.
Economists Prabhu Pingali and Shivaji Pandey project that by 2020, the world demand for maize will surpass that for both rice and wheat — a significant development for Africa, where humans eat more than three-quarters of the maize produced, compared with Europe, North America and Asia, where livestock and industries constitute the majority consumers.
“Maize as an industrially produced cash crop appeals to the global system because it is controllable by the state and corporate agriculture and amenable to economies of scale in cultivation, processing and research investment,” writes James C. McCann in his book Maize and Grace, Africa’s Encounter with a New World Crop.
“It suits global economic forces that seek increased food production, the circulation of commoditised agricultural inputs (fertiliser, herbicides and pesticides, genetic modification), and a product that will be comparable across geography and cultures. It also appeals strongly to forces of political control and centralisation. From Socialist Ethiopia and Stalin’s Soviet Union to apartheid South Africa and the Sasakawa Global 2000 Agricultural Project, state planners and agricultural empiricists alike have recognised the appeal of maize.”
Although not a true grain like sorghum, rice or wheat, maize has grown to become the staple crop in most of sub-Saharan Africa. Of the 22 countries in the world where maize forms the highest percentage of the national diet, 16 are in Africa. The top three — Zambia, Malawi and Lesotho — are in Africa, surpassing even Guatemala and Mexico, the crop’s homelands. On the world list, Kenya and Tanzania are sixth and 15th respectively, by percentage.
The effect of maize farming on the continent’s forest cover was huge. When the crop was introduced in the slave ports of West Africa, dense forestland had to be cleared to create farmland. According to historian Ivor Wilks, clearing a single hectare of primary tropical forest required removing 1,250 tonnes of moist vegetation.
Subsequent clearance of the same plot after a fifteen-year fallow generated only 100 tonnes. The disruption of insect life and the existing biodiversity was massive. In this way, maize could have contributed to the expansion of the Sahara.
The famine experienced during World War I marked the big shift to maize farming in Kenya. During the famine, farmers were forced to eat their millet seed. Government programmes and small-scale merchants replaced this with maize seed in the following seasons.
The process of breeding hybrid maze seeds, which involves interaction of favourable genetic materials as manipulated by professional breeders, and the fact that farmers must use new hybrid seeds every season to avoid deterioration of the plant’s desirable traits, makes maize breeding a political as well as an agronomic undertaking.
Yields notwithstanding, it is common to hear rural farmers cautioning against putting their whole farmland under commercial hybrid seeds at the expense of “traditional” varieties that have been passed down for generations.
They understand the risk inherent in becoming dependent on a remote breeder for their sustenance. In Kenya, artificial shortages of seed and fertiliser have been witnessed around planting time, usually manipulated by middle-men hoping to force a price-hike or for political reasons, to worsen the situation.
Although no other cereal can be put to as many uses as maize, maize monocultures are extremely vulnerable to environmental shocks, especially drought.
Even in the best of times a maize-based diet may impoverish the bodies of those who depend too heavily on it for food, leading in the long term to deficiency diseases like pellagra and kwashiorkor.
Benefits aside, maize has been linked to malaria. In 1998, Yemane Ye-ebiyo, an Ethiopian entomologist engaged in a doctoral programme at the Harvard School of Public Health, set out to link the prevalence of malaria in Ethiopia’s highlands to the prominence of maize in the farmlands.
His theory was that pollen grains dispersed by the maize into water bodies were nutritious for mosquito larvae, increasing the levels of malaria.
It was a curious theory that carries through into modern Ethiopian folklore, where children are often cautioned against ruining maize tassels or eating the stalk of the corn lest they get enqetqet (shivers).
It applies in rural western Kenya too, where children are similarly cautioned against attracting rodegera (malaria fever) if they eat the tender stalks and milky cobs.
The ready acceptance of maize can be attributed to the fact that it offers a higher return on expenditure in land, labour and cash than all competing crops except cotton.
The Ministry of Agriculture and the country’s economists should find this book useful, given the convincing arguments the author puts forth about this important crop.
