Baseline Study of Striga Control using IR Maize in Western Kenya

livelihoods. Households with the following characteristics are more likely to be poor: Strigahas been on the farm for long; high perceived yield loss to Striga while depending heavily onmaize for household income; lack integrated Striga control; high dependency ratio; headed byolder farmers; low educational attainment; non-adopters of technology; poor access to landand farm assets, depend on credit; no off-farm work; no cash crops; and live in environmentswith characteristics similar to those of Bondo and Vihiga districts.6. Food shortage can last as long as five months in a year and it occurs every year for morethan 70% of households. Coping strategies include off-farm short-term jobs, disposal ofassets, and informal safety nets especially through remittances received from relatives. Theabove findings on household vulnerability were gathered from respondents’ perceptions. Theresults from this qualitative assessment were confirmed by those from quantitative analyseson the anthropometric indices on children and women. The Z scores calculated on childrenindicate that about 30% were wasting, 50% were underweight and 48% were stunted.Therefore, the identified vulnerability is reflected in both indicators of short term exposure tofood insecurity (underweight) and those on long-term exposure to food insecurity (stunting).The magnitude of the malnutrition on children is beyond any prediction in a country at peace.Similarly, the results on BMI on women showed that 36% were underweight while 18% wereoverweight. One would expect only cases of underweight for food insecure households.However, the presence of cases of obesity in that environment is not strange to nutritionists.They characterise this contrasting situation as nutrition in transition (Sanusi et al, 2005). It istypical of poor households but it is also common in wealthy countries. For households thatdepend on agriculture for their livelihoods, the only approach to break the above vulnerabilityis to increase the production and productivity of crops. For western Kenya, interventionsshould target maize. There is also need to look into additional strategies through thediversification of farming enterprises.7. A translog stochastic frontier production function incorporating a model for technicalinefficiency effects was used to analyse the technical efficiency of maize farmers in westernKenya. The results showed both gender and location differentials in maize productivity.Gender differentials in productivity were more apparent in Nyanza than in Western province.Adoption of hybrid maize and traditional Striga control increased maize production. Thesampled maize farmers achieved an average technical efficiency of 62%, indicating aconsiderable potential (38%) for increasing maize production through improved efficiencyand better practices such as integrated Striga control. An examination of the relationshipbetween efficiency and socioeconomic attributes revealed that while technical efficiencyincreased with educational attainment, it has turned out to have a non-linear relationship withage and farm size. Technical efficiency first increases with age and farm size but eventuallydeclines with age and farm size. The result relating to the direct farm size–efficiencyrelationship for smaller holdings coupled with the fact that most farmers cultivate tiny plotsof land suggests that re-allocation of more land to maize would enhance farmer efficiency.Increased efficiency could be achieved through, for instance more optimal application ofinputs and greater intensity of adoption of improved maize varieties. Therefore, efforts mustbe made to enhance adoption of both hybrid maize (and hence fertiliser) and Striga controltechnologies to help increase maize production. Maize yields in Kenya have continued todecline despite increased use of new maize varieties, largely because of lack of effectiveStriga control technologies. Promoting both high-yielding varieties and Striga controltechnologies should thus be an important goal for research and extension in Kenya. In thisregard, AATF’s IR maize technological intervention for Striga control holds considerable50