Drawing on a series of technology adoption studies carried out by the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) in collaboration with national agricultural research systems in Eastern Africa during 1996-98, this paper suggests alternative approaches for designing technology...

Identifying the appropriate germplasm to be improved is a key component of any participatory breeding effort because of its implications for impacts on social welfare and genetic diversity. This paper describes a method developed to select a subset of 17 populations for a participatory breeding...

This paper examines the economics of introducing conservation tillage into maize cropping systems in the state of Jalisco, in the western part of Mexico. A stochastic cost-benefit analysis (SCBA) of introducing conservation tillage in two contrasting agro-climatic zones in the four main maize...

Several opportunities are available for dramatically reducing the use of agrochemicals in Asian cereal crop production. The first section of this paper summarizes past trends and future prospects for pesticide use in Asia for the three major cereal crops: rice, wheat, and maize. The second...

Four environments with contrasting potential for agricultural productivity and infrastructure development were identified in Guanajuato State, Mexico, to test hypotheses about the relationship of maize biological diversity to the region's potential for agricultural productivity and...

The principal advantage of in situ conservation is that it allows adaptive evolutionary processes to continue in the species that are being conserved. For a cultivated crop species, in situ conservation involves farmers' management of their own genetic resources even as the farmers themselves...

This paper presents results of a 1995 survey of 864 maize-growing households in six states that account for more than 70% of India's maize area: Andhra Pradesh, Bihar, Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, and Uttar Pradesh. The current adoption of improved open-pollinated maize varieties (OPVs)...

This paper reviews trends in maize production and consumption in Central America and Mexico in the context of the political and economic changes taking place in the region since the 1970s. The authors focus on the effects of the structural adjustment programs in the 1980s and 1990s. The analysis...