SCCI searches for COMESA  drought tolerant seed

Sat, 06 May 2017 15:09:05 +0000

By BUUMBA CHIMBULU 

A STANDARD threshold for drought tolerant seed varieties to be used across the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA) region is currently being worked on by the Seed Control and Certification Institute (SCCI).

SCCI senior seed officer, Mudenda Sikwangala, said the institute had a project called ‘‘Establishing call collections for varieties and drought tolerant seed varieties’’ which was trying to determine thresholds for what was really a drought tolerant seed variety.

Ms Sikwangala explained in an interview that the project, which was being funded by the Agriculture Productivity for Southern Africa (APSA), would ensure that breeders and seed producers spoke the same language with regard to drought tolerant seed varieties.

“Within the region, we have different criteria that we use to determine a drought tolerant seed variety, so we are looking at coming up with a standard threshold that will be used across the region for drought tolerant seed varieties.

“We have a project called ‘Establishing call collections for varieties and drought tolerant thresholds’, so under that project we are trying to determine the thresholds for what is really a drought tolerant variety; it will be for each country,” she said.

She was hopeful that by next year, the standards would have been established and be sold to other countries to see if they could adapt to them.  “Because when you are talking about drought tolerance, you need to know at which level do you determine that this variety is actually drought tolerant? So we will do field tests and we will be withdrawing water at different levels and then look at the characteristics that determine a variety to be drought tolerant,” she said.