The Impact of Maize Hybrids on Income, Poverty and Inequality among Smallholder farmers in Kenya

Abstract

Introduction:

For decades, Kenya has been depicted a maize “success story” in Sub-Saharan Africa, known for rates of hybrid maize adoption during the 1960s and 70s that paralleled those of the U.S. Corn Belt thirty years earlier (Gerhart, 1975; Byerlee and Eicher, 1997; Smale and Jayne, 2010). Over the past few decades, however, a general perception of stagnating adoption and production has been supported by FAO data and a rising maize import bill. Replacement of older hybrids by newer releases appears to have been slow (Hassan 1998; Smale et al., 2012), dampening yield potential on farms. For example, a hybrid released in 1986 and derived from this first hybrid still dominates the maize fields of Kenya, despite the dramatic increase in the number of hybrids and breadth of seed suppliers as seed markets liberalized (Swanckaert, 2012).