Summary: Narrator: There’s a line out the door at the Sope Nabi Bakery in Thies, Senegal. The bread that’s sold here is delicious, but it’s special for another reason. It’s made of a composite flour that uses local climate-smart crop varieties. The World Bank-funded West Africa Agriculture Productivity Program or WAAPP is providing more bakers with this flour as it builds a climate-smart food system. Aifa Ndoye: “We are developing the value chain around the composite flour. We are doing it for millet and maize with an incorporation rate of 15% for bread and 50% for cake and this can help farmers get income with dry cereal. This project will also help to reduce the import of wheat because all the bread before was made by wheat 100%. Narrator: That’s Aifa Ndoye, Senior Agricultural Economist at the World Bank. She co-leads the WAAPP program in Senegal. The program develops climate-smart crop varieties—like the millet and maize that’s being used in the bread. WAAPP has delivered 160 climate-smart crop varieties, technologies and training to 5.7 million farmers across West Africa. This has been important in Senegal. Aifa: Last year…the rainy season was very delayed. Instead of starting in mid-June, it started in August. In Senegal like in other Sub Saharan African countries, the rainy season is becoming very short. Narrator: Erratic rainfall has slashed harvests and caused hunger for many farmers. WAAPP’s climate-smart agriculture interventions are helping to turn things around. WAAPP varieties developed in Senegal are yielding bigger harvests. Aifa: “We have generated 7 new varieties characterized by their high productivity, moving from 1 ton per hectare to 2 to 3 tons per hectare for dry cereal like millet, sorghum and maize. In total we’ll have 14 new varieties, drought resistant, with high yield and early maturing varieties because sorghum we move from 120 days to about 100 days and cowpea, we are having varieties that move from 3 months to like 1.5 months. So in terms of reducing the production cycle it fits the rainy season. And these varieties, like the sorghum varieties, are very drought resistant because they can stay 2-3 weeks without having rain.” Narrator: WAAPP also helps farmers get access to climate-smart technologies. Aifa: In terms of planting we are using SRI, the intensive rice production system, a system that can help farmers save more seed. Instead of using 60 kg per hectare they are using 20 kg of seed per hectare. It is a way to have high outcome over the limited cropped area. In addition to these varieties, we are supporting a project on sustainable land management that enable farmers to use agroforestry to regreen their field and to use organic material in order to limit the use of mineral fertilizer in the plot without dampening the level of yield. So WAAPP is transferring a package of technology that can reduce in some way the greenhouse gas emissions.
