Adams, who became the head of SEED two years ago, has been improving the attrition rate by reducing the number of staff members with authority to dismiss students and taking a more nuanced view of dismissal-worthy offenses.
"This is a story repeated thousands of times all over Africa," said Joseph Devries, who is the head of seed development for a joint effort by the Rockefeller and Bill and Melinda Gates foundations to jump-start farm productivity in Africa.
The results of the mixed effects model testing for differences among populations according to their native precipitation regime were significant for several traits, including leaf width, leaf length, stem diameter, number of heads, number of primary branches, number of secondary branches, height, head size, number of seeds per head, and days to 50% flowering (Table 3, Fig. 4).
Farai Munyanyi is head of global seed and chemical company Bayer Crop Science in Zimbabwe.
Melaku was head of the seed bank in the 1980s, when drought and acute food crises threatened the lives of hundreds of thousands of Ethiopians.
Melaku Worede, the former head of the seed bank, says recurrent droughts have put the country's agricultural diversity at risk, a problem compounded by farmers in some areas abandoning their local varieties for new, high-yield, commercial seeds.
"Science is being utterly abused by all sides for nonscientific purposes," said Benedikt Haerlin, head of Save Our Seeds, an environmental group in Berlin and a former member of the European Parliament.
Contrary to expectations, Pearson's partial correlation analyses (Table 2) failed to detect significant negative correlations between 1000 seed mass (used as a proxy for seed size) and head diameter, the number of flowering heads, and the number of seeds per plant.
The head of the European seed-crushers' association Fediol, Nathalie Lecocq, said that for her industry, the food and feed market are completely interlinked, so a feed-only solution would fail.
In the years where treatments significantly affected total seed mass, we conducted further analyses to determine the effects of treatments on the number of seed heads per square meter and the mass of seeds per seed head (total seed mass per square meter = number of seed heads per square meter * mass of seeds per seed head).
