**4. Conclusions**

This chapter provides a short history of maize in Africa, including its importance as a staple food, and identifies various accompanying technologies for modernizing maize production. It then describes some unfolding mechanisms to deploy these technologies

within larger development thrusts. The chapter features high-yielding varieties that resist drought and pests and those that improve their nutritional value. It provides opportunities for supplying improved maize seed through recent mechanisms for commercial licensing and access to mechanized agricultural equipment and contracted services through digital agriculture platforms. It highlights fertilizer and soil nutrient management advances in maize-based systems, including pre-plant and top-dress fertilizers and legumes, to increase soil nitrogen stocks. Advances in weed management include the use of specialty and pre-emergent herbicides. It also provides insights into the control of invasive Fall Armyworms. It further features biotechnology that prevents aflatoxin contaminants from entering food systems. Maize grain is an important human food, but it can also be processed into high-quality flour and starches from which various products are manufactured. In addition, maize stover is widely used as fodder for livestock and important for practices like mulching and the maintenance of soil organic matter. Technologies featured in this Chapter offer the means for farming communities in Africa to access the high-end of the maize value chain and its global marketplace, improving returns to both small-scale farmers and commercial agribusinesses. The Feed Africa Strategy of the African Development Bank, the partnership galvanized around that Strategy, and the momentum achieved through the recent Dakar 2 Summit are viewed as promising means to deploy these technologies.

The authors note with concern that The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) is currently experiencing a maize crisis because national demand now far exceeds domestic supplies. Its government seeks a combined federal, international, and private sector response. Maize production for the DRC has grown from 306,000 MT in 1971 to 2 million MT in 2020, increasing at a rate of 4.5% per year. This growth was caused more by expanding land under cultivation rather than improving maize productivity. Land area under maize cultivation increased from 1.5 million ha in 2001 to 2.9 million ha in 2021, but maize yields remain low, averaging only 0.8 MT per ha. As a result, maize deficits of about 2.8 million MT developed a shortage that was largely addressed through importation from Zambia. But Zambia recently halted maize exports to cope with its own domestic shortages. As a result, the cost of maize flour on RDC has skyrocketed, increasing in some parts of the country from US \$0.45 per kg a few months previously to \$1.61 per kg in May 2023. A recent communication from the Deputy Prime Minister in charge of the economy stated, "The causes of this situation include the shortfall in local production in line with demand, restrictions on Zambian exports and high import costs, as well as the deterioration of climatic conditions, which affects agricultural production in the sub-region". Recent outreach efforts by ATA-DRC providing farming communities in Kasai and Lualaba with improved maize management practices resulted in yields of 1.7 MT per ha, a readily achieved increase of 112%. More concentrated efforts relying upon improved varieties, judiciously applied pre-plant and top-dressed fertilizer, better weed control, and other technologies described in this Chapter readily achieve 3 MT per ha yields. In this way, maize production in DRC may be improved by 2.6 to 6.4 million tons per year provided technologies described in this Chapter are scaled through increasingly available agricultural transformation processes.
