Articles in the Who's Who Category
Ousmane Boukar, IITA’s cowpea breeder, has been with IITA since 2007. As a breeder, he mines IITA’s germplasm collection of cowpea to identify important additional sources of gene(s) of interest for resistance to both biotic and abiotic stresses, sources of consumers and producers’ preferred traits, etc. to broaden cowpea’s genetic diversity and contribute efficiently and significantly to cowpea genetic improvement.
Developing countries lose billions of dollars in trade annually to aflatoxin contamination in foods. Worst still, the contamination endangers the health of millions of people in the region. But the good news is that IITA has developed a biocontrol product (aflasafe) to tackle this problem. Ranajit Bandyophadhay relates the journey that led to the development of aflasafe.
