The living standard of Nepal's poor hill farmers has been raised thanks to improved high yielding varieties of maize, according to the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYI).

The maize improvement project was successful in bringing improvement in the livelihood of the poor farmers who are insecure in terms of food sufficiency, said Thakur Prasad Tiwari, an agronomist of CIMMYI after the annual review and planning meeting of the Hill Maize Research Project (HMRP) concluded here Saturday.

The HMRP has direct participation of more than 80 percent of the poor farmers in the middle hills of Nepal, according to Tiwari.

One of the major achievements of the project is that the farmers have already produced some 309 tones of seeds through the community-based seed production since 2000 and the amount is increasing each year, Tiwari said.

"It has solved one of the major problem of seed scarcity in the remote areas," he said.

With the financial support from the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation, the five-year-long second phase of the HMRP is being conducted since 2003.

Source: Xinhua