Abstract

Drought is the single most common cause of severe food shortage in developing countries and climate change is predicted to further exacerbate its impact. It is also estimated that some 1.8 billion people will suffer from water shortage and two thirds of humanity will be affected by water stress by 2025 compromising cereal production sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America. In maize, moisture stress is most devastating when it occurs at flowering with causing yield losses of 45-60%. Therefore, the development of drought-tolerant lines becomes increasingly more important. Multidisciplinary approach, which ties together breeding, physiology and molecular genetics, can bring a synergistic understanding to the response of maize to water deficit and improve the breeding efficiency. Managed stress screening approaches provide an opportunity to keep heritability high and adequately representing abiotic stress factors that are relevant in the target environment. It is desirable that more breeding programs use high-priority abiotic stresses in their mainstream breeding program, so that more experience on breeding approaches that effectively target stress environments can be gained. The objective of this paper will focus on the major strategies or approaches used by breeding programs for improving drought tolerance maize