A couple of years ago, Eunice Changirwa never thought she'd see another bean crop in her half-hectare field. But today, at her farm near Kakamega in western Kenya, she offers guests a steaming plate of plump, multicolored beans, mixed with kernels of white maize in a thick, rich broth.

In the early 1990s, Eunice and most other farmers in this area practically lost their local bean races, when crops mysteriously began to turn yellow and fail season after season. "I had no choice but to stop growing beans," she says. "Any seed I planted was just wasted, it didn't produce anything."

After that, beans became a rare treat in her household. "Once in a while, I would buy beans in the market from other parts of the country, but they were expensive," she recalls. In the absence of this vital protein source, the family's diet was reduced to a monotonous dependence on maize and banana, their main starchy staples.

It also hurt to lose the income from sales of surplus bean production. In fact, Eunice's finances still haven't recovered from the blow. Only recently, her daughter had to drop out of school, because the family couldn't come up with the fees.

But Kenyan bean scientists refused to accept the finality of the farmers' loss. One of them, Reuben Otsyula, a bean breeder with the Kenyan Agricultural Research Institute (KARI), obtained a grant through the Eastern and Central Africa Bean Research Network (ECABREN) to seek solutions. He and colleagues determined that the problem was a complex of diseases referred to collectively as root rot. "Serious outbreaks occur mainly in areas where high population density makes land extremely scarce and forces farmers to cultivate their plots intensively, thus exhausting the soil," explains CIAT plant pathologist Robin Buruchara.

In search of a genetic remedy, Otsyula first screened all the samples in KARI's bean germplasm bank for their reaction to root rot. About 90 percent proved highly susceptible, and under heavy disease pressure the rest succumbed as well.

Next, Otsyula began to look outside the nation's borders. In 1993 he joined scientists from Uganda and other countries for a "traveling workshop" organized in Rwanda by the CIAT-supported bean network. "I was really impressed with farmers' widespread adoption of climbing beans in highland areas similar to ours in western Kenya," Otsyula says. Many of the varieties he saw, introduced in Rwanda during the 1980s, are of Mexican highland origin and are resistant to root rots.

Otsyula arranged to import the 10 best varieties from Rwanda into Kenya. "I began to test them with farmers right away, because root rot is not a problem in the well-fertilized soils of our experiment station," he explains. At about that time, Otsyula attended a field day organized by Patrick Nekesa of the Association for Better Land Husbandry (ABLH). A nongovernment organization supported by the UK's Overseas Development Administration (ODA), ABLH seeks solutions to the problem of declining soil fertility in Kakamega through its Organic Matter Management Network (OMMN). By enabling farmers to derive an adequate income from the land they already occupy, the network hopes to relieve pressure on the area's sole remaining tropical forest.

"Without new opportunities to produce, farmers have no motive to conserve," Nekesa says. "That's why climbing beans were the right technology at the right place and at the right time. Their good yields of a highly marketable product justify the farmers' use of organic material to maintain soil fertility."

At an OMMN meeting, farmers discuss the problem of finding stakes to support climbing beans. One of the few male farmers in the room describes how he lets part of his Napier grass, which provides fodder for cattle, grow to maturity and then uses the tall bamboo-like shoots to support his climbing beans. Later, the conversation shifts to the new, root rot resistant bush bean varieties with which some of the farmers have been experimenting. Otsyula obtained these too through ECABREN and has tested them jointly with Eunice Changirwa and other farmers. Participants in the meeting talk excitedly about the prospect of intercropping beans with maize once again, in addition to growing high yielding climbers on the raised beds where they apply organic matter. Early next year, Otsyula hopes to release the new bush bean varieties officially. "If the farmers have five to chose from, they will be better able to protect their bean crops from root rot," he says.