New Rice For Africa Plant Breeding Technology to Fight Hunger

Climate change, drought, desertification, soaring food prices, hunger... Nowhere do these intertwined threats to development threaten more starkly than in Africa.

To mitigate the threats, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon called, at the annual meeting of the Commission for Sustainable Development in May 2008, for a fresh generation of agricultural technologies to usher in a second green revolution - "one which permits sustainable yield improvements with minimal environmental damage and contributes to sustainable development goals."

Plant-breeding technologies - often combining traditional knowledge with cutting edge biotechnological techniques - are already making real impact in meeting the challenge. The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) reports that rice production in Africa has risen consecutively for over seven years, and is forecast to rise further in 2008 to 23.2 million tonnes. A major factor in this growth has been the success of a new type of rice, known as the New Rice for Africa - or NericaTM .

The new rice was the result of years of work by a team of plant breeders and molecular biologists led by Sierra Leonean scientist Monty Jones at the West Africa Rice Development Association (WARDA - now the Africa Rice Center). When Dr. Jones set up the biotechnology research program in 1991, some 240 million people in West Africa were dependant on rice as their primary source of food energy and protein, but the majority of Africa's rice was imported, at an annual cost of US$1 billion. WARDA's objective was to produce a rice variety which was better suited to the harsh conditions in Africa.

Traditional varieties

There were two basic traditional rice varieties available to African farmers, each with very different characteristics:

Native African rice ( Oryza glaberrima ) had been cultivated in the region for some 3,500 years. It is tough and rugged. Its prolific leaf growth smothers weeds, and it has developed a high genetic resistance to disease and pests such as the devastating African rice gall midge, rice yellow mottle virus and blast disease. But its yield is poor, not least because the plants are prone to falling over when grain heads are full and losing grain through "shattering" before they can be harvested. As a result, O. glaberrima has been almost totally abandoned by farmers in favor of the more productive Asian rice.

Asian rice (...