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"Smart
Valleys's" representative Dominique Hounton inspects a rice field in
Ouinhi, south-eastern Benin ©Yanick Folly (AFP)
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Daniel Aboko proudly shows off the 11 hectares
(27 acres) of paddy fields he shares with other farmers -- a small spread that
produces a bounty of food thanks to smart irrigation and a hardy strain of
rice.
In just four years, small farmers in Ouinhi,
southeastern Benin, have seen their harvest double from three to six tonnes of
rice per hectare (1.2 to 2.4 tonnes per acre).
They produce so much, in fact, that they have
created an unusual problem for West Africa: a local glut.
"People come here to ask us questions and
they invite me to their fields to train them," beamed Aboko, after parking
his motorbike.
"It's quite common in Ouinhi," he said.
Some 500 rice growers work in 20 paddy fields in
the town of 40,000 people in the hilly, rural department of Zou.
They accepted an invitation from the Africa Rice
Centre, or AfricaRice -- a not-for-profit research and training centre -- to
change their irrigation system, and it's worked wonders.
"In 2013, there was a drought but the
producers on the pilot sites had rice, while the others didn't," said
Sander Zwart, a researcher at AfricaRice.
Specialists in rice breeding and irrigation,
AfricaRice has devised a system called Smart-Valleys, in which humid inland
valleys -- natural catchment areas for rainfall -- are scouted out for
rice-growing potential.
The project's team then work with local farmers,
explaining the benefits of an irrigation system that is cheap and sustainable
-- provided it is built in the right areas, and used at the right times.
But for the change to happen, it needs the
farmers' extensive knowledge of the terrain and characteristics of the soil.
- 'The plant gives back' -
The work has entailed moving some paddy fields
into moist valleys, which are flooded at key times, and tossing out concrete
aquaducts, replaced them with earthen embankments forming rows of ditches.
"Rice needs water, but not all the
time," explained Aboko, who is president of the Ouinhi cooperative.
"With this system, when the time comes to
give water, we do so -- if we shouldn't, we drain it away.
"What you give to the plant, it will give
that back to you!"
The aim of the project -- also being trialled in
neighbouring Togo -- is not only to fight against drought but also to better
use rainwater, which is often the only source of local irrigation for paddy
fields.
"Before, people would choose somewhere and
cultivate without thought," said Zwart. "And when there was no water,
they couldn't do anything."
Local farmers are involved at every step.
"We clear the vegetation with them and they
are the ones who design the layout according to the lanes of running water, the
slope of the terrain and the size of plots," said Zwart.
No matter how little it rains, the new system
allows farmers to produce crops.
But another part of the success story is due to
the rice strain -- a hybrid of African and Asian cultivars called Nerica, which
is shorthand for New Rice for Africa.
It brings together genes from high-yield Asian
strains and an ancient African strain that is low-yield but resistant to
drought and less thirsty than its Asian cousin.
The strain was created by AfricaRice, which gave
producers their first seeds. Growers have since then bought more from their own
profits.
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Rice
growers in Ouinhi, south-eastern Benin, have benefitted from new irrigation
system ©Yanick Folly (AFP)
|
- Sales problems -
Guaranteeing a consistent harvest does not mean
the farmers' troubles are completely solved.
"The growers don't always manage to sell
their produce because they have multiplied their yield in a short space of time,"
said Felix Gbaguidi, a director at the ministry of agriculture.
"They hadn't always anticipated that aspect.
But some organizations are being set up to look after processing the rice, and
marketing."
Even so, Aboko wants to increase his yearly
harvest from one to three.
And there is room for Benin to increase its
production.
Back in 2009 the UN Food and Agriculture
Organization (FAO) envisaged Benin becoming self-sufficient in rice by 2011.
Yet last year, France's agriculture ministry said
the West African country was still bringing in 50,000 tonnes of rice from
abroad.
With surplus yields it is perhaps marketing and
sales development that Benin needs to take its rice industry to the next level.
One hurdle is consumer resistance, for many
people prefer the aromatic imported rice from Asia to the hardy, nutty local
grain.
GUEST BLOG POST: New
Rice For Africa – Plant Breeding Technologies Fighting Hunger — Elizabeth
March
Climate
change, drought, desertification, soaring food prices, hunger …Nowhere do these
intertwined threats to development menace 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)’s Rice Market Monitor 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 Centre). 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 African.
Traditional varieties
There were two basic traditional rice varieties
available to African farmers, each with very different characteristics:
o
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.
o
Asian rice (Oryza
sativa), introduced into Africa by Portuguese sailors some 500 years ago,
has largely replaced the African rice strains. Asian rice is high
yielding. But it requires a plentiful water supply to thrive. Its smaller sized
plants are easily overcome by weeds and are vulnerable to African diseases and
pests. It is particularly ill-adapted to the upland rice growing areas in
Sub-Saharan Africa, where small holder farmers do not have the means to
irrigate the land or to buy chemical fertilizers and pesticides.
The obvious solution was to cross the two
varieties. But having evolved separately over millennia, the two species are
genetically so different that they will not inter-breed naturally. Repeated
attempts to cross them had produced only sterile or unstable hybrids.
Working with partners from across the region and
overseas, Dr. Jones’ team collected and classified all available rice strains –
including a gene bank of 1,500 strains of the native O. glaberrima species, which had been in danger of extinction.
They then began the painstaking process of selecting parents for the best
combination of characteristics, crossing them to produce offspring and
backcrossing the offspring with the O. sativa parent to fix the
desired traits. After a series of failures, they turned to “embryo rescue”
techniques, in which the cross fertilized embryos were grown on artificial
media. By the mid-1990s they succeeded in producing robustly fertile plants,
and so the first Nerica was
born. Field testing of the new rice started in 1994, and with improved
techniques many more lines were generated each year. There are now more than
3,000 Nerica lines.
Best of both worlds
While genetic differences between the two species
had made breeding difficult, it gave the resulting new rice variety a high
level of heterosis, i.e. the
phenomenon in which the progeny of two genetically different parents
outperforms both parents.
New Nerica varieties
can smother weeds like the African parents, resist drought and pests or can
thrive in poor soils. Like its Asian parents Nerica has a high yield. The grain head holds 300 to 400 grains
compared to the 75 to 100 grains of traditional varieties grown in the region.
Its strong stems and heads prevent shattering, and the taller plants make
harvesting easier.
Moreover, the most popular Nerica lines take only three months
to ripen, as opposed to six months for the parent species, thus allowing
African farmers to “double crop” it in a single growing season with
nutritionally rich vegetables or high-value fiber crops. As a further bonus,
some of the new lines contain up to 12 percent protein, compared to about 10
percent in the imported rice sold in the local market. As WARDA
director-general Papa Abdoulaye Seck comments, “Nerica is a powerful
weapon on Africa’s fight against hunger and poverty.”
“ Though we wish it were not so, scientists in
Africa are engaged in the greatest war on earth. They are waging war against
poverty and hunger.” – Dr. Monty Jones
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The
new rice varieties are rugged, high yielding and fast growing: Bernard Bassene
a rice farmer in etafoune holds traditional red hued Senegalese rice in his
right hand and hybrid gm rice in the other
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Technology from Africa for Africa
Monty Jones’ technological advances in the war
against hunger won him the World Food Prize in 2004, and he was named last year
by Time magazine as one of “The World’s Most Influential People.” The
World Food Prize committee also highlighted Dr. Jones’ leadership and
innovation in the follow-up phase of getting Nerica rice technology quickly into farmers’ hands. He built
partnerships between WARDA, policy makers, NGOs and research services, trained
farmers to become seed producers, and introduced community-based, participatory
programs to disseminate the seeds rapidly and allow rice farmers – a majority
of whom are women – an active role in planting and evaluating the new rice
varieties and continuing outreach in rural areas.
As an upland rice, Nerica is not restricted to growing in paddies, thus enabling
African farmers to grow rice in places not previously thought possible. In
Nigeria, the new rice has resulted in over 30 percent expansion in upland rice
cultivation. In Guinea the Nerica area
has quickly superseded the modern varieties introduced by the national system.
Since Uganda launched the Upland Rice Project in 2004, in which Nerica is a major component, the
Ugandan National Agricultural Research Organization (NARO) reports an almost
nine-fold increase in the number of rice farmers from 4,000 to over 35,000 in
2007. At the same time, the country has almost halved its rice imports from
60,000 tonnes in 2005 to 35,000 in 2007, saving roughly US$30 million in the
process.
And intellectual property? Helping agricultural
research centers manage their intellectual assets as public goods is the raison d’être of the Central
Advisory Service on IP (CAS-IP), a unit of the Consultative Group on
International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) to which WARDA belongs. WARDA and
CAS-IP are holding ongoing workshops to determine how IP mechanisms could best
support the impact of this agricultural success story. Nerica was registered as a
trademark with the USPTO in 2004, and as the expanding range of Nerica products are adopted by ever
more smallholder farmers, CAS-IP notes that it will be increasingly important
to protect the quality associations that have been so carefully established by
WARDA, and to ensure that any Nerica seeds
acquired by a farmer are the real thing.
As WARDA declares with pride on its webpages, the New Rice for Africa, a technology from Africa for Africa, has become a symbol of hope for food security in a region of the world where one-third of the people are undernourished and half the population struggle to survive on US$1 a day or less.
