African farmers have been growing rice for about 4,000 years, but until recently it was served only at weddings and festivals. During the past several decades, Africans have come to rely on rice as their staple food, yet found they had to choose between African rice (the kind served at special occasions), which has a very low yield, and Asian rice, which has a higher yield but which is vulnerable to weeds, drought, and disease. Today, West African rice farmers have a new choice.
Thanks to the West African Rice Development Association (WARDA) and its partners, a new rice has been created through agricultural biotechnology. The rice matures 30 to 50 days earlier than other varieties; is richer in protein; is more tolerant to disease, drought, and acidic soils; resists some of the most damaging insects in West Africa; and can outcompete weeds. Known by the acronym NERICA (new rice for Africa), the rice is being made available to the nearly 20 million rice farmers-many of them women-in Sub-Saharan Africa by the NERICA Consortium.
"NERICA rice varieties represent genuine new potential for resource-poor farmers throughout Sub-Saharan Africa and should be disseminated widely throughout the Continent," said Dr. Gordon Conway, president of the Rockefeller Foundation, while visiting farmers in The Ivory Coast in April. WARDA developed the rice to provide poor West African rice farmers with a crop that could feed their families, reduce the amount of labor and land needed to grow the rice, and improve their incomes. It is projected that a 25 percent adoption rate would return $20 million to farmers in 1 year. The rice is currently being grown on almost 2,000 acres, and that number is expected to grow to 132,000 acres by 2002.
