Realizing Africa's Rice Promise

Marco Wopereis, David Johnson, Nourollah Ahmadi, Eric Tollens, Abdulai Jalloh, Marco Wopereis, David Johnson, Nourollah Ahmadi, Eric Tollens, Abdulai Jalloh

• Publisher: CAB International
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781789244458
• Topic: Technology & Engineering
• Subtopic: Sustainable Agriculture
• Index: Technology & Engineering

*Includes contributions from the key scientists working in the area*Provides a comprehensive overview of the latest research as well as making recommendations for how best to deal with future challenges*Has a wide and varied scope – covering policy, genetic diversity and improvement, sustainable productivity enhancement, innovations and value chains

1 From WARDA to AfricaRice: an Overview of Rice Research for Development Activities Conducted in Partnership in Africa

Eric Tollens,¹ Matty Demont,² Moussa Sié,³ Aliou Diagne,³ Kazuki Saito³ and Marco C.S. Wopereis³*
¹Centre for Agricultural and Food Economics, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Leuven, Belgium; ²Africa Rice Center (AfricaRice), Saint-Louis, Senegal; ³Africa Rice Center (AfricaRice), Cotonou, Benin

Introduction

The West Africa Rice Development Association (WARDA) was created in 1971 by 11 West African states (Burkina Faso, Côte d’Ivoire, The Gambia, Ghana, Liberia, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Senegal, Sierra Leone and Togo) – with the assistance of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) and the Economic Commission for Africa (ECA) – as an autonomous research organization and an intergovernmental association of member states (WARDA, 2001a). The highest governing body of the Center is the Council of Ministers of Agriculture of member states, with statutory meetings being held once every 2 years. In 1975, WARDA joined the growing contingent of international agricultural research centres affiliated through the CGIAR (now the CGIAR Consortium) (CGIAR, 2013). Over the following two decades, six additional countries (Benin, Cameroon, Chad, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau and Nigeria) joined the Association to bring the membership to 17. When it was realized that WARDA’s products were gaining ground in countries beyond its traditional mandate region of West and Central Africa, the name Africa Rice Center was adopted in January 2003 (WARDA, 2004). In 2007, a new vision was formulated to encourage such countries to become full members of the Association. This prompted five more countries to join in the midst of the global food crisis of 2007–2008 (Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of Congo, the Republic of Congo, Egypt and Uganda). These were followed by Gabon (September 2009) and Madagascar (February 2010). Thus, today (June 2013) the Association’s 24 member states represent West, Central, East and North African regions. When Africa Rice Center became the official legal name of the Center and the Association in 2009, the abbreviation AfricaRice was adopted in both English and French and was to be applied retroactively.¹

Like other CGIAR-supported centres, AfricaRice has a Board of Trustees composed of nominees from member states and from non-member states. They work together to ensure that AfricaRice management conforms to the resolutions of the Council of Ministers and to the CGIAR guidelines on governance and management in implementing the Center’s approved 2011–2020 Strategic Plan (AfricaRice, 2011b).

In this chapter, we look back over rice research for development in Africa, with emphasis on the past two decades. We focus on AfricaRice, but contributions of many other institutions and partners are acknowledged. This is not a comprehensive historical overview of rice research and development in Africa. Rather, we highlight some of the major institutional and technological challenges encountered and achievements obtained since about 1990. Much more information on a wide range of research-for-development activities conducted in partnership in Africa can be found in subsequent chapters of this book.

The chapter starts with a brief overview of the Task Force mechanism, which has been the main vehicle used by AfricaRice to conduct research in partnership with the national agricultural research systems (NARS) of its member states and other African nations and an overview of some other important partnerships. The remainder of the chapter is structured in three thematic areas: (i) genetic diversity and improvement; (ii) crop and natural-resources management; and (iii) policy, impact assessment and rice value-chain development.

Task Forces and Other Partnership Mechanisms

The Task Force mechanism

The Task Force mechanism was introduced as a novel approach to building partnerships between the Center and the NARS in 1991. The mechanism responded to concerns highlighted by two working groups of NARS representatives (WARDA, 1999). Consequently, each Task Force had four primary objectives:

• to coordinate regional research activities, thereby reducing duplication and identifying the most complementary forms of collaboration among rice research programmes;

• to provide national scientists with more complete and rapid access to information and results from regional research;

• to test and transfer technologies in a targeted and systematic manner; and

• to target technical, material and financial assistance to national programmes in such a way as to strengthen the regional rice research system as a whole (Fakorede and Yoboué, 2001).

Between 1991 and 1995, ten Task Forces were established (although, because of reorganization and mergers, a maximum of nine operated at any one time), covering mangrove swamp, upland rice breeding, lowland rice breeding, irrigated rice breeding, Sahel resource management, integrated pest management (IPM), problem soils, cropping systems, rice economics and technology transfer.

Specifically designed to address constraints to rice production identified by the NARS, the Task Forces operated through (annual) meetings, joint research activities, monitoring tours, visiting fellowships, and training (WARDA, 1999). The Task Forces provided for sharing of information and resources so that – on a regional scale – there would be no duplication of effort, isolated national researchers could interact with their peers from other countries, and no one NARS was overstretched in achieving research objectives. The Task Forces attempted to ensure that each national partner and AfricaRice conducted activities according to their institutional comparative advantages, thereby achieving greater overall impact on a regional scale. Finally, the Task Forces also served to help AfricaRice prioritize its work with direct guidance from national partners. A 218-page summary of the first 7 years of AfricaRice–NARS Task Forces activities was published in 2001 (Fakorede and Yoboué, 2001).

In 1998, the decision was taken to merge the AfricaRice–NARS Task Forces with the Rice Network of the West and Central African Council for Agricultural Research and Development (WECARD/CORAF). This was prompted by a review of networks funded by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and in light of the fact that the two networks involved the same NARS scientists. Moreover, the composition of the newly created (January 1998) AfricaRice National Experts Committee was almost identical to that of the WECARD/CORAF Executive Committee (WARDA, 1999). Consequently, the Rice Research and Development Network for West and Central Africa (Réseau Ouest et Centre Africain du Riz, ROCARIZ) was created in 1999 (WARDA, 2000). ROCARIZ followed the Task Force mechanism, but replaced the annual meetings of individual Task Forces with a biennial Regional Rice Research Review (4Rs) (e.g. Sanyang et al., 2003; Narteh et al., 2006), which brought together as many of the NARS scientists as possible, with members of the individual Task Forces meeting as ‘breakout groups’ during the Review. Unfortunately, funding for ROCARIZ dried up and the network ceased to function in 2006 (AfricaRice, 2012).

However, AfricaRice did manage to continue some of the networking activities of some of the Task Forces (e.g. Breeding and Economics) through projects (AfricaRice, 2012; A.A. Touré, Cotonou, Benin, 2013, personal communication).

In 2010, the Second Africa Rice Congress urged African governments to renew commitment to rice research and development, and supported AfricaRice in its proposal to revive the task force mechanism (AfricaRice, 2012). Consequently, by March 2013, there were Africa-wide Rice Task Forces covering breeding, agronomy, processing and value addition, policy and gender, with the final one (mechanization) scheduled for launch later that year (GRiSP, 2013).

Other partnerships

The Consortium for the Sustainable Use of Inland Valley Agro-Ecosystems in sub-Saharan Africa (Inland Valley Consortium, IVC), convened by AfricaRice, is composed of 12 West African NARS and a number of international (IITA, ILRI, IWMI,² FAO, WorldFish and WECARD/CORAF) and advanced research institutes (CIRAD,³ Wageningen University). It was founded in 1993 with the objective to develop, in concerted and coordinated action, technologies and operational support systems for intensified but sustainable use of inland valleys in sub-Saharan Africa. Extensive biophysical and socioeconomic characterization work was done during the first phase in 18 key sites in 1994–1999 (e.g. Andriesse et al., 1994; Windmeijer et al., 1998). A second phase (2000–2006) focused on technology development for inland-valley systems. The participatory learning and action-research (PLAR) approach was developed and diffused during this time (see Defoer and Wopereis, Chapter 31, this volume). Lack of funding after 2006 severely restricted IVC operations. Since 2012, IVC has continued as the Inland Valley Community of practice, which better reflects its new modus operandi.

The Human Health Consortium (1994–2000) brought together six multidisciplinary West African research institutions to evaluate the health and social impacts of various degrees of wetland water management and irrigation in the humid rain-forest, savannah and Sahel zones of Côte d’Ivoire and Mali. The research concluded that most types of water management in the region have minimal impact on the occurrence of the two main water-associated diseases, malaria and schistosomiasis (WARDA, 2001a).

Various research and development partnerships grew up around and to support the work that led to the development of the NERICA varieties and subsequently promoted them across the continent. First, the Interspecific Hybridization Project itself, launched in 1996 – just 3 years after the first successful development of fertile progeny from crosses between African cultivated rice (Oryza glaberrima) and Asian cultivated rice (Oryza sativa) – brought together three CGIAR centres (AfricaRice, IRRI and CIAT),⁴ Cornell University (USA), Institut de recherche pour le développement (IRD, France), Tokyo University (Japan) and Yunnan Academy of Agricultural Sciences (China). The Project sought to develop and utilize the breeding techniques and their products (WARDA, 2001a).

The mechanism devised to disseminate the NERICA varieties and to help resource-poor upland-rice farmers identify varieties best suited to their particular agroecological and socioeconomic contexts – participatory varietal selection (PVS) – itself became the focus of a research and development network, the Participatory Rice Improvement and Gender/User Analysis, which ran for several years from about 1999 (WARDA, 2001a). Then in 2001, the African Rice Initiative (ARI) was established to promote the widespread and rapid diffusion of the NERICA and complementary technologies throughout the rice-growing areas of Africa. Early work targeted upland rice in five pilot countries in West Africa, while enabling PVS and community-based seed systems (CBSS) activities to start in East and Southern Africa (WARDA, 2002a; Bèye et al., 2011)...