Guinea - Speeding up Technology Transfer to Rice Growers
In Guinea, improving the productivity of upland rice is a key challenge for the national agricultural services. Though rice is the main staple in Guinea, low yields make the country highly dependent on rice imports that it can ill afford. While the...
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| Language: | English |
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Washington, DC
2012
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| Online Access: | http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/1998/12/13779426/guinea-speeding-up-technology-transfer-rice-growers http://hdl.handle.net/10986/9879 |
| Summary: | In Guinea, improving the productivity of
upland rice is a key challenge for the national agricultural
services. Though rice is the main staple in Guinea, low
yields make the country highly dependent on rice imports
that it can ill afford. While the national agricultural
research system (Institute de Recherche Agronomique de
Guinee, IRAG), did not have improved technology available,
the West Africa Rice Development Association (WARDA),
located in neighboring Cote d'Ivoire, had made a major
breakthrough. It was developing inter-specific rice
varieties that combined the best characteristics of the
high-yielding Oryza Sativa varieties of Asian origin with
those of the hardy Oryza Glaberrima varieties indigenous to
Africa. Though the results looked promising, the normal
approach of first testing new varieties at research stations
and only then releasing them for on-farm trials and then to
extension will have taken years. To speed up the process,
Guinea's national extension service (Service National
de la Promotion Rurale et de la Vulgarisation) teamed up
with IRAG in a pilot program that brought promising
varieties from WARDA concurrently to evaluations on IRAG
stations and to on-farm trials. The participatory pilot
program was supported by the World Bank and the Special
Program for African Agricultural Research (SPAAR). |
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