ADB approves about US $31 million for rice project

The African Development Bank (ADB) said on Wednesday it had approved US $31 million of loans and grants to help increase the production of upland rice in seven West African countries through the planting of new higher yielding varieties. The ADB said the New Rice for Africa (NERICA) programme should raise the combined rice production of Benin, The Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Mali, Nigeria and Sierra Leone by 600,000 tonnes a year. That in turn would enable these countries to save $100 million a year on food imports. The ADB said the new funds would be used to provide small loans to farmers to enable them to buy the higher yielding rice seeds. The project should boost the incomes of 241,000 farming families across West Africa, it added. Upland rice is grown on dry land rather than flooded paddy fields. The ADB said the new high yielding varieties to be grown under the NERICA programme were hybrids of African and Asian species. They were developed during the 1990s by the Cote d'Ivoire-based West Africa Rice Development Association (WARDA). Vidal Aline, a trainer and documentation officer at WARDA, told IRIN the organisation had so far distributed seeds to 17 countries in West and Central Africa and other states were asking for them. She said it was training farmers to how to use and store the new seeds and was showing blacksmiths how to make winnowing equipment to separate the seeds of the harvested rice from the chaff. Several high yielding varieties have been made available, allowing farmers to choose those that best suit their own needs and new methods to improve soil fertility are being encouraged. WARDA has also received financial and technical assistance for the NERICA rice project from the UN Development Programme (UNDP), The World Bank, the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation, Japan, the United States Agency for Development (USAID), and the Rockefeller Foundation.