Goal of doubling rice production in Sub-Saharan Africa in 10 years to be met in 2018

It is now certain that a bold goal for rice production in Sub-Saharan Africa will be met: doubling the amount produced between 2008 and 2018.

The effort has been led by the Coalition for African Rice Development (CARD), which JICA jointly launched with the international NGO Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) at the fourth Tokyo International Conference for African Development (TICAD IV) in 2008. Rice production in Sub-Saharan Africa, which stood at 14 million metric tons in 2008, is projected to reach 28 million metric tons in 2018.

The key to achieving this goal is not just “on-farm” assistance, such as introducing rice varieties that fit the diverse African agro-ecologies, improving irrigation facilities, and disseminating rice growing techniques to the farmers. It is also essential to formulate and implement strategic national plans to stimulate rice production in each country. These plans bring efficiency to the flow from production to processing, distribution, and sales, thereby increasing the value added to rice that eventually sells well in the market. The Coalition joined forces with the governments of the 23 member countries and 11 international development partners and took the lead in enhancing the rice value-chain in each country to achieve the goal of doubling the rice production.

Hiroshi Hiraoka, a JICA senior advisor, pushed the initiative forward as the coordinator at the CARD Secretariat in Nairobi, Kenya, for four years after its inauguration in 2008. He found that the weak progress in increasing rice production in Africa was because the taste and quality of domestically grown rice failed to meet consumers’ preferences. Consequently, farmers, facing weak demand for local rice, were not incentivized to boost their production.

“The governments of the CARD member countries tended to focus only on increasing production and productivity. Therefore, I put much effort into sensitizing them to the importance of taking more measures to improve the quality of rice with a view to strengthening the competitiveness of domestic rice over its counterpart from Asia and stimulating local consumers’ demand for local rice,” Mr. Hiraoka says.

With many meetings and training opportunities over the past ten years and growing confidence of the member countries in the initiative, Mr. Hiraoka feels that such a paradigm shift has occurred to some extent and started to bear fruit on the ground.

For example, the rice self-sufficiency rate in Senegal stood at only about 20 percent in the early 2000s, and the country depended on large amounts of imported rice. As the government of Senegal set its target to improve its rice self-sufficiency, JICA provided support for improving the techniques of rice-production and processing and building a value-chain network to increase the amount of rice distribution in urban areas. These efforts have led to the rice self-sufficiency ratio rising to 39 percent (as of 2014). JICA will continue its support with a goal of achieving full self-sufficiency.

With the demand for rice in Sub-Saharan Africa expected to continue increasing, discussions are underway for the CARD second phase, which would aim to double the annual rice production from an estimated 28 million metric tons in 2018 to 56 million metric tons by 2030. In addition to the current 23 CARD member countries, nine other countries including Angola and Sudan have expressed their intentions to participate.

Original source: JICA
Published on 19 October 2018