Monty P. Jones and Yuan Longping
Monty P. Jones developed NERICA—“New Rice for Africa”—by crossbreeding high-producing Asian plants with African varieties that thrived in the region’s poor soils and drought conditions. NERICA can increase yields by up to 250 percent while cutting growing time in half for rice farmers, potentially providing 240 million people with more food in West Africa.
Yuan Longping, the “Father of Hybrid Rice,” discovered a genetic phenomenon in rice and then developed the technologies essential for breeding the first hybrid rice variety ever created. Yuan is considered the first scientist to successfully alter the self-pollinating characteristics of rice and facilitate the large-scale production of hybrid rice, which has 20 percent more yield than elite inbred varieties. He took the unknown path in achieving the rice hybrid miracle. His high-yielding, “super hybrid” rice varieties have aided food security in China by feeding millions of people and have spread throughout Asia, to Africa and the Americas.
Born in Sierra Leone, Monty P. Jones was educated there, receiving a bachelor’s degree from the University of Sierra Leone. He next attended Birmingham University in the United Kingdom, where he earned a master’s degree in 1979, a doctorate in plant biology in 1983, and an honorary Doctor of Science in 2005.
He began his career in 1975 at the Africa Rice Center, one of the research centers sponsored by the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR), in its Mangrove Swamp Rice Research Project in his home country. He continued to work as a rice breeder and researcher through the 1980s.
In 1991, Jones was appointed head of the Upland Rice Breeding Program at the Africa Rice Center, then located in Côte d’Ivoire. It was in this position in 1994 that he made his exceptional breakthrough achievement in combining Asian and African rice varieties to develop NERICA, a “New Rice for Africa” uniquely suited to poor African rice farmers.
Jones had observed that low-yielding native African rice varieties grew most successfully in the continent’s alkaline soils and conditions of varying moisture. However, their yield potential was remarkably low, especially compared to the more productive varieties introduced from Asia which had low resistance to African pests and diseases and did not adapt well to the soil and climate. Combining these species had been attempted before, but had never met with success because early in the crossbreeding process the progeny rice varieties always developed sterility.
Jones led his staff to organize and classify all available rice varieties, including 1,500 accessions of the native O. glaberrima species, which were in danger of extinction. From this collection, Jones and his team began the painstaking process of selecting parents for combination traits, crossing them to produce offspring, and backcrossing the offspring to fix varietal traits from the two species and overcome the sterility barrier. After three years of breeding research, the first stable and fertile cross was produced.
With the ability to resist weeds, survive droughts, and thrive on poor soils gained from its African parent and the trait of higher productivity from its Asian ancestor, NERICA rice is capable of increasing farmers’ harvests by 25 to 250 percent. It has been especially valuable in the drier upland regions, where much of West Africa’s rice is grown, with yields reaching four to six tons per hectare. In addition, its shorter, three-month growing time – as opposed to the six months required by parent species – allows African farmers to harvest NERICA rice during the annual “hunger period” when food reserves run out, and to double-crop with nutritionally rich legumes and vegetables or high-value fiber crops in one growing season.
For the consumer, especially poor or malnourished families, NERICA provides increased amounts of protein at a lower price. The nutritional, economic, and political impact of NERICA on countries that previously had to import rice annually is difficult to overst