By Peyot Patricia
In a bid to address the challenges posed by climate change, scientists at the National Agricultural Research Organisation have called on farmers to plant hybrid rice varieties.
This was revealed by Dr. Jimmy Lamo, a senior principal researcher and head of the cereals program at the National Crops Resources Research Institute.
According to Lamo, hybrid rice is not only an appealing crop to the farmers, rice traders, and consumers but also very rewarding in terms of yield return as compared to other rice varieties.
“It is adequate to produce this crop with a more yielding capacity that is 9.5 to 10 tons compared to the other rice varieties that yield about four to five tons,” Lamo says.
“With hybrid, the yield and tones are almost double that of normal rice and this is a game change in production with a country being able to feed its citizen with more to offer as export too.”
He adds that hybrid rice will help curb the global crisis of food insecurity that keeps increasing with population growth and high food demand.
Lamo says there is need for improved production through adopting new technologies that are climate friendly and WDR has just proven to be ideal.
“It is income generating, possessing both quantitative and quality that end users look out for in rice. This variety will address the resource and environmental challenges faced by rice producers,” he added.
Climate Change is a serious challenge
According to United Nations, hunger hit as many as 828 million in 2021, about 46 million in 2020 and 150 million since the outbreak of covid19.
A major contributing factor has been resulting from the rigid non progressive traditional methods of farming that cannot properly address climatic change.
This has led to poor crop yield hence delayed availability of food. A research by the Food and Agricultural Organization in 2020 stated that rice provides 220,000 tons annually thus making it one of Uganda’s top staple food relied on in terms of food and exportation.
“With more acceptability of hybrid rice, we are rest assured of improved crop genes manageable by farmers and end users at large,” Lamo revealed, adding that this comes at the right time as the world is still grappling with effects posed by the covid19 pandemic.
What about the WDR73 variety
NARO teamed up with the Shanghai Agro-biological Gene Centre (SAGC) and Shanghai Tiangu Biotechnology Co.Ltd in a collaborative research and developed the climate stress tolerant hybrid rice variety, WDR73.
WDR is a water use efficient and drought tolerant rice variety. According to Lamo, the crop is able to survive where there is less water and drought.
He says the crop was developed to fit in two seasons of both wet and dry meaning, it can be planted as an upland rice which is rain fed or in lowland areas and swampy places.
WDR hybrid rice was released after approval by the government of Uganda at the end of 2022. It stood a chance to compete with the already existing local varieties and outperformed them as it was most preferable by the farmers and consumers during organoleptic and sensory rice testing.
It got majority votes against the local varieties due to its enormous qualitative attributes. Lamo cites it is appealing in both cooked and uncooked form with stunning qualities including being high yielding, in addition to a pleasing aroma and taste.
Also, he says it is appealing in grain size, color, and it’s ability to cope with stress and diseases such as rice yellow mortal virus (RYMV), brown spots, streaks makes it even more outstanding.