CIRAD Agricultural research for development
  • Version française
  • Intranet
Quick search
  • News
  • Jobs
  • Contacts/Access
  • Who are we?
    • CIRAD in a nutshell
    • CIRAD worldwide
    • Organization
    • Our strategy
    • Our partnerships
    • Our values
  • Our research
    • Key thematic fields
    • The impact of our research
    • Tropical value chains
    • Research units
    • Platforms in partnership for research and training
    • Open research resources and infrastructures
  • Teaching & training
    • Higher education
    • Available training
    • E-learning
  • Innovation & expertise
    • Partnerships for innovation
    • Skills and expertise
    • Products and services
    • Our subsidiaries
  • Publications & resources
    • CIRAD publications
    • CIRAD data
    • Information resources
    • Publishing
    • Science for all
    • Photo library
    • Website Directory
  • You are here:
  • Home >
  • News >
  • All news items >
  • Upland rice in Madagascar

Back to the list
Upland rice growing in Madagascar © CIRAD, L.-M. Raboin

Link

  • Le Cirad à Madagascar

Research units

Agroecology and Sustainable Intensification of Annual Crops

Contact

Eric Scopel
Antananarivo, Madagascar
E-mail

Louis-Marie Raboin
Antsirabe, Madagascar
E-mail

  • All news items
  • Coming up
  • Newsletter
  • Media access

A new upland rice variety for the highlands of Madagascar

13/06/2012 - Snippets

A new upland rice variety is now available to growers in the highlands of Madagascar. The variety is the fruit of a partnership between FOFIFA and CIRAD, and is tailored to the agro-climatic conditions in the region. In particular, it is tolerant of the cold temperatures over 1200 m above sea level.

In Madagascar, rice is both the main crop and the staple food for the local population, with an annual per capita consumption figure of more than 120 kilos. The highlands region is densely populated, and its farmers traditionally grow irrigated rice. However, there is no land left to set up new irrigated rice fields. Developing upland rice in the hills ("tanety"), which are generally used for maize, beans, sweet potatoes and cassava or to graze zebus, has thus emerged as a possible way of boosting rice production.

The lack of a sufficiently cold-tolerant upland rice variety that could be grown at heights of more than 1200 m above sea level, thus led to the establishment, in the mid-1980s, of a varietal creation programme for high-altitude upland rice, associating FOFIFA and CIRAD. Since then, more than fifteen cold-tolerant upland rice varieties have been bred and launched on the market, FOFIFA 173 being the latest. These varieties have served to push the threshold for upland rice growing over 1800 m above sea level.
Thanks to these varieties, high-altitude upland rice growing has developed very rapidly, particularly in the Vakinankaratra region, along the famous RN7 road between the towns of Antsirabe and Ambatolampy (70 km north), where research and dissemination efforts have been concentrated. Upland rice is now an integral part of the landscape in the highlands region, and in places, it is even the dominant crop in upland cropping systems.

Varietal creation needs to continue, to support this development and broaden the range of available varieties so as to ensure the sustainability of high-altitude upland rice production by taking on board several objectives such as resistance to rice blast fungus, nitrogen uptake efficiency, diversification of grain quality, cold tolerance and adaptation to farming systems developed as part of a conservation agriculture strategy.

  • Category: Science

  • © CIRAD 2009-2019
  • Site map
  • RSS feed
  • Legal details
  • Marchés publics
  • CIRAD is a founder member of
  • Agreenium
  • Montpellier Université d'excellence (I-Site MUSE)