As global warming progresses, there is concern about the decline in productivity and quality of paddy rice due to heat-induced sterility caused by exposure of the spikelets to high temperatures during flowering. A research group including JIRCAS has established an international open-field rice monitoring network (MINCERnet) covering 11 countries around the world to accumulate and analyze data from paddy fields under various climatic conditions. The research group identified that heat-induced sterility can be uniformly evaluated by using panicle temperature at the time of flowering, rather than ambient air temperature as an indicator. This evaluation method will improve the accuracy of predicting heat-induced sterility around the world and enable appropriate countermeasures to be taken.

At the 8th Tokyo International Conference on African Development (TICAD8) held in Tunisia on August 27-28, the Japanese government positioned Africa as “a partner for growing together" and expressed its commitment to focus on “investment in people” and “quality of growth”. At the opening ceremony, the President of Senegal spoke of the need to expand food and agricultural production and value chains, and expressed his expectations for a win-win relationship in technology transfer, human resource utilization, and public-private partnerships between Japan and the continent, as well as for solving issues through innovation in order to fully utilize the potential of each country. From 5:00 PM today, the online event "Managing African Soil for Food Security and Environmental Sustainability" will finally be held.