To commemorate the 50th anniversary the Africa Rice Center (formerly WARDA) which is one of the CGIAR centers, Field Crops Research (Elsevier), an internationally renowned research journal has published a special issue on "Sustainable productivity enhancement of rice-based farming systems in Africa".

The special issue features 19 research papers written by researchers who are at the forefront of research on rice agronomy in Africa. The papers cover a wide variety of rice production environments and regions in Africa (from irrigated rice in the Sahel of West Africa to the highlands of Madagascar) and a wide range of topics including nutrient management, cropping systems, water management, weed management, crop growth simulation models, and breeding. In a summary of the 18 papers published in the special issue, a synthesis paper (Rodenburg and Saito, 2022) identified the following six future research directions in this field.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/journal/field-crops-research/special-issu…

1. More research and technology development for rain-fed and upland rice-based systems.
2. Develop technologies that take into account the farming system and landscape level.
3. Strengthen research on sustainability, taking into account limited resources, climate change mitigation and adaptation measures, and biodiversity conservation.
4. Develop and utilize sustainability performance indicators targeting not only the field level, but also the farming system and landscape level to realize 3.
5. Strengthen development and/or introduction of labor-saving technologies, including mechanization.
6. Strengthening research collaboration with other disciplined scientists.

JIRCAS has been collaborating with AfricaRice since the 1990s. For this special issue, JIRCAS researchers contributed the following two papers.

• Hidetoshi Asai, Kazuki Saito, Kensuke Kawamura, 2021. Application of a Bayesian approach to quantify the impact of nitrogen fertilizer on upland rice yield in sub-Saharan Africa Field Crops Res. 272, 108284. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.fcr.2021.108284
• Tovohery Rakotoson, Yasuhiro Tsujimoto, Tomohiro Nishigaki, 2022. Phosphorus management strategies to increase lowland rice yields in sub-Saharan Africa: A review. Field Crops Res. 275, 108370.https://doi.org/10.1016/j.fcr.2022.108670

References

Field Crops Research Special issue: Sustainable productivity enhancement of rice-based farming systems in Africa. Edited by Jonne Rodenburg, Kazuki Saito https://www.sciencedirect.com/journal/field-crops-research/special-issu…
Africa Rice Center: https://www.africarice.org/
Jonne Rodenburg, Kazuki Saito, 2022. Towards sustainable productivity enhancement of rice-based farming systems in sub-Saharan Africa. Field Crops Res. 287, 108670. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.fcr.2022.108670

Contributor: SAITO Kazuki (Social Science Division and Africa Rice Center)