Growing Pains: Can Rice Production In Africa Keep Up With Demand?

Africa Rice initiative aims to give farmers more control over their land in order to reduce flooding and increase yields Salmata Ouattara remembers 2023 as the turning point for her rice farm. June is usually the peak of the rainy season in Ivory Coast, but in the preceding years she and other farmers in MBe on the outskirts of Bouak, the countrys second biggest city, would wait weeks for rainfall. Then in September, they would watch helplessly as their farmlands were flooded. Some abandoned their farms, frustrated by fluctuating crop yields.