Adoption and impacts of international rice research technologies

To meet rising demand for rice, it is estimated that the global rice production needs to increase by 116 million tons by 2035. Much of the increase has to come from smallholder rice farmers in developing countries. In this article, we review 25 evaluation studies on new rice technologies and practices that have been tried and used by smallholder rice farmers in developing countries. Stress-tolerant rice varieties are found among promising new rice varieties. African farmers benefit from New Rice for Africa (NERICA) varieties. Some natural resource management (NRM) practices have been evaluated in farmer trials and found beneficial. However, the NRM evaluation studies faced with difficulties in defining NRM “technology” and “adoption”, and the difficulties remain as future challenges for evaluation studies.