Abstract
In Uganda, a new upland rice variety, namely New Rice for Africa (NERICA), was introduced in 2003 as one of its poverty eradication strategies essentially because it is high-yielding, which can results in both increased cash income and food security. In addition, NERICA is considered to be cultivable in most parts of Uganda thanks to its short maturity and drought tolerant trait. The major question is whether the “NERICA Revolution” is sustainable and extendable to wide areas. The major purposes of this study are to identify the determinants of NERICA adoption with a special focus on the high incidence of dropouts and to assess the consequences of NERICA adoption in terms of changes in crop income using the panel data collected in 2004 and 2006.
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Notes
- 1.
Figure 6.1 come from different survey (rice miller survey). We asked total amount of processed rice from 2004 to 2008. This figure does not mean that the adoption rate of NERICA is 30%. The NERICA’s production share out of total rice produced increased from 10 to 30%. These seemingly contradicting figures with the high dropout rate discussed in this chapter suggest that NERICA adoption areas have been expanding but the adoption rate would have been much higher if there were no problems mentioned in this study.
- 2.
Two to three local council 1s (the lowest administrative unit in Uganda called LC1) constitute each NERICA growing area and our sample covers 29 LC1s.
- 3.
Another way is contract farming with a private seed company and an agricultural research organization from which farmers obtain NERICA seeds and to which farmers sell outputs.
- 4.
In Mpigi and Mubende districts, the yield turns to be higher in the second season of 2006 than 2005. This is probably because only “better” farmers remain in rice cultivation, which has a positive effect on average yields.
- 5.
Since mailo tenants have secure land rights according to the government Land Act of 1998, we include mailo tenanted land in the land area along with the owned land. The difference between the sum of the owned area and the mailo tenanted area and the cultivated area is the fallow area.
- 6.
The average yield of upland rice in SSA is about 1 t/ha (Balasubramanian et al. 2007).
- 7.
Sserunkuuma (2008) shows that farmers trained by JICA in 2007 had significantly lower NERICA yield than those trained in 2005 who started growing NERICA earlier and accumulated experience over the years.
- 8.
This is why seed suppliers cannot make large profits in Asia, where farmers are adept at producing high-quality seeds. In Uganda, certified seeds are actually produced by farmers under contract with seed companies, which provide detailed instructions for seed production.
- 9.
A recent study conducted in Uganda (Sserunkuuma 2008) shows that the occurrence of severe drought conditions during the cropping season significantly reduced the rice yield and negatively affected the number of Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA)-trained households growing NERICA in the subsequent cropping seasons.
- 10.
The rice cultivation experience for 2006 captures the experience in 2004 and 2005.
- 11.
One may wonder if the use of self-produced and purchased seeds is endogenous. It is not necessarily so, however, because farmers are almost all forced to use such seeds, if the seed distribution programs are unavailable.
- 12.
This variable takes unity when seed is farmer’s own produced seed or seeds purchased from neighboring farms.
- 13.
Note that rainfall was not particularly low in 2004 in areas where dropouts reside.
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Kijima, Y., Otsuka, K. (2013). Causes and Consequences of NERICA Adoption in Uganda. In: Otsuka, K., Larson, D. (eds) An African Green Revolution. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-5760-8_6
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