SRISTI

The Africa Rice Center, earlier known as the Western African Rice Development Association (WARDA), Benin has been involved in exploring the potential of farmers’ innovations in solving the problems of paddy cultivators. They have collected many different innovations and traditional knowledge applicable to crops and also livestock. Dr. Paul Van Mele, Technology Transfer Agronomist, contributed an article about the Africa Rice Center and its work. It is an autonomous intergovernmental research association of African member states. It is also one of the 15 international agricultural research Centers supported by the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR). It was constituted as the WARDA—a name that it carried until 2003 when it was designated as the Africa Rice Center. It is good that CGIAR institutions are at last waking up to realising the potential of farmers’ innovations, however, not many seem to have been subjected to serious institutional research and that is an area where much more action will be expected in the future. It is also hoped that CG institutions will take up practices from the Honey Bee Network database for dissemination among African farmers. More than two decades ago, Paul Richards had also argued for this cause.