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As climate change – together with the associated extreme weather conditions – intensifies, researchers from Europe, Argentina and China are developing salt-tolerant rice varities to protect the crop from the effects of global warming.

The researchers, working under the NEURICE project, have developed six salt-tolerant rice varieties, two of which are to be commercially registered in Spain, two in France and the remaining two in Italy, according to a report made available to Financial Nigeria today. The NEURICE project is being funded by Horizon 2020, the European Union’s biggest research and innovation programme.

The main objective of the project is to develop strategies for rice productivity, stability and quality. The new rice varieties are not only salt-tolerant, they are also tolerant to apple snails pest, which represent one of the worst crop pests, damaging rice fields worldwide in recent times.

According to the statement by Horizon 2020, rice is one of the most important cereal crops in the world and it makes up an important part of the human diet. The United States Department of Agriculture Economic Research Service said in a different report that sub-Saharan Africa’s total rice consumption is projected to grow from 27-28 million tonnes in 2017 to about 36 million tonnes in 2026. Nigeria is among the three largest rice-consuming countries in the region, the others being Côte d'Ivoire, and Madagascar, who account for about 40 per cent of SSA’s rice consumption.

Rice produced in Europe currently accounts for two-thirds of the rice consumed on the continent. However, the crop is being threatened by the effects of climate change. River deltas, where rice is grown in Europe, are becoming saltier due to rising temperatures, rising sea levels and water scarcity.

Hence, most varieties of rice are severely damaged by salinisation and giant snails. For years, the measures adopted to combat the apple snails and stop their spread had failed. Indeed, those methods incresed salt levels in the soil, thereby decreasing the ability of plants to take up water from the soil.

Recent discovery found that the salinity-tolerance of tropical Asian varieties is due to the presence of a chromosome segment called Saltol. The scientists – comprising participants from Spain, France, Italy, England, Argentina and China – on the NEURICE project are using traditional breeding methods to cross European with Asian rice lines. The technique used to do this is called genetic introgression (which is a classic non-transgenic genetic improvement technique), said the EU programme.

“We have yet seen that most of the varieties obtained in the NEURICE project behave better than the original local varieties in salinity conditions,” said Salvador Nogués, project coordinator and Professor of Plant Physiology at the University of Barcelona. “But surprisingly, some of the varieties behave also better than local ones in non-salinised fields, although we have to wait for the results of this second year to confirm this observed trend.”

Nogués added that hundreds of rice varieties have also been sequenced, seeking new genes related to salinity-tolerance. Once submitted for registration, the next step is to make them available to growers so they can be made available to rice producers by 2022.