Matty Demont

International Rice Research Institute | IRRI · Sustainable Impact through Rice-based Systems Platform

National rice development strategies in Africa are often supply-focused and implicitly assume that consumers will readily substitute imported for domestic rice. However, due to increasing import dependency, urban consumer preferences for rice have become biased toward Asian export quality standards, against which African rice has difficulties to co...

Background: Quality is a powerful engine in rice value chain upgrading. However, there is no consensus on how “rice quality” should be defined and measured in the rice sector. Scope and approach: We adopt a Lancasterian definition of rice quality as a bundle of intrinsic and extrinsic attributes. We then review how rice quality is (i) perceived and...

Following the food price crisis in 2008, African governments implemented policies aiming at crowding in investment in rice value chain upgrading to help domestic rice compete with imports. We assess the state of rice value chain upgrading in West Africa by reviewing evidence on rice millers' investment in semi-industrial and industrial milling tech...

Gödecke, Stein and Qaim (2018) (GSQ) recently analysed the 1990–2010 trend and determinants of the global burden of chronic and hidden hunger. We reanalyse and extend GSQ's study and demonstrate that after 2010, significant reductions in the burden of hunger were achieved. In contrast with GSQ, we find that (i) hidden hunger is more prevalent than...

Following its approval in the Philippines in July 2021, provitamin A-rich “Golden Rice” is set to become the worlds' first commercialized genetically modified crop with direct consumer benefits. Despite supplementation and fortification programs, the burden of micronutrient deficiencies remains high. For Golden Rice to be successful in reducing vit...

In many countries, varietal turnover rates are stubbornly low in seed systems that target smallholder farmers. While there are several factors that contribute to low turnover, two important behavioral factors that limit adoption of new varieties are the difficulties that farmers may face in learning about new varieties and their hesitancy to assume...

Introduction Strategies for increasing rice production in the Asian Mega-Deltas have led to environmental degradation, resource overexploitation, and high greenhouse gas emissions. Certified sustainable production labels can support governments in their efforts to render rice value chains more sustainable by simultaneously fostering planetary and h...

Though enormous strides have been achieved in recent decades towards reducing food insecurity in the Global South, continued efforts are imperative in light of rapidly expanding populations and threats posed by climate change. A relatively unexplored area in this arena is the nexus between cultural heritage and food security. Cultural heritage embo...

Crop breeding by the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR), in partnership with national agricultural research and extension systems (NARES) and privately owned seed companies, forms the backbone of the research and development (R&D) effort needed to ensure future food security in developing regions. Over the past decade...

Reducing Africa's dependence on Asian rice imports requires tailoring local rice products to food markets that are segmented by cultural heritage of ancient rice domestication and colonial heritage of more recent import substitution policies. Using experimental auctions, we examine quality upgrading and branding spillovers from Senegal by assessing...

Through experimental auctions conducted during 19–23 October 2009, we examine quality upgrading and branding spillovers from Senegal by assessing the competitiveness of Senegalese and Asian rice products in an urban market in the capital Nouakchott in Mauritania. Four rice products were used in the auctions: (i) standard SRV rice, (ii) imported bra...

The impact of information as an extrinsic quality cue on consumers’ valuation of intrinsic food quality attributes can be captured by incorporating ‘information treatments’ in experimental auctions. We combine ‘exogenous’ information treatments (a video broadcast and a radio transcript) on the benefits of a locally produced improved rice processing...

Rice production in Vietnam is characterized by environmental degradation, high greenhouse gas emissions, and low wage rates. The Sustainable Rice Platform (SRP) standard is the first globally recognized certified sustainable production standard for rice. There are efforts to increase sustainability in rice production, but little is known about cons...

Cette étude vise à analyser les dispositions à acheter et le consentement à payer le riz local par les femmes au Burkina Faso. Les préférences des consommatrices et leurs consentements à payer le riz local de Bagré ont été révélés à partir des enchères expérimentales conduites auprès de 120 femmes de la ville de Ouagadougou. L'étude a montré que 55...

In order to help Vietnamese smallholder farmers tap into high-quality rice export markets, the International Rice Research Institute supported farmer groups and export companies in negotiating an inclusive rice farming contract that would encourage and support farmers in producing high-quality rice following sustainable production standards. Our au...

Where CGIAR breeding programs rely on the private sector for the multiplication and distribution of improved cultivars, persistent challenges have dampened their impact on varietal adoption and turnover rates. Part of the problem is that research and practice in CGIAR and among its national breeding program partners tend to treat the private sector...

Rationale, approach, methods and parameter data for the joint Projection of Benefits for Genetic Innovations CGIAR Initiatives

Maps supporting priority setting in Genetic Innovation for the submission of Initiative proposals.

Breeders face the challenging task of tailoring crop varieties to complex consumer preferences shaped through culture and history. The Casamance rice sector in Senegal is an interesting case; it is endowed with a 3,000-year-old cultural heritage of African rice domestication, while it was exposed to century-long colonial import substitution policie...

Adoption of new plant varieties has played a significant role in eradicating global hunger. Previous research has mainly focused on farmer adoption and impact of new crop varieties, although upstream adoption of technologies in plant breeding can generate substantial multiplier effects on downstream impacts. This study moves upstream in the innovat...

Rice breeding priorities in Africa often focus on agronomic gains. However, being a net importer of rice, the continent’s varietal replacement success also crucially hinges on new varieties’ market competitiveness vis-à-vis imports. Markets have been profoundly shaped by cultural and colonial heritage. Indigenous preferences for African rice can be...

The demand for improved packaging and labeling of rice is expected to rise in Asia due to rapid income growth, growing food safety concerns, and retail market transformation. Currently, about half of the rice in urban markets in South and Southeast Asia is sold in packaged form. However, urban market shares of packaged rice are highly heterogeneous...

A consumer survey was conducted in eastern India in 2017 to understand the heterogeneity of consumers’ food choice. Face-to-face interviews were conducted among urban and rural consumers from low- and middle-income households in Odisha and West Bengal, eastern India, using a structured questionnaire. A multi-stage sampling procedure was implemented...

Food safety of staple crops such as rice is of global concern and has recently risen to the top of the policy agenda in Vietnam. Policy makers have introduced food safety certification, but little is known about the inclusiveness of consumer access to certified safe food. To address this evidence gap, we survey rice purchase behavior of urban Vietn...

Understanding heterogeneity of consumers' food choice is critical in formulating tailored nutrition interventions. To illustrate this, we survey urban and rural consumers from low- and middle-income households in eastern India to unravel five sources of heterogeneity (5 Ws) in gastronomic systems that affect diets: (i) socioeconomic characteristics...

The data presented in this article contains information on purchase behavior of certified rice of 199 urban Vietnamese consumers, surveyed in August 2016. The dataset captures behavioral outcomes in terms of rice purchase as well as factors that affect purchase behavior such as psychological and socio-economic determinants. The data not only contri...

Despite the widespread belief that marketing cooperatives’ benefits may extend beyond participating farmers, little is known about the cooperative’s effect on nonparticipating farmers. This paper exploits exogenous variation in language spoken at home in Thailand to obtain instrumental variable estimates of the spillover effect of marketing coopera...

On 25 February 2021, I was invited to present my 15-year portfolio of policy research and advocacy on rice value chain upgrading in Africa as a CGIAR Flagship Leader at Coalition for African Rice Development's (CARD) webinar on “COVID-19 Impact and Rice Competitiveness.” The webinar was attended by the Minister of Rice Promotion, Côte d’Ivoire, and...

For centuries, heirloom rice varieties have been grown on the terraces of the Cordillera Mountains of Luzon, Philippines, terroirs known for their significant historical, cultural, and aesthetic values. However, heritage heirloom rice farming is gradually being abandoned, mainly because of its lower productivity and the struggle of the sector to cr...

Achieving healthier diets requires a thorough understanding of the drivers of food choice. We developed a toolkit to capture diversity and drivers of food choice of a target population and identified entry points for introducing novel food products or nutrition interventions. The toolkit is based on the gastronomic systems research framework, which...

Two expert elicitation workshops were conducted in 2017 to capture the diversity and cultural drivers of food choice of low- and middle- income households in the states of West Bengal and Odisha in eastern India. Experts representing the fields of nutrition, home science, food technology, and food service industry were invited to participate. Follo...

Breeders have two non-exclusive strategic investment options for increasing smallholder farmers’ and consumers’ livelihoods through genetic improvement of crop varieties: (i) enhancing productivity; and (ii) enhancing value and market access. New Rice for Africa (NERICA) varieties with superior agronomic characteristics were bred and introduced in...

The EAT-Lancet Commission urgently called for “planetary health diets”. The success of encouraging dietary shift, however, crucially hinges on people, and more specifically on consumers’ culture, context, socioeconomic status, food environment, attitudes, perceptions, beliefs and behavior towards food choice. In India, enhanced food availability an...

Rice plays a strategic role in food security in West Africa. However, the region increasingly relies on rice imports due to a growing and structural deficit, and domestic value chains face constrains on technology, finance and coordination. As a result, West Africa is very vulnerable to international and local trade disruptions, such as the ones cu...

Using an experimental methodology based on investment games, we examine whether smallholder rice farmers from Nueva Ecija, Philippines have heterogeneous preferences for improvements in 10 rice varietal traits. We use a latent class cluster approach to identify different segments of rice producing households and their distinct preferences for trait...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to analyze geographic heterogeneity of consumer preferences for intrinsic quality attributes of rice in South and Southeast Asia and the drivers of demand for these attributes, with a particular focus on rice fragrance and the role of gender. Design/methodology/approach Stated-preference surveys were conducted...

Rice straw is a tradable commodity in food and feed markets, particularly in rice-producing countries such as India, Vietnam, and Cambodia. Understanding the bottlenecks and linkages of different components and actors in rice and rice straw value chains is important to identify strategies to extract maximum value out of the straw and encourage dive...

Rice straw is a by-product generated during rice production when harvesting paddy. Rice straw is used for energy and non-energy purposes. For non-energy purposes, rice straw can be used to produce mushroom and as feed for cattle. In addition, rice straw is used for producing organic fertilizer. Thus, the utilization of rice straw can have an import...

We examined intrahousehold decision making with respect to household investment in portfolios of future rice varietal trait improvements (VTIs) to increase farm households' livelihoods in Nueva Ecija, Philippines. Investment decisions were elicited using an experimental methodology based on investment games. In the investment game, couples from ric...

The Vietnamese government is currently attempting to upgrade rice value chains in the Mekong River Delta by encouraging (i) vertical coordination between exporters and farmers through contract farming, and (ii) horizontal coordination among farmers through the “small farmers, large field” program. Previous studies on the determinants of contract fa...

With an expected 9 billion people by 2050 and average income on the rise in the developing world, meeting future food demand will be a challenge. Climate change, urbanisation and land degradation are putting further pressure on the food supply. The multifaceted and self-reinforcing nature of these challenges calls for a fun- damental transformation...

Higher head rice yield (HRY), which represents the proportion of intact grains that survive milling, and lower grain chalkiness (opacity) are key quality traits. We investigated the genetic basis of HRY and chalkiness in 320 diverse resequenced accessions of indica rice with integrated single- and multi-locus genome-wide association studies using 2...

The data presented in this article contains information on 189 rice breeders from 51 rice-growing countries around the world. Firstly, this unique dataset permits to lay down a baseline of currently used breeding methods. Secondly, the data allow to make an assessment of the adoption behavior of rice breeders towards alternative breeding methods, a...

Achieving healthier diets requires a thorough understanding of the diversity and drivers of food choice. The International Rice Research Institute developed a ‘Food Choice Application’ featuring 162 unique Bengali dishes and captured the weekly meal plans of 177 low to middle income households in West Bengal. Food choices varied by gender and betwe...

Little is known about the value of sustainably-produced rice and incentive mechanisms for the adoption of sustainable production standards throughout rice value chains in Southeast Asia. This study tests the feasibility of a market-based incentive mechanism by eliciting consumers’ willingness-to-pay (WTP) for rice produced and labeled under a natio...

Background: Despite the critical role rice breeders play to ensure food security, there is a lack of information regarding their current socio-economic characteristics, constraints and attitudes towards technology adoption. Some key concepts like budget, experience, local ecosystems, level of education and even main breeding method have hardly bee...

Rice breeders in Asia and elsewhere in the world have long overlooked trying to shorten the time it takes to develop new varieties. Plant breeders have proposed a technique called Rapid Generation Advance (RGA) as a way to accelerate the results of public rice breeding programs. However, little is known about RGA’s potential impact. Here, we presen...

Selected rice benefit studies (data). (XLSX)

The purpose of this study is to understand the drivers of food choice in eastern India using the gastronomic systems research framework and to identify entry points for nutrition-sensitive interventions that are context-and culture-specific. In this framework, food choice is viewed as a result of one's socioeconomic and cultural context which then...

In West Africa, rice produced locally falls short of meeting the demand and preferences of urban consumers. We analyzed the challenges facing local rice in urban markets and identified policies that can be implemented to improve the competitiveness of the regional rice sector. We argue that without addressing the demand side of the value chain, eff...

Rice production needs to increase in the future in order to meet increasing demands. The development of new improved and higher yielding varieties more quickly will be needed to meet this demand. However, most rice breeding programmes in the world have not changed in several decades. In this article, we revisit the evidence in favour of using rapid...

Supplementary material Word cloud of descriptors used to describe the seven rice varieties evaluated during the consumer survey in 2015. In this word cloud, the font size of each word indicates the relative frequency of mention and the two most frequently used words are in blue font.

Consumers’ preference toward rice that has the aroma trait is evolving. In this article, we investigate rice attributes that are valued by the urban and rural consumers of seven countries in South and Southeast Asia. In addition, the factors that influence consumers’ decisions on choosing from a set of rice attributes are identified. We fit a rank...

Nutritional and dietary interventions and the introduction of novel food products and ingredients require a thorough understanding of the drivers of food choice, which are embedded in local context and culture. We develop a framework of “gastronomic systems research” (GSR) to understand culture-specific consumer food choice, and contextualise it to...

Genetic modification (GM) has been advocated as an alternative or complement to micronutrient interventions such as supplementation, fortification or dietary diversification. While proof-of-concept of various GM biofortified crops looks promising, the decision tree of policy makers is much more complex, and requires insight on their socio-economic...

Rice production is crucial for food security and income generation in sub-Saharan Africa. However, productivity and technical efficiency levels in rice production systems are severely constrained by biotic constraints such as parasitic weeds. This paper assesses the impact of infestation by parasitic weeds on rice farmers' technical efficiency and...

Although Vietnam is one of the biggest rice exporters today, there is an urgent need to restructure the sector. To guide the transition from being a quantity-focused producer to a credible supplier of quality rice, this study explores the sector's opportunities for sustainable value chain upgrading. Data was collected through focus group discussion...

Parasitic weeds invade around 1.34 million hectares of rainfed rice areas in Africa causing damages estimated at USD 200 million.

Parasitic weeds pose increasing threats to rain-fed rice production in Africa. Most important species are Striga asiatica, S. aspera and S. hermonthica in rain-fed uplands, and Rhamphicarpa fistulosa in rain-fed lowlands. Information on the regional spread and economic importance of parasitic weeds in cereal production systems is scant. This articl...

Public rice breeding plays a crucial role in food security in Asia, but it is often supply-focused. Consumer-focused rice breeding incorporates consumer preferences in varietal development and benefits (i) consumers by fostering availability of affordable rice with characteristics that meet their food preferences, and (ii) farmers by facilitating m...

Weeds and granivorous birds are the two major biotic constraints to rice production in sub-Saharan Africa. Anecdotal evidence advances the hypothesis that weedy fields attract granivorous birds to the extent that the joint weed × bird impact on crops is synergistic. We develop a theoretical model, based on experimental data, of the interaction betw...

Hedonic pricing analysis is conducted to determine the implicit values of various attributes in the market value of a good. In this study, hedonic pricing analysis was applied to measure the contribution of grain quality search and experience attributes to the price of rice in two rural towns in the Philippines. Rice samples from respondents underw...

Distribution of chalkiness, grain length, grain width, percentage of head rice from the milled grain, and length-width ratio of the grain length of raw milled rice grains submitted by respondents from Famy and Sta Maria. (TIFF)