Africa Rice Breeding Task Force annual meeting

The annual meeting of the Africa Rice Breeding Task Force was held, 12–13 May, in Cotonou to review progress made in the first year and discuss plans for 2011. The Breeding Task Force was launched in June 2010 to regroup scarce human resources devoted to rice breeding in Africa and help build a new generation of rice breeders across the continent. It adopts a systematic collaborative approach to rice breeding that will build much-needed rice breeding capacity, facilitate access of African rice breeders to new materials, stimulate rice germplasm evaluation across the continent and, in general, shorten the time needed to deploy new climate-resilient and stress-tolerant rice varieties for major production systems in sub-Saharan Africa.