26/03/2025
Farming DRC - 4
With as big a group of farmers as TDR Justin Lukungu has in the South Kivu province of DRC, it is important to maintain the cultivation of more than one crop. First to minimize the risk, and second, to make sure the farmers have enough harvest to feed their families. For the second reason, TDR Justin Lukungu, and his associates, selected rice as one of their main crops. They allocated 3 hectares for the rice, and only maize (corn) has equally big land under.
Rice is believed to have been first cultivated in the Yangtze River basin in China about 9,000 years ago. Approximately 6,000 years later, the Oryza glaberrima rice, or African Rice, was independently domesticated in Africa. The Oryza glaberrima rice is still grown in West Africa and also in some countries in the Americas.
From China, rice cultivation spread around the world, by trade and migration, and now rice is cultivated on all continents except Antarctica. However, Asia is the dominant rice producer in the world, with China and India producing about 54% of the total or about 282 million metric tons.
Nigeria is the top producer of rice in Africa, with about 8.2 million metric tons, followed by Egypt, Madagascar, and Tanzania with 4.8, 4.2, and 3.0 million metric tons respectively. Nigeria almost doubled its rice production between 2010 and 2020, growing from 4.5 to 8.2 million metric tons.
Although there are over 120,000 varieties of rice in the world, categorized by kernel size, starch content, color, flavor, and degree of milling, it is more common to use only grain size and color to categorize the rice.
There are three categories of grain size, short, medium, and long. Short rice is under 5.5 mm in length, while long-grain rice is over 6.6 mm. The grain size affects the texture, which means that each grain type is used for different cooking applications.
Rice comes in three basic colors, white, brown, red, and black.
White rice is the most processed rice. That is w