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Progress and Activities

• Egypt Becomes thirty-first Country to Report Positive SRI Reults
Dr. Walid El-Khoby, researcher at the Rice Research and Training Center at Sakha, has reported on trials conducted at his Center which showed SRI yields of 10.7 tons per hectare with inbred improved varieties, and 13.9 tons per hectare with hybrid varieties. Since Egypt’s national average yield at 9.5 tons per hectare is the highest in the world, these yield increases are not as great in percentage terms (12.5% and 46%) as in some other countries. However, they were achieved with a 35% reduction in water use and one-third lower costs of production, which makes the results attractive in Egypt. In the next season, researchers at the Center will extend SRI in areas that are constrained by soil salinity, which is a major problem in Egypt, with the expectation that SRI methods can mitigate this constraint.

In August 2008, Dr. El-Khoby and colleagues at Rice Research andTraining Center, and their SRI trial plots, were visited by Dr. Mustapha Ceesay, research director of the Gambia’s National Agricultural Research Institute, who was attending an international rice conference in Cairo. Ceesay, who has been evaluating SRI in the Gambia since 2000 while still a graduate student at Cornell, shared his considerable experience with SRI practices with Egyptian colleagues (see Ceesay's report).