The purpose of the Market Oriented Rice Development project (MOReDeP) is to promote rice
cultivation as a cash crop in Zambia, which would contribute to increasing the domestic rice production
and supporting the government’s policy on the crop diversification. For this purpose, MOReDeP
mainly conducts:

1. Researching and developing rice cultivation techniques that are flexible and
   favorable to various ecologies in Zambia,
2.  Formulating “Rice Clusters” while conducting extension
   activities to spread the use of the techniques across farmers.
3. Enhancing farmers’ knowledge and
   business skills to improve their income by selling produced rice.

Project
purpose             Rice cultivation is promoted as a cash crop in the target areas
Key activity       1) Research and technology development
                            2) Extension through rice cluster approach
                            3) Enhancement of agri-business by market-oriented rice farming model
(RiceSHEP)
Target area       Countrywide (main focused areas are Luapula, Western, and Lusaka)

Beneficiary        Farmers, rice millers and traders, and MoA staff

Duration             From October 2019 To September 2025
Implementing
organization       Ministry of Agriculture

RICE RESEARCH
Developing cultivation techniques favorable to various ecologies
Higher Productivity is the focus of the activity. The productivity of rice production in Zambia
is 1.20 ton/ha (FAO2019), which is quite low, even comparing to other African countries not very
actively producing rice[*]. Low productivity is not because the natural environment is not suitable for
rice production. The basic cultivation and harvest/post-harvest processing techniques practiced by
farmers are the problem. For the improvement of productivity, while supporting the Zambia Agriculture Research Institute (ZARI) and developing its rice research capacity, MOReDeP researches to find solutions to the problems and develops a rice production techniques package