The GIC promotes four crops, namely Rice, in Nasarawa and Benue, Cassava in Ogun and Osun, Irish Potato in Plateau and Maize in Kaduna and Kano, respectively. The second round of PARI studies in 2016 were expected to find common ground with the GIC crops. This was implemented against the already documented results from Nigeria’s 2015 PARI study 1 “An inventory of existing functional promising agricultural innovations in Nigeria”. The salient results from this study are as follows: 116 technologies were identified nationally during the review period (2006-2014); the top 4 commodities associated with the highest number of proven beneficial technologies are Cassava (32; 27.4%) , maize (20; 17.1%), sorghum (11; 9.4%) and rice (10; 8.5%); at least 45 items were found to trigger the 116 agricultural technologies assembled. The strongest or most frequent triggers of innovation include yield improvement, resistance to pests and diseases, wide ecological adaptation, high quality cassava flour, HQCF, shorter time to maturity, drought resistance, seed or grain colour, malting quality and grain weight or size. In general, some triggers are cross-cutting while several others are commodity specific. The foregoing highlights substantially guided the conduct of the supplementary PARI 2016 studies, at least the choice of commodities.

Published as FARA Research Results Vol2(4).