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Millions of farmers suffer heavy damage due to floods in India and Bangladesh. Now Bangladesh has developed three new flood-tolerant rice varieties that would be immensely helpful in preventing tonnes of crop loss every year.
Bangladesh is prone to frequent floods and storms. So it will be a right thing to cultivate those flood-tolerant varieties in the down lands.
This project is being supported by ‘The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’.
According to the project officials, the new varieties have a gene called as Sub1 which helps the plants to withstand two weeks of complete submergence in water.
Khandakar Iftekharuddaula, principal investigator of the project of Bangladesh Rice Research Institute, said, "In September, we applied to the Seed Certification Agency for release of the three submergence-tolerant varieties, Swarna-Sub1, BR-11-Sub1 and BR-11-Recombinant-Sub1."
"Once the agency completes its field evaluations, these varieties will be officially released, hopefully this year," he said.
Iftekharuddaula also said that the Sub1 varieties endured inundation well during this year's flash floods in certain parts of the country like Jamalpur's Dewanganj, Kurigram's Kachir Char, Sylhet's Golapganj and Mymensingh's Dhobaura.
The new rice varieties could be developed due to the identification of a gene which is responsible for the tolerance capability. It was identified earlier by David Mackill and his team from University of California.
