Adoption trend of climate-resilient rice varieties in Bangladesh

The adoption of stress-tolerant versions of popular rice cultivars can enable farming communities to mitigate the current and future challenges of recurrent flooding and drought in Bangladesh. It is recommended to promote these varieties on a large scale with assured availability and supply of good-quality labeled seeds through public and private extension and delivery networks.  This remains critical to maintaining and increasing the rice production rate of the country to match the demand of the growing population. Therefore, it is imperative to appropriately position these climate-resilient or stress-tolerant varieties against the popular non-stress-tolerant varieties. This also calls for targeted public-private community partnerships in seed systems to accelerate the supply of early-generation as well as commercial and good-quality seed for faster varietal turnover.