Trading off consumer preferences induced by cultural and colonial heritage: Lessons from New Rice for Africa (NERICA) in Casamance, Senegal

Breeders face the challenging task of tailoring crop varieties to complex consumer preferences shaped through culture and history. The Casamance rice sector in Senegal is an interesting case; while the region is endowed with a 3,000-year-old cultural heritage of African rice domestication, it has also been exposed to century-long colonial import substitution policies, leading to massive influx of cheap, broken Asian rice. Markets have responded to the amalgam of consumer preferences that have emerged as a result of cultural and colonial heritage by offering three standard grades of rice: 100 per cent broken, semi-broken (35–60 per cent broken), and unbroken. To disentangle the trade-off between indigenous and ‘imported’ traits and inform breeding priorities, we conducted framed field experiments with urban women in the Casamance. We assessed consumers’ revealed price premiums for replacing imported, broken Asian rice with three locally produced New Rice for Africa (NERICA) hybrids between African and Asian rice: (i) broken, fragrant NERICA 1; (ii) broken NERICA 4; and (iii) unbroken NERICA 6 featuring medium/bold grain shape. Consumers with genealogical lineages tracing back to the original domesticators of African rice put significantly higher value on locally produced NERICAs relative to immigrants from the north and northeast, who put premiums on ‘imported’ traits such as rice fragrance. Driven by preferences for both broken and unbroken rice, NERICA 6 outcompeted all other varieties as it mimics the grain shape of semi-broken rice while being unbroken. The latter exemplifies how breeders can strike an optimal compromise in the trade-off between cultural and colonial heritage-induced preferences.