The breeding breakthrough came at the West Africa Rice Development Association (WARDA, now AfricaRice). Monty Jones's group succeeded in crossing the otherwise reproductively incompatible Asian *O. sativa* and African *O. glaberrima* using embryo rescue, producing fertile interspecific progeny — the NERICA lines.
The work that converted those breeding lines into varieties Nigerian farmers could plant was done at the National Cereals Research Institute, Badeggi, under the agronomy programmes of S. O. E. Sadiq and successors. NCRI ran the participatory varietal selection (PVS) trials, multi-location adaptation trials across upland and lowland agroecologies, and the National Variety Release process. NERICA 1, 2, 3, 4, 7 and 8 were released for Nigerian conditions between 2000 and 2007.
Adoption was rapid: upland NERICA reached roughly 200,000 hectares in Nigeria by 2010, concentrated in the rice-growing belts of Kebbi, Niger, Benue and Ebonyi. The yield advantage over traditional upland landraces was substantial (~2 t/ha vs ~1 t/ha unfertilised).
The catalogue point: NERICA is the rare African plant-breeding result that won an international prize at the level of the World Food Prize. The Nigerian institution's contribution was the boring, indispensable, downstream half — the adoption trials and registration that turn a breeding line into a planted crop. NCRI Badeggi has never been adequately funded for the work it does.
Nigeria still imports about 2 million tonnes of milled rice a year. The breakthrough was not the limit.