Jones, Monty 1951(?)–

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Monty Jones 1951(?)–

Scientist

Monty Jones serves as the executive director of the Forum for Agricultural Research in Africa, which is headquartered in the West African nation of Ghana. Jones is a prominent scientist who was the recipient of the 2004 World Food Prize for his work in developing NERICA (New Rice for Africa), a hardier strain of rice that is better suited to African soil. NERICA has proven to be more drought and pest resistant and produces far higher crop yields for its farmers. It promises to reduce hunger on the continent and help Africans both feed their families and produce extra income for their households, villages, and nations. In 2007 Jones was honored as one of Time magazine's Top 100 Scientists and Thinkers of the year.

Born in the early 1950s, Jones grew up in Freetown, the capital of Sierra Leone. His family was part of Sierra Leone's Krio (Creole) population, whose ancestors had been former slaves in the United States, Britain, and the West Indies and chose to resettle in a colony established for freed slaves. He attended a Roman Catholic school in his teens, and the Irish clerics who taught him considered him ideally suited for the priesthood, but he decided against entering the seminary in favor of a career in science. After earning his undergraduate degree in agriculture from Njala University of Sierra Leone, Jones went on to England's University of Birmingham for further study. In 1979 he earned a master's degree in plant genetic resources, following it four years later with a doctorate in plant biology.

Jones's interest in improving African agriculture was spurred by hearing reports of rioting after annual rice shortages threatened the population of his and other West African nations. His first job was with the West Africa Rice Development Agency (WARDA), and in 1987 he went on to a position with the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research as coordinator of a rice-growing program set up by the U.S. Agency for International Development and the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture. In 1991 he returned to WARDA as head of its Upland Rice Breeding Program in Ivory Coast.

Crop scientists had tried for many years to improve agricultural yields in Africa, especially for parts of the continent that had faced periodic famines due to crop failures. There were many varieties of African rice, known by its Latin scientific name Oryza glaberrima, some of which were first cultivated more than thirty-five hundred years ago. Most of the strains were hardy but produced low yields. By contrast, the strains of rice that were native to Asia, called Oryza sativa, resulted in much higher crop yields on their native soil but fared less well in the alkaline African soil and were unable to withstand certain types of African pests. The Portuguese had brought the first varieties of Asian rice to Africa in the 1500s, and periodic attempts had been made to cross the two types of rice to produce a hardier hybrid—but the hybrids were sterile, meaning that farmers were forced to buy new seed every year.

At WARDA Jones and his research team began to classify and crossbreed different varieties of both Asian and African rice types, and he traveled to China to work with agricultural genetic specialists there. His breakthrough in creating a nonsterile strain of rice came when he added coconut milk to a rice-seed embryo. The process took three years, and the breakthrough was announced in 1994 and called NERICA. Once he and his research team began introducing it to local farmers willing to participate in the first growing trials, the results were impressive: NERICA was decidedly drought resistant, higher in protein by 25 percent, and produced higher yields in a much shorter growing cycle. It matured fifty to eighty days faster than the traditional crop, reducing a long, six-month growing period almost in half. More important, the crop became ready for consumption during a seasonal cycle of agricultural-harvest and weather conditions that had become known as the “hunger period” in many parts of Africa. When fertilizer was added, NERICA's crop yield was even higher. Farmers who participated in the earliest trials were so stunned by the plant that some took turns standing guard over the fields during the night to protect the quickly growing plants from thieves.

Jones's work brought him many honors. In 2001 he won the National Order of Merit of the Ivory Coast, one of the seven West African nations that began using NERICA, and in 2004 he received a special presidential citation from Sierra Leone. During the latter ceremony, he told the audience of assembled dignitaries that “access to affordable food is the foremost human right,” an Africa News Service report quoted him as saying. “Since the poor spend most of their meager incomes on food, it is also the first step out of poverty onto the path to sustainable wealth creation.”

The highest honor that Jones received for his work in developing NERICA was the World Food Prize, which he shared in 2004 with China's Yuan Longping, who had worked with him on the embryo stage of the experiment. As the first African ever to win the honor, Jones traveled to the United States for the ceremony at the state capitol building in Des Moines, Iowa. By then NERICA had produced some slow but impressive gains for the estimated thirty-five million growers who were planting and harvesting it. The government of Guinea, for example, was spending 50 percent less of its annual budget on rice imports and had actually begun to export some of its surplus crop to other nations. During his trip to the U.S. heartland, Jones spoke before farming groups and world-hunger activists to help promote NERICA and efforts to implement it further. Marlene Lucas, a correspondent who chronicled one of his speaking engagements for the Gazette in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, wrote that “Jones said he cried when a farmer told him that extra rice from his field had allowed him to buy a bicycle. The farmer was able to ride the seven miles to his field after walking for 20 years.”

At a Glance …

Born Monty Patrick Jones, c. 1951, in Sierra Leone. Education: Njala University, BS, agriculture; University of Birmingham, MS, plant genetic resources, 1979, PhD, plant biology, 1983.

Career: Worked for the West Africa Rice Development Agency (WARDA), after 1975; Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research, coordinator of the U.S. Agency for International Development/International Institute of Tropical Agriculture Cameroon rice program, 1987-90; WARDA, principal breeder, after 1991, deputy director of research, 1991-2002; Forum for Agricultural Research in Africa, executive director, July 2002—.

Awards: King Baudouin Award, Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research, 2000; National Order of Merit of the Ivory Coast, 2001; World Food Prize, World Food Prize Foundation, 2004.

Addresses: Office—Forum for Agricultural Research in Africa, PMB CT 173 Cantonments, Accra, Ghana.