Rice Breeding in Latin America - Plant Breeding Reviews - page 259

1. History. Formal public rice research started when the Estación
Experimental Agrícola del Norte (EEAN) was founded in 1927 (Castillo
and Hernández 1961; Castillo 1969). By then, planted cultivars were
those introduced by the Spaniards and local farmers. The EEAN began
the introduction and evaluation of cultivars brought fromAsia and North
America, and later started making crosses that resulted in successful
cultivars such as MINABIR 2. The

rst modern indica semidwarf variety,
IR8, was introduced from IRRI and immediately released in 1966.
Coastal farmers quickly adopted it as a new variety. In 1968, the recently
created Peruvian National Rice Research Program from INIPA (National
Institute for Agricultural Research and Development) introduced and
subsequently released newer modern lines for better quality from IRRI
than IR8, such as Chancay and Naylamp, and began developing domes-
tic cultivars with the new semidwarf plant type, the first of which was

Inti, released in 1974. VIFLOR followed in 1983, becoming the most
widely planted cultivar on the coast during the 1990s (Bruzzone 1999).
CICA-8 was introduced fromCIAT and released in Peru in 1983 for the
tropical rice-producing valleys. PA-2 was released by CIAT in 1984, and
a blast-resistant, lodging-tolerant, locally developed cultivar, San Mar-
tín, was released in 1986 (Bruzzone 2002). In 1988, Amazonas, an INIPA-
developed cultivar, was released, which is still being planted in small
areas of the northern coast. Alto Mayo was derived from an F 3 popula-
tion introduced from CIAT (Bruzzone 2002).
In 1995, a private company released the high-yielding IRRI variety
IR43, which became the most planted variety on the coast from 1999 to
the present. INIA 508-Tinajones, released in 2007, and INIA 510-Mal-
lares, released in 2010, are progressively reducing the area planted to
IR43 in several rice-producing coastal valleys, mainly due to higher
milling quality and overall field performance.

In 1996, INIA (formerly INIPA) released a group of cultivars, among
them Capron, of long, slender, and translucent grain, which rapidly
became the leading variety planted in the tropical irrigated valleys for
the next 10 years. Capirona was later overtaken by La Conquista, with
higher blast resistance and better milling quality, and the latter by La
Esperanza, a higher yielding cultivar resistant to current blast races, both
released by INIA, in 2006 and 2010, respectively.

2. Main Constraints and Breeding Objectives. The main production
constraints in the coastal rice-producing valleys are the incidence of
stem and sheath rot-causing pathogens, Rhizoctonia , Nakataea , and
Gaeumannomyces (Garrido 2009); damage by rice leaf miner ( Hydrellia
sp.); soil salinity; and inadequate agronomic practices. In the tropical