There are two types of rice. I’m not talking of basmati and jasmine and brown rice. There are two species of rice. The one most of us eat is Asian rice. The other is African rice. They’re both rice, but quite different genetically.

In West Africa they plant both, but the African is the local. African rice has a slightly nuttier taste than Asian rice. West Africans eat a lot of rice and prepare a dish called jollof rice, which became my food of choice whenever we ate out.

In the outskirts of Buchanan, Liberia, I visited a cooperative that wants more and better African rice. The team Liberia’s Central Agricultural Research Institute gave the cooperative some improved rice seeds so they could plant and multiply.

I asked the RESADE country coordinator, Dr James Dolo, what made that rice variety so special. He pointed to the water in a trench and I could see metallic colours. ‘Iron’, he said. The improved variety was bred to be more tolerant of iron in the soil.

And having seeds for iron-tolerant African rice means more rice – more jollof rice – and more happy members of the cooperative.