Action needed to avoid rice crunch

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Los Banos, Philippines, Dec 14: A global rice shortage is possible in the short run unless governments and farmers improve cultivation to squeeze more grain out of overworked paddy fields, a top world rice expert warned on Thursday.

“We are facing a problem and it’s the poor who are going to be hit the most severely,” Robert Zeigler, director general of the Philippines-based International Rice Research Institute (IRRI), told Reuters.

Boosted by rising populations and economic growth, the world is already eating more rice than is harvested annually and stocks are at their lowest levels since the early to mid-1970s, when food shortages triggered famine in some Asian countries.

Back then, IRRI came to the rescue with the Green Revolution: the development of high-yielding rice seeds that multiplied harvests of Asia’s food staple and enabled economies such as China, India and Thailand to industrialise.

Now the world needs a sequel but the stakes are higher and the odds tougher.

Nearly half the planet’s 6.6 billion people depend on rice to survive and demand for the grain is expected to increase 50% by 2030. Average rice prices have nearly doubled to around $325 per tonne in the past six years.

Yields, however, are plateauing as the urbanisation that the Green Revolution enabled shrinks available farmland and diverts water and labour away from production.

Demand for biofuels is also eating up resources and climate change is a potentially catastrophic threat.

Zeigler talks of a ‘perfect storm’ of complications. Under his leadership, IRRI is trying to engineer a superstrength rice grain known as ‘C4’ which will boost yields by as much as 50%.

But even the self-confessed hopeless optimist admits it will take at least three years to prove such engineering is possible and another seven to come up with a prototype.

In the meantime, Zeigler says farmers will have to squeeze more out of their land by managing pests better and improving their use of water and fertiliser to prevent the nightmare scenario of food shortages and rice at $1,000 a tonne.

Governments, who have cut funding for agriculture in favour of modern industry, will have to re-invest.

“We really have to make some short-term big pushes to increase the productivity of our intensive systems as a short-term gap-filling exercise,” said Zeigler.