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Rice - food for the world

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Monheim Germany
February 19, 2009

Source: Bayer CropScience

About 120,000 varieties of rice are grown all around the world

Rice is the staple diet of half the world's population. In some Asian languages, the word "eating" is actually synonymous with "eating rice". In Western cultures, however, these slender grains are usually served as a side dish; wrongly so, as rice contains valuable carbohydrates as well as vitamins and minerals that are essential to life. But the popular grain is in crisis, as climate change and pests are making life tough for rice plants. And a growing global population needs ever-increasing amounts of this precious foodstuff.

NUTRITION AND HEALTH
Irrigated rice field in Indonesia.
 
Rice plants at the stage of panicle development.
 
Farmer working in a rice field in Indonesia.
 
Landscape with rice terraces in the Philippines.
 
Planting of rice seedlings from a seedlings box in Japan.
Photos copyright
Bayer CropScience AG
 

Health-giving grains
Rice is good for you: whole-grain brown rice in particular provides the body with vital nutrients. One of these is vitamin B1, which helps our metabolism obtain energy from food and strengthens the nerves. Rice is also rich in vitamin B6, used in blood formation. The elongated grains also contain biotin, another vitamin, which keeps our hair healthy and our nails strong. In addition, they are packed with vitamins like potassium and zinc, which not only help keep our blood pressure healthy but also boost our immune system. And the proteins in rice are particularly valuable since they contain all the essential amino acids that are vital to life.

Rice is also low in calories and very low in fat. And one particularly appealing property of rice is that we feel full for longer after eating it because our body takes quite a long time to process the carbohydrates it contains. Rice also contains fiber, which aids digestion. It is perfect for people who are ill as it does not lie heavy in the stomach. Its diuretic properties help the body eliminate toxins from the body via the kidneys. And one other beneficial feature: it is thought that the protease inhibitors in rice can help prevent cancer.

Rice in all its forms
There are about 120,000 varieties of rice grown all around the world. The main distinction is between short-grain and long-grain rice. Brown rice, which still has its husk intact, is particularly healthy. This husk contains many of the vitamins and minerals in rice. White rice is more popular, but it has been polished and so has lost the husk and these vital nutrients. People who rely on polished rice are at risk of beri-beri, a disease caused by vitamin B1 deficiency which can lead to nerve paralysis and cardiovascular disorders.
The parboiling process has been in use since the early 1940s to help retain valuable components even in white rice. This process produces white parboiled rice which contains 80 per cent of the nutrients that are contained in whole-grain rice.

ECONOMIC FACTORS

Helping rice out of a crisis
These tiny grains are the most important cereal in the world: around 600 million tons of rice are harvested each year throughout the world. But rice-growers are already finding it hard to keep pace with consumption as it stands, let alone the increase in demand that will follow the rapid rise in the global population. Rice yields in Asia have been around four tons per hectare since the mid-1990s – too little for too many people. More than 780 million tons of rice would have to be produced annually in order to safeguard the supply of food for the world by 2020 – a 20 per cent rise on today's figures.
Another issue is the dramatic rise in food prices since 2003: rice now costs four times as much as it did six years ago. The International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) expects rice consumption to increase again in 2009. No improvement is in sight: rising demand has forced many governments to make use of reserve stocks to cope with the deficit. The world's stocks of rice are now lower than they have ever been.
There was a global food crisis back in the 1970s, which led to the formation of the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) based in the Philippines and research into breeding new high-yielding varieties and improving farming methods. The results were record harvests. We now need to build on this first "green revolution".

A greater commitment to robust seeds
The IRRI recognized the problems now facing rice more than a decade ago. Although the international community undertook to do more for agriculture after the first global food crisis, the will to take action waned as prices fell. "International agricultural research has been neglected for years," criticizes Professor Stefan Tangermann, former OECD Director for Agriculture. "Now we wonder why agriculture cannot manage to feed a hungry world." As increasing the acreage of land under cultivation is scarcely an option, the challenge is to increase yields and develop varieties that are better able to cope with climatic influences. "Farming methods must be improved, and these could boost yields per hectare by up to three tons in most regions," explains Dr. Achim Dobermann, Director at the IRRI. Efficient water management is vital too, as rice is the thirstiest of all crops. It takes about 5,000 liters of water to produce a kilogram of rice. Wheat, by comparison, is less demanding, requiring only about 1,200 liters to produce the same amount. The effects are worrying, as the water table in India is falling by one and a half meters a year. "Better seed that is resistant to pests and diseases is the most important requirement," says Dr. Dobermann, "and another point is that 15 to 20 per cent of the harvest is lost worldwide in transport and storage."

RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT

Securing the world's food supplies is one of the greatest challenges of our time
There are more of us than ever before on our planet: it is estimated that by 2050 the world's population will reach nine billion. The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) estimates that agricultural production would need to double in order to feed all these mouths. In the final report of the conference on food security, bioenergy and climate change in June 2008, it therefore called on "the international community, including the private sector, to decisively step up investment in science and technology for food and agriculture."
Comments Professor Stefan Tangermann, "More must be done to increase agricultural productivity and thereby expand the supply of food. This depends particularly on more research and development, and a more open-minded attitude to the opportunities offered by modern biotechnology." Research into breeding and molecular biology therefore needs to be strongly supported. Companies such as Bayer CropScience AG and public bodies like the International Rice Research Institute have joined forces to assist in the development of improved rice varieties. The Hybrid Rice Research and Development Consortium (HRDC), which was created as part of this move, has set itself the task of increasing rice production in Asia and introducing new breeding methods.

Resistant to flooding
Using biotechnology, scientists are able to transfer useful genes from one rice variety to another. "For instance, we have found a gene that makes rice resistant to flooding. This is important for coastal areas that are repeatedly affected by to this problem," comments Dr. Achim Dobermann, Director at the IRRI. The genetic marker for this flood-tolerance was discovered in a hybrid of two existing rice varieties. Many rice varieties thrive when grown on flooded fields and terraces, but if they are completely covered with water they can only survive for a few days. Natural disasters like this are already threatening a quarter of the land on which rice is cultivated, due mainly to climate change. The new rice plant can survive for two weeks entirely immersed in water. When the plant is submerged, a gene is activated which stimulates cells to form proteins that adjust the plant's metabolism to cope with the low-oxygen conditions that prevail under water. Scientists are now working with genes for salt resistance and tolerance to prolonged periods of drought.

Identifying the right genes
Bayer CropScience is also working to develop new, high-yield rice seed. The Arize® dhani variety is extremely resistant to pests, environmental stress, saline soils and flooding. Scientists developed the new variety using a technique called hybrid breeding. This involves skilful hybridization to insert resistance genes from naturally-occurring rice varieties into the cultivated plant, resulting in a cross such as the hybrid rice variety Arize® dhani. The additional gene from the hybridization partner makes the new variety more resistant to bacterial blight, one of the most serious global threats to rice plants and the potential cause of drastic losses. It is caused by the bacterium Xanthomonas oryzae.

Scientists working on breeding hybrid rice need parent plants with a particular set of characteristics. They stop the rice plant self-fertilizing, which it would normally do, and deliberately transfer pollen from one plant to another, producing hybrids that are stronger, more resistant to pests, and more productive. The task of finding the desired properties and breeding parent plants is time-consuming and expensive, because it is important that the beneficial properties of previous hybridization experiments such as higher yields are not lost.

Hybrid rice has already proved successful in China, where an area of 30 million hectares has produced 184 million tons of rice. India, which has the same area of land under rice cultivation, only produced 96 million tons. Bayer CropScience opened a new research laboratory in Singapore in the summer of 2008 with the aim of further boosting the contribution of high-yield rice to global rice production. This laboratory concentrates on breeding rice varieties with very high yields and special additional properties.
 

Additional information on rice
A brief history of rice
Rice is an ancient crop. It is thought that the first rice fields were plants in eastern Asia six thousand years ago. Some experts even believe that rice was being grown around ten thousand years ago. Rice was first brought to Egypt from Persia about 300 A.D., but it was not until the time of Alexander the Great that the cereal was seen in Europe, initially in Greece, where it was given the name "oryza". The Moors then imported rice plants to Spain and Portugal around the ninth century.

Flooded terrace
The crop is grown mainly on flooded terraces in Asia. This 'wet rice cultivation' method is very labor-intensive. Chinese rice-growers use water buffaloes rather than machines to plough their fields. The water is allowed to drain away just before harvest time. A mature rice plant looks like an oat plant: the panicles, which fan out to a length of 20 to 30 centimeters, contain the rice grains.
The crop is quite tolerant of soil type, but does need a lot of water and heat. Rice is the only cereal that can withstand flooding. Rice grown by this method is sometimes harvested from boats and can yield between 7,000 and 10,000 kilograms per hectare. But rice also grows well in marshy areas in the high valleys of the Himalayas. In Africa and Latin America the crop is grown on fields that are not flooded, but yields are much lower than with the wet-cultivation method, at only 1,500 to 4,000 kilograms per hectare.

Miracle rice from the USA
Henry Monroe Beachell achieved his breakthrough in 1966 with IR8. His International Rice Variety 8 was the product of a cross between a Taiwanese and an Indonesian variety. This miracle rice saved billions of people from starvation in the 1970s. Breeding work at the IRRI has reduced the stalk length of this plant from one and a half meters to just under a meter, enabling the panicles to bear twice as many grains without collapsing. The grain ripens in 110 days instead of 160 days. Yields per hectare doubled during this first "green revolution", as many regions were able to produce an extra harvest every year. Dr. Beachell, an agronomist born in Nebraska, USA, in 1906, was awarded the World Food Prize jointly with his former IRRI colleague from India, Gurdev S. Khush, in 1996.

LINKS

This German-language page on the website of the German Plant Breeders' Association provides information about crossing and selecting, hybridization and smart breeding.
http://www.bdp-online.de/de/Pflanzenzuechtung/Methoden/

Clicking on the “Pflanze” tab of this website of the Agricultural Information Centre takes readers to information in German about cultivation statistics, the biology of rice, harmful pathogens and other details.
http://www.proplanta.de

The Rice Knowledge Bank pages of the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI ) are a wealth of information about rice - from seed to market.
http://www.knowledgebank.irri.org/Rice/Ricedefault.htm

To mark the International Year of Rice in 2004, the FAO presented a rich resource of knowledge about rice and what it means for our diet.
http://www.fao.org/rice2004/en/aboutrice.htm

The publications of the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) explain the food and financial crises and their consequences for poor populations.
http://beta.irri.org/solutions/images/publications/papers/ifpri_food_financial_crisis_dec2008.pdf

The magazine Rice Today, published by the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI), looks at rice research, the food situation and environmental protection around the world.
http://beta.irri.org/news/images/stories/ricetoday/8-1/RT_8-1_complete.pdf

 

 

 

 

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