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30 Rice Today January-March 2014

How will we create a beer lifeand a beer future for rice?How can we do much more,with less? These were the

questions posed by Tobias Marchand,head of the Asia Pacic region, Bayer

CropScience, to 200 rice experts andpolicymakers during the Rice FutureForum on 8-9 October in New Delhi,India.

These questions are not rhetorical but practical. Mr. Marchand andthe forum participants agree on theissues surrounding the rice industry.Increasing global population,rising demand for rice production,malnutrition and poverty, threats ofclimate change, limited resources(farm land, water, and labor), and

gaps in technology were the naggingissues that reverberated duringthe forum. And it was said that“understanding the problem is halfthe solution.”

Improved technologiesIndia Agriculture Commissioner

 J.S. Sandhu acknowledged the roleof the development of agriculturaltechnologies for improving thegrain industry. For the last 60 years,

 Public and private institutions have come together to fnd solutions

to the challenges faced by the rice sector 

India’s food grain production hasincreased from 50 million tons in1947 to 250 million tons in 2012-13—which made India an exporter of foodgrains, including rice. He aributedthe increase in grain production,

particularly in the 1970s, to high-yielding varieties developed duringthe Green Revolution, and the recentadvances in research and developmentin agriculture.

For B.C. Viraktamath, projectdirector, Directorate of Rice Researchof the Indian Council of AgriculturalResearch (ICAR), “Increasingproductivity through partnershipsin R&D is the way to go.” He citedmany research programs and projectsof ICAR in partnership with the

International Rice Research Institute(IRRI), among other organizations.Examples of these projects areStress-Tolerant Rice for Africa andSouth Asia (STRASA) and the CerealSystems Initiative for South Asia(CSISA).

Hybrid rice, noted for helpingincrease production in China, is setto reach an average yield of 16 tonsper hectare there. Other technologiessuch as those of stress-tolerant rice

varieties help improve productivity inunfavorable conditions.

A five-point planBas Bouman, director of the GlobalRice Science Partnership, the CGIAR

Research Program for Rice, proposeda ve-point plan to modernizethe Asian rice sector, whichconsists of (1) land consolidation,(2) mechanization, (3) makingfarmers modern entrepreneurs, (4)strengthening the whole value chain,and (5) sustainable intensication(see Modernizing Asian rice production on pages 32-33).

“Most rice farmers are poor,”Dr. Bouman pointed out. Even witha farm of 2 hectares and growing

two crops a year, many farmers earnonly US$1,200−2,000 per year. “Evenif their productivity is doubled—increasing their annual income to$2,400−4,000—it is not sucient to

 bring them out of poverty.”He argued that it is not a question

of whether rice farming is protableor not. “Land consolidation is neededto increase the farm size of marginalfarmers,” Dr. Bouman said. “The farmsize of most farmers is too small for

haping the future of ricby Lanie Reyes

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31Rice Today January-March 2014

them to aain an income above thepoverty line.”

Solutions to limited resourcesDr. Bouman, among other speakers,sees hope in mechanization forsolving the problem of labor shortage

 because of the migration of farm

workers to cities. Satoshi Ida, deputygeneral manager of R&D, KubotaCorporation, shared that they have

 been designing farm machines tosolve the problem of insucient laborin Asia. He reported that many Asianrice farmers have been using thesemachines, thus saving on labor costand time.

Dr. J.K. Ladha, IRRI principalscientist, highlighted the challengesfacing rice systems in Asia, whichinclude shortages and untimely

availability of water and labor.“Manual transplanting is highlylabor intensive and requires 25–50person-days per hectare.” He stressedthat rice consumes about 50% of thetotal irrigation water in Asia andon average 2,500 liters of water areneeded to grow a kilogram of rice.

Dr. Ladha recommended drydirect-seeding technology, withwhich the seed is manually broadcastonto the soil and then incorporated

either by plowing or by harrowingwhile the soil is still dry. In this way,puddling and transplanting can beavoided.

He said that much progresshas been made in perfecting thistechnology and in developinga package of practices. Asidefrom saving water and labor, thistechnology allows crop residuerecycling (otherwise residue is

 burned), reduces methane emissions,lowers energy use, and increasesfarmers’ prot. He added, “Avoidingpuddling improves soil structure,which is needed for the succeedingcrops such as wheat, maize, andvegetables.”

The importance of policiesIn addition to technologies, policieshave played a vital role in thedirection of the rice industry acrossthe globe. Dr. Trilochan Mohapatra,director of the Central RiceResearch Institute in India, sharedhow policies helped increase riceproduction in the country. The policyof bringing the Green Revolutionto eastern India allowed Odisha,which had the lowest average riceyield among the eastern states, to

increase its average yield from 1.7tons per hectare in 2007-08 to 2.3 tonsin 2012. Dr. Mohapatra aributedthis to large-scale demonstrations oftechnologies. Eventually, this jump inrice had a domino eect nationally.The country’s rice production rose tomore than 104 million tons in 2012-13.From this, about 8 million tons ofadditional rice came from the easternstates.

Looking at the four or ve

decades after the Green Revolution,Sam Mohanty, head of IRRI’sSocial Sciences Division, noted thatgovernment policies on rice havefocused on reducing price riskand reducing the cost of inputs forfarmers. Surprisingly, many rice-importing countries such as Malaysiaand China have food securitythrough self-suciency as a policydirection.

According to Dr. Mohanty, ifevery country wants to achieve foodsecurity through self-suciency, wemight be in big trouble—globallyspeaking. “This will make thevolume of the market smaller. If wehave a bad year, the price of ricecould skyrocket.” He added that

there might be a need for a policyintervention at the global level, not

 just domestically.

Public-private partnershipThe problems that the rice sectorfaces now cannot be solved byone institution alone. The publicand the private sectors must worktogether. “But, for the partnership to

 be sustainable, it should go beyondthe usual sharing of the socialresponsibility fund by the private

sector,” said Richard Rogers, seniorprogram ocer of the Bill & MelindaGates Foundation. He pointed outthat both the public and the privatesectors should prot from the“partnership.”

This public-private partnershipwas beer understood when speakersfrom private companies such asKellogg, Bayer CropScience, and TigaPilar Sejahera Food shared concreteexamples of how these companies

work together with governmentinstitutions and with farmers acrossthe rice value chain while mutually

 beneting each other.Lastly, Christel Weller-Molongua,

division head, Rural DevelopmentAgriculture of the GermanInternational Cooperation (GIZ),reminded all participants that “aswe nd solutions to the challengesin the rice sector, let us not forget theimportance of preserving biodiversityand environmental sustainability.”

Indeed, the forum, organized by Bayer CropScience in associationwith ICAR and IRRI, has stimulatedfresh perspectives on topics thatrange from research and newinnovations to government policies,collaboration among stakeholders,and sustainability across the ricevalue chain.

 Ms. Reyes is the managing editor of RiceToday. J.S. Sandhu Tobias Marchand B.C. Viraktamath

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