Asian rice industry in crisis — researchers

Asia’s rice industry is in crisis due to inadequate support, driving farmers into penury and spurring mass migration with potential adverse implications on regional security, the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) said yesterday.

"The Asian rice industry is in trouble," an IRRI statement quoted its director-general Ronald Cantrell as saying.

"Not only is the rice industry in Asia facing a crisis in the supply of such essential resources as land, labor and water, but – most importantly of all – many nations are finding it difficult to develop sustainable ways to provide decent livelihoods for rice farmers and consumers."

The Los Baños, Laguna-based IRRI said the stability of Asia, including the "troubled nations of Indonesia and the Philippines, is threatened by the continuing lack of development" in its most important cereal crop.

Rice farming remains a poverty trap in many Asian nations, mainly because of very small farm size and compounded by declining support for public rice research, it added.

IRRI said Asia’s rice producers enjoyed annual yield increases of 2.5 percent and production gains of more than three percent between the early years of the Green Revolution and up to the early 1980s.

However, from the late 1980s until the late 1990s, the rate of annual yield increase was nearly halved, and the rate of production increase fell even further.

As stagnating yields push them deeper into poverty, "many rural rice communities in Asia are growing increasingly restless," it warned.

Poverty and a lack of opportunity "can foster instability. Desperate people forced to leave home in search of work are susceptible to extremism," it said, citing the case of one of the convicted Jemaah Islamiyah (JI) militants convicted of the October 2002 bombings in Bali, killing more than 200.

While the case of the convict, who fled the village of Tenggulun to seek work in Malaysia where he was recruited by the JI "is a worst-case scenario, such reports should not be discounted," the IRRI statement said.

"A lack of opportunity in heavily agricultural Tenggulun has forced 20 percent of its working-age population to leave in search of employment — a story repeated time and again throughout rural Asia."

Cantrell said international support for public rice research has been collapsing, with mainly Western donor nations taking aid money elsewhere, including to Africa after having achieved "visible success" in Asia.

"While IRRI still has some very committed donors, there is no doubt that the institute could do a lot more if it had more support," he said.

Cantrell said new rice technologies developed by IRRI and other entities have not reached ordinary farmers in many countries because the extension systems for delivering them are chronically underfunded.

"Assuming there are 200 million rice farmers in Asia, an investment of just 40 cents per farmer for each of the next 20 years would go a long way toward ensuring that they can earn a decent living sustainably supplying poor rice consumers with plentiful supplies of affordable, nutritious rice," he said. — AFP