Scientists
seek to develop a hardy, high-yielding rice to feed the earth’s growing
billions
The
first phase of a painstaking research project by scientists from the Chinese
Academy of Agricultural Sciences in Beijing and the International Rice Research
Institute in the Philippines has been completed to create a high-yielding rice
that is environmentally beneficial, resistant to drought and bugs.
Called
Green Super Rice, it is the result of 14 years of research begun in 1988,
involving the crossbreeding of more than 250 different potential varieties and
rice hybrids by hundreds of researchers in dozens of countries across the
world, seeking to isolate the desirable traits from indigenous strains and then
backcross breed them to produce hardier varieties that do not need large
amounts of pesticides or fertilizers. It has been described as a rice
revolution.
The
current phase is to be concluded in June. The researchers are now sending
proposals to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, established by the
eponymous founder of the Microsoft computer software company, seeking US$15
million to carry on the second phase. Of that, said Dr Jauhar Ali, a scientist
and regional project coordinator for IRRI for the South-Southeast Asian region,
IRRI isx expected to receive US$5.8 million of the total. The bulk will go to
the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences.
“We are
confident that we will be able to work in 50 locations across nine countries in
Asia and Africa, working with the most dominantly adopted genotype,” Dr Ali
said. “We have got a good jumpstart and we are already developing a number of
lines from 16 donor parents. We have developed a very interesting program.”
The
project is headed by Li Zhi-Kang, a senior molecular geneticist and chief
scientist with the Institute of Crop Sciences in Beijing. Dr Li is considered
the father of the process. The two research institutes have developed 48 inbred
plants and another 24 hybrids to move into phase 2, Ali said, and are testing
them in several countries in Asia and Africa, including in the Philippines.
He
described the program as creating rice cultivars that produce higher and more
stable yields with less water, fertilizers and pesticides, resistant to
drought, salinity, alkalinity and iron toxicity, diseases such as blast,
bacterial blight, sheath blight, viruses and false smut, and insects including
brown and green leaf hoppers.
The
test sites are in Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Vietnam, Bangladesh, Pakistan and
Sri Lanka in Asia and Liberia, Mali, Mozambique, Nigeria, Rwanda, Senegal,
Tanzania and Uganda in Africa, and Guangxi, Guizhou, Suchuan andYunnan in
China.
The
importance of new, hardy and high-producing strains of rice cannot be
overestimated. Rice is the dominant staple food for more than half of the
world’s population. It is the primary food source of 17 countries in Asia and
the Pacific as well as nine countries in North and South America and eight in
Africa, supplying 20 percent of the world’s dietary energy supply according to
the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. In Asia alone,
rice is grown on 142 million hectares of land, feeding more than 4 billion
people.
As much
as any crop on the planet, rice has been under threat from global warming, for
a variety of reasons. Research scientists as the International Rice Research
Institute say that yields from newer strains of the famed IR8, the so-called
miracle rice that was developed by IRRI scientists in the 1960s, have dropped
by 15 percent, primarily because average night-time temperatures have risen.
According
to a study printed in Field Crops Research by a research team headed by Dr
Shaobing Peng at IRRI, when it was first developed IR8 produced 9.5 to 10.5
metric tons of rice per hectare at a time when average global rice yields were
only around 2 tons per hectare. However, according to Dr Peng's paper, IR8
yields have dropped to about 7 tons per hectare.
IR8’s
successors have other problems that spurred Li Zhi-kang and his researchers to
seek new strains. In return for its substantially higher yields, IR8 used far
more fertilizers and pesticides than conventional strains. The extensive
crossbreeding involved in Green Super Rice, which was developed by Zhi-Kang Li
when he was a researcher at IRRI before moving back to Beijing, was partly
developed as an effort to reduce the dependency of the new rice strains on
fertilizers and pesticides.
In
China that is a particular problem. Some strains of rice being grown in China
requireas much as a staggering 250 kilograms of nitrogen per hectare, compared
to about 120 kg used in India. For more than a decade, China has been the
world’s biggest producer of fertilizers, which environmentalists say is
destroying the country’s soils and turning its rivers and lakes into nightmares
of bright green algae. China consumed 32.6 million metric tons of nitrogen
fertilizer in 2007, a 191 percent increase over 1981, according to a Feb. 11,
2010 article in Nature News by Natasha Gilbert. Nitrogen contributes to soil
acidity.
Nor are
warmer nights and fertilizer overuse the only cause for concern. According to a
study by the United States Environmental Protection Agency, if global climate
change raises sea level as much as 1 meter over the next century as climate
scientists have predicted, hundreds of thousands of square kilometers of
coastal wetlands and other lowlands could be inundated.
Eight
to ten million people live within 1 meter of high tide in each of the
unprotected river deltas of Myanmar, Bangladesh, Egypt and Vietnam – some of
the most important rice-growing areas in the world. In Vietnam, for instance,
the most fertile agricultural lands, together with half of the population of
the country, are in the low-lying Red and Mekong River Deltas. Accordingly, the
new rice strains show high resistance to salinity.
Much of
the effort is coming under an umbrella organization called the Global Rice
Science Partnership, under the acronym GRiSP, launched in 2010 and seeking to
coordinate a global approach to rice science so that agencies can pool their
resources, apply their expertise and collaborate in the delivery of the
improved strains to poor rice farmers across the world.
John
Berthelsen
Asia
Sentinel
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