Saturday, December 10, 2016

10th December,2016 Daily Global, Regional & Local Rice -eNewsletter by Riceplus Magazine

World Rice Production 2016/2017

December 2016

This month the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) estimates that the World Rice Production 2016/2017 will be 481.5 million metric tons, around 2.29 million tons less than the previous month's projection.
Rice Production last year (*) was 472.27 million tons. This year's 481.5 estimated million tons could represent an increase of 9.24 million tons or a 1.96% in rice production around the globe.

Rice Production by Country

(Values in Metric Tons)
China: 144,850,000
India: 106,500,000
Others: 41,917,000
Indonesia: 36,600,000
Bangladesh: 34,515,000
Vietnam: 27,800,000
Thailand: 18,600,000
Burma: 12,500,000
Philippines: 11,500,000
Brazil: 8,025,000
Japan: 7,790,000
United States: 7,454,000
Pakistan: 6,900,000
Cambodia: 4,700,000
Egypt: 4,554,000
Korea, South: 4,200,000
Nepal: 3,100,000

Next Update will be January 12, 2017

https://www.worldriceproduction.com/?Referer=Newsletter

Indonesia`s rice stocks enough to last until May 2017

Jumat, 9 Desember 2016 08:47 WIB |

Jakarta (ANTARA News) - The Indonesian government has assured that the country has enough rice stocks to meet its consumption needs until May 2017.The rice stocks are being held by traders and state logistic agency (Bulog), Trade Minister Enggartiasto Lukita said here on Thursday.The traders could keep the commodity for more than three months, provided they have registered their warehouses, he noted.

"The (rice) stocks are enough to last till the next year. The stocks are being held by traders and Bulog. Traders are prepared to augment their rice stocks once the harvest comes in, but they should not be accused of hoarding the commodity," he explained.The government actually put in place a price control instrument through Presidential Regulation No. 71 of 2015, concerning pricing and storing of foodstuffs, he disclosed.

As of now, traders are holding an estimated 15-18 million tons of rice stocks, enough to meet needs until May 2017, while Buolg now holds 1.75 million tons.The government claimed that as a result, domestic rice supplies have been secured.(*)


http://www.antaranews.com/en/news/108274/indonesias-rice-stocks-enough-to-last-until-may-2017

Haryana paddy arrival jumps

Press Trust of India  |  Chandigarh 

More than 67.95 lakh metric tonnes (MT) of paddy have arrived in the mandis of Haryana so far compared to about 61.91 lakh MT in the corresponding period of last year, an official said today. Out of the total arrival this year, government agencies have procured about 53.27 lakh MT and over 14.67 lakh MT has been procured by millers and dealers, a spokesman of Food, Civil Supplies and Consumer Affairs Department said.


The department had procured over 22.62 lakh MT of paddy and HAFED has procured more than 18.35 lakh MT. He said the Haryana Agro Industries Corporation has procured over 6.30 lakh MT of paddy, Haryana Warehousing Corporation more than 5.67 lakh MT and Food Corporation of India has procured 32,258 MT of paddy.

Regarding arrival of paddy in various districts of the state, he said that a maximum of about 12.41 lakh MT of paddy has arrived in the mandis of Karnal, followed by 11.71 lakh MT in Kurukshetra, about 8.18 lakh MT in Kaithal and 7.31 lakh MT in Ambala. imilarly, 6.91 lakh MT of paddy has arrived in the mandis of Fatehabad and 5.30 lakh MT in Yamunanagar.
(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)http://www.business-standard.com/article/pti-stories/haryana-paddy-arrival-jumps-116120900978_1.html




Rice price rise helps increase real income by 0.11pc: Study

FE Report

Increase in rice prices helps raise real income by 0.11 per cent in the country, a latest study has revealed.
The disclosure was made in a research styled 'Rice Prices and their Relationship to Growth and Development', conducted by the think-tank Bangladesh Institute of Development Studies (BIDS)

The research finding found its place in the BIDS Research Almanac 2016, jointly authored by BIDS Director General Dr K A S Murshid and Senior Research Fellow of the Institute Dr Mohammad Yunus.The paper was presented by Dr Yunus at the first session of the concluding day of BIDS Almanac 2016, held at a city hotel on Thursday. It was organised by the Institute.  Talking about rice prices and their relationship with local growth and development, the research showed that a 10 per cent hike in rice prices at farm, wholesale and retail levels, has helped increase real income by 0.11 per cent in the country.

The research also showed that if rice prices increase by 10 per cent, it causes rise in labour wages by 20 per cent.
The national Net Benefit Ratio (NBR) is 1.4 per cent (if rice prices increase by 10 per cent), it said.   Average income in Bangladesh will rise by 0.2 per cent in the long run while poverty rate will also fall slightly if rice prices maintain usual rise, it said.The paper said such a hike (10 pc) in rice prices even can reduce poverty rate to 31.23 per cent from 31.5 per cent.Dr Murshid said, "We have to give up the old notion on increase in rice prices that it could extend a blow."

"But we have to realise that hike in rice prices to some extent has little impact over poverty eradication process; it rather helps boost rural economy," he said.He said the price of rice hasn't increased in last ten years in real terms. This means farmers are the ultimate losers.A rice variety was sold at Tk 38-Tk 40 a kg in 2010. If its price remain the same now, it indicates that the price of the product declined in real term, he said.

Asked, he said the primary trading of paddy by the farmer community will be included in the research in future which could give more diverse scenario.  The research found that paddy covers 13 million farmers, 48 per cent of rural economy, 70 per cent of agricultural GDP and the cereal also meets two-thirds of calorie needs of the nation.

BIDS former Director General Dr Quazi Shahabuddin chaired the first session while farm economists Dr Mohammad A Jabbar and Dr Sattar Mandol also spoke.  Two more papers related to vegetable and fruit production and their exports were presented on the concluding day of the programme.

Eleven research papers were disseminated during the two-day BIDS Almanac 2016 aiming to bring  stakeholders, and policymakers to research domain to boost socio-economic development of the country, organisers said.



Rice Prices

as on : 09-12-2016 08:10:29 PM

Arrivals in tonnes;prices in Rs/quintal in domestic market.
Arrivals
Price
Current
%
change
Season
cumulative
Modal
Prev.
Modal
Prev.Yr
%change
Rice
Gadarpur(Utr)
1320.00
4300
202460.00
1670
2756
-16.92
Akbarpur(UP)
120.00
-42.86
660.00
2150
2170
7.50
Kalna(WB)
97.00
NC
1532.00
2970
2940
-
Cachar(ASM)
80.00
60
4930.00
2200
2200
-18.52
Vasai(Mah)
80.00
166.67
878.00
2760
2810
6.15
Kalipur(WB)
80.00
5.26
11445.00
2400
2400
11.63
Silapathar(ASM)
59.00
15.69
1705.90
3000
3000
NC
Gazipur(UP)
37.00
-28.85
4100.00
2230
2200
10.12
Raiganj(WB)
35.00
2.94
1613.00
2575
2575
-2.83
Saharanpur(UP)
30.00
-6.25
7373.00
2275
2275
10.98
Karimganj(ASM)
20.00
-50
2240.00
3100
2300
51.22
Ulhasnagar(Mah)
20.00
150
593.00
2500
7000
-
Alipurduar(WB)
20.00
NC
904.00
2350
2350
6.82
Champadanga(WB)
18.00
50
1461.00
2800
2800
14.29
T. Narasipura(Kar)
16.00
NC
121.00
1500
1725
NC
Kolhapur(Laxmipuri)(Mah)
12.00
-7.69
2650.00
3000
3000
NC
North Lakhimpur(ASM)
10.10
-34.42
2462.30
1900
1900
NC
Kolaghat(WB)
7.00
-12.5
1401.00
2500
2500
8.70
Tamluk (Medinipur E)(WB)
7.00
NC
1364.00
2500
2500
8.70
Uluberia(WB)
6.00
15.38
343.60
2450
2450
-2.00
Chengannur(Ker)
5.00
-23.08
729.00
2500
2300
NC
Dibrugarh(ASM)
4.50
-10
430.60
2250
2250
-
Darjeeling(WB)
3.20
6.67
205.50
2950
2950
5.36
Lakhimpur(UP)
2.00
-23.08
557.15
2160
2150
0.70
Thoubal(Man)
2.00
233.33
51.90
2700
3100
8.00
Kalimpong(WB)
1.10
NC
69.20
2600
2600
10.64
Bonai(Bonai)(Ori)
0.80
14.29
103.40
2500
2500
13.64
Kasipur(WB)
0.80
-27.27
57.40
2200
2200
-12.00
Shillong(Meh)
0.60
-25
100.60
3700
3600
5.71

Could rice fields save endangered salmon in the Sacramento Valley?


Robin Abcarian

It was, as the duck hunters say, a bluebird day in the Sacramento Valley — sunny and warmish, barely a cloud in the sky. I stood on the edge of a harvested rice field, squinting into a drainage ditch. The water was maybe a foot deep.Suddenly, a tail fin belonging to a salmon way too big for these shallows broke the surface, then disappeared. Peering into the water, I could make out a male and female, perhaps as large as 25 pounds. What on earth were winter-run Chinook doing here, in a ditch next to a rice field, when they should be making their way up the Sacramento River to their spawning grounds?

“They got lost,” said my guide, Jacob Katz, a senior scientist with CalTrout, a nonprofit engaged in improving fish populations. “They zigged when they should have zagged.”Miles southwest of here, after swimming under the Golden Gate Bridge and through the Sacramento Delta, these endangered fish made a wrong turn. Instead of bearing right in the Sacramento River, they turned left into a system of agricultural drainage canals and ended up many miles later in dead-end ditches like this. Each year, despite rescue efforts of the Department of Fish and Wildlife, hundreds end up dying, without spawning, at the edges of Sacramento Valley rice fields.Young salmon heading downstream to the ocean have it even worse. If they survive to the age of migration, the fast-moving Sacramento River provides them with little food and refuge from predators. Other disasters befall them; in 2014 and 2015, most salmon eggs were wiped out by high water temperatures in the river, a result of the drought and a mechanical flaw in a temperature control device at Shasta Lake that was supposed to release enough cold water to save them.
Tuesday, I visited a couple of projects in the Sacramento Valley that are aimed at helping salmon on both ends of the life cycle. They are collaborations between farmers and environmentalists, two groups that are often at each other’s throats in the never-ending battle over who is entitled to California’s precious water supply.

“It’s just a blessing to work with these people,” said second-generation rice farmer Bryce Lundberg, at a breakfast that included Katz, farmers and officials from various water districts and state agencies. “Our future is tied to the environment. The health of birds and fish is tied to the health of farms.”
::
The environmental awakening of the Sacramento Valley’s rice farmers was more or less forced upon them. Traditionally, farmers burned the rice stubble left in their fields after harvest. But that cheap and dirty practice was outlawed by the state in 1991.Many took to flooding their fields to help the leftover rice straw decompose. This had the effect of creating what scientists call “surrogate wetlands,” attractive to all manner of ducks and geese whose populations had dramatically shrunk because their winter habitat, the Sacramento Valley’s wetlands, had been engineered out of existence with levees, canals and dams.All that human intervention had allowed farms and cities to flourish, of course. But it was hell on birds and fish.
Transforming hundreds of thousands of once-burnt acres into wetlands helped revive an important migratory stop along the Pacific Flyway. It was good PR for farmers, who could also charge duck hunters hefty fees for using their land. The ducks tend to catch on quickly.“They hang out in the wildlife refuges during the day where they can’t be hunted,” said Lewis Bair, general manager of Reclamation District 108, one of the state’s oldest water districts, as we drove along the edge of a flooded rice field. “Then they move to these fields to eat after dark.”  

Several years ago, scientists at UC Davis got an idea: What if they figured out a way to get young salmon back into those wetlands, too? Before all the levees and canals were built, juveniles would come down the river from Redding, spilling over the banks into the flood plain to fatten up for the treacherous journey to sea. Instead of being shunted down the food-scarce Sacramento River as they are now, the fry could take some time to bask in the shallow, bug-filled waters of the rice paddies.This experiment, dubbed the Nigiri Project (after that sushi favorite, salmon on rice), is in its fifth year, and is showing promise. It’s still unclear, however, whether the “flood-plain fatties” have a better chance of making it back to spawning grounds as adults.
“We’ve done this with 5,000 or 10,000 fish, and there’s no way to recover enough of them to draw scientific conclusions,” said Katz. He’d like to do it with half a million fish, but has not been able to get permission from various government agencies. “There are a lot of politics involved, and it’s sensitive.”


Last year, the Natural Resources Defense Council filed a lawsuit against the federal Bureau of Reclamation and Sacramento Valley rice farmers (whose water rights are nearly iron-clad) for mismanaging water at the expense of the endangered Chinook.“There’s a line that is being walked here,” Katz said. “Fish need water, and there needs to be resolution about water rights and the Endangered Species Act. But in the meantime, there’s lots of projects that are good for fish, good for the environment and good for farmers. And it’s in everyone’s interest to build those now.”
::
My last stop of the day was a construction project on a private farm in the Yolo Bypass, a swath of farmland 40 miles long and 3 miles wide between Davis and Sacramento that protects Sacramento from severe flooding. Wallace Weir, a $13-million barrier, will allow for improved flood control, but will also prevent adult salmon, like the ones I saw, from straying to their deaths in drainage ditches. Reclamation District 108 General Manager Lewis Bair at Wallace Weir in the Yolo Bypass. The project will help with flood control and save endangered salmon that have strayed from the Sacramento River into drainage canals.
Robin Abcarian / Los Angeles Times
Reclamation District 108 General Manager Lewis Bair at Wallace Weir in the Yolo Bypass. The project will help with flood control and save endangered salmon that have strayed from the Sacramento River into drainage canals.Reclamation District 108 General Manager Lewis Bair at Wallace Weir in the Yolo Bypass. The project will help with flood control and save endangered salmon that have strayed from the Sacramento River into drainage canals. (Robin Abcarian / Los Angeles Times)

The day after my visit, Katz told me, he returned to the ditch to find salmon in water so shallow, their backs were exposed. This makes them easy prey for river otters, who gorge on the eggs and leave the carcasses for coyotes, vultures and deer.When off-course salmon reach Wallace Weir, they will be directed into a maze-like tank with a mechanical, perforated floor that will lift the heavy adults up to biologists who will pluck them out of the water with slings and load them into trucks for return to the Sacramento River.It’s not exactly a sustainable way to save the salmon, but given that human intervention has pushed them to the edge of extinction, it’s the least we can do for now.

PM Lee learning about tissue culture techniques to clone and regenerate trees with desirable traits at the Temasek Life Sciences Laboratory on Friday (Dec 9).PHOTO: MCI

SINGAPORE - Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong gave a thumbs up to "Temasek Rice", a grain variety made in Singapore, in a Facebook post on Saturday (Dec 10).He visited the Temasek Life Sciences Laboratory, a non-profit research institute funded by Temasek Trust, on Friday (Dec 9) and said in his post that he enjoyed "learning about the lab's work, its focus on sustainability and on using science to improve our environment and lives".Temasek Rice, which is the first and only rice variety to be created and sold here, was launched at Meidi-Ya supermarket in Liang Court in August this year.
http://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/pm-lee-looks-forward-to-trying-made-in-singapore-temasek-rice-after-visit-to-research-lab




DA strengthens seed sector in 2017

 December 10, 2016


QUEZON CITY, Dec. 10 - The Department of Agriculture (DA) will have to focus programs on the commercialization of rice seed production in the country by 2017.This was according to Agriculture Secretary Emmanuel F. Piñol during the inauguration of a modern rice seed processing facility at the Philippine Rice Research Institute on December 6, 2016.Piñol likewise stressed the importance of good breeding materials in achieving the food sufficiency.

“Good genetics and good farm management are two factors the DA needs to focus on to be able to synch our strategies with the vision of the President towards affordable and accessible food for every Filipino,” he said.He noted that the government will have to improve rice productivity thru the expansion of rice farmlands by at least one million hectare next year.“To be able to achieve that dream, we have to provide more good seeds for farmers,” Piñol added.

Piñol, together with PhilRice acting executive director Dr. Sailila E. Abdula, led the inauguration of the $4-million processing facility funded by the Korea International Cooperation Agency (KOICA) thru the “Enhancing the Capacity of Production and Distribution of High Quality Rice Seeds” program.The initiative includes the establishment of the facility, providing of equipment, and trainings for the personnel.The 1,000m3 facility aims to lessen the processing time and certification process for rice seeds. The structure also aims to encourage farmers to use high-quality seeds.

“By using the right seeds, a ten percent increase on farmers’ rice yield every year is possible,” Piñol noted.The facility is composed of two recirculating dryers and two reversible dryers, which can dry 6 and 4 tons seeds per batch, respectively. It also has two seed cleaners and a gravity separator for sorting seeds with a capacity of two tons per hour. It has a cold room, an office, and a generator room.Piñol seeks to set up the same concept of facility in other rice producing areas in the country such as Davao and Soccsksargen region. (DA


http://news.pia.gov.ph/article/view/1141481240679/da-strengthens-seed-sector-in-2017#sthash.FZI1XjjY.dpuf