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Major yet quiet breakthroughs in genetically
modified rice have made crops more resilient to rising climate change
challenges like monsoon floods and rising seas
By JOHN MCBETHJAKARTA, NOVEMBER 23, 2018 4:20 PM
(UTC+8)
·
A rice paddy field in rural Karnataka, India. Photo:
iStock/Getty Images
In advances reminiscent of the
“Green Revolution” of four decades ago, agricultural scientists have quietly
made important breakthroughs in the cultivation of Asia’s prime staple food,
developing so-called “scuba rice” that survives long periods of flooding and an
alkaline-resistant “sea rice” farmers are already growing along China’s
northern coast.
With an eye to an uncertain future, the Philippines-based
International Rice Research Institute’s (IRRI) last month sealed a deal with
the Global Crop Diversity Trust to provide permanent funding for the
conservation and sharing of 136,000 varieties of a grain that currently feeds
more than 3.5 billion people a day.
IRRI director general Matthew Morell says the institute’s
invaluable gene bank has become a fundamental part of
global efforts to make rice more resilient, sustainable and equitable at a time
when the impact of climate change far outweighs the positive effects of CO2
fertilization.
In China’s coastal Shandong province, north of Shanghai,
scientists are claiming initial success in an ambitious plan to grow rice on 20
million hectares of tidal flats and saline-alkali soil, especially in the
Yellow River Delta, which they believe could ultimately feed an additional 80
million people.
That’s about 80% of the Shandong populace, or 10% of the 840
million Chinese who depend on rice as their staple – a figure that is unlikely
to grow beyond 2030 when the emerging super power’s population is expected to
peak at about 1.45 billion.
Avoiding the controversy associated with genetically modified
rice, scientists have been trying to grow the grain in brackish water since the
1970s. But it is only now they have come up with varieties that yield a
commercially viable four and a half to nine tons a hectare.
A mill worker in Thailand holds harvested rice
grains. Photo: Reuters / Jorge Silva
China has strived for self-sufficiency in rice, wheat and corn
since the late 1960s, but still falls short of satisfying an appetite for rice
which rose from 125 million tons in 1975 to 261 million tons in 2016, in line
with a population increase of 484 million.
Last year, China was the world’s biggest rice importer with 5.1
million tons, ahead of Nigeria (3.3 million), the Philippines (1.9 million),
Iran and Indonesia (1.7 million). India, by comparison, was the biggest rice
exporter, followed by Thailand, the United States, Pakistan and Vietnam.
Self-sufficiency is a key objective of most other Asian
governments, but with widely varying degrees of success determined not so much
by yields per hectare as water supply and flat land, particularly in countries
with large river deltas like Vietnam, Thailand and Myanmar.
In Indonesia, importing rice is always a hot political issue,
largely because its people believe the country is self-sufficient. It did in
fact achieve that goal between 1984-86, but rarely since then with per capita
consumption at 148 kilograms a year – fourth behind Myanmar, Vietnam and
Bangladesh.
IRRI’s high-tech facility in Los Baños, southeast of Manila, has
developed improved rice varieties that withstand flooding and drought, and at
the same time help keep pace with a growing world population and changing
consumer preferences.
By 2050, Asia’s estimated 5.2 billion population will eat about
90% of annual global rice production, which according to most current estimates
will have increased from the current 450 million tons to a staggering 525
million tons.
Men load rice bags to a ship for export at a rice
processing factory in Vietnam’s southern Mekong delta, July 6, 2017. Photo:
Reuters/Kham
IRRI scientists have used its gene bank to achieve genetic
breakthroughs tailored to worldwide climate extremes that already threaten
production in key rice-producing regions, including China, India and Indonesia
– the three largest producers and consumers.
Scuba rice will eventually benefit farmers tending 20 million
hectares of rice-land across Asia hit by regular monsoonal flooding, which last
year killed more than 1,200 people in South Asia alone and raised fears of
long-term food insecurity.
While the staple normally dies within days of being submerged,
“scuba rice” can withstand flooding for up to two weeks or more and is now
being grown by five million farmers in India, Bangladesh, the Philippines and
Indonesia, with Vietnam, Thailand and Cambodia as future targets.
Through collaborative research, scientists from the IRRI and the
University of California have spent the past four decades isolating and transferring
the water-tolerant Submarino-1 (sub-1) gene from India’s Orissa variety into
other popular rice types, using a technique known as marker-assisted
backcrossing.
The gene is only activated when it is under water, effectively
placing the plant in a dormant state and allowing it to conserve energy until
the floodwaters slowly recede. Normally, rice stems grow quickly to get the
leaves out of water, which exhausts the plant’s energy reserves.
Rice farmers in Thailand working in their fields.
Photo: AFP
Scuba rice is now grown over 600,000 hectares in India and
Bangladesh, where flooding causes annual paddy losses of four million tons,
enough to feed 30 million people. The funding has largely come from the
foundation created by US billionaire Bill Gates, which focuses on alleviating
the impact of climate change on the world’s poor.
Currently, the so-called Swarna Sub-1 variety is planted across
367,000 ha of eastern India, with the rest grown by about 40% of the farmers in
the northwest of typhoon-battered Bangladesh, now the world’s sixth largest
producer.
In Indonesia, scuba rice covers more than 430,000 ha of such
flood-prone areas as Palembang in South Sumatra and Bandung in West Java, where
the Ciherang sub-1 – one of seven different flood-resistant varieties in Asia —
was first released in 2012.
Under normal conditions, the average yield of most varieties of
scuba rice is about 4.5 to 6.5 tons per hectare. During periods of flooding,
say IRRI scientists, Ciherang sub-1 still yields 3-4 tons, even after two weeks
of complete submergence.
While limited so far, production in the Philippines is
concentrated in low-lying regions like Nueva Ecija in central Luzon, North
Cotabato in Mindanao, and Bohol and Samar in the central and eastern Visayas
where farmers report an average yield of 4.5 tons a hectare.
More than 20 tropical cyclones wreak havoc in the central and
northern Philippines each year. One of the most destructive was Super Typhoon
Haiyan in 2013, which killed 4,460 people, destroyed 2,000 hectares of paddy
fields and caused US$225 million in agricultural damage across Leyte and
eastern Visayas.
A Cambodian farmer cuts rice in a field in Cambodia’s
Kampong Speu province. Photo: AFP/Tang Chhin Sothy
Only last September, Typhoon Mangkhut caused paddy losses of
275,000 tons in northern Luzon, forcing the Philippine government to add
420,000 tons to the one million tons of rice imports ordered earlier in the
year to make up for a perennial shortfall.
Conserved in the IRRI gene bank are improvements to its IR8, the
high-yielding “miracle rice” which brought Asia back from the brink of famine
during the so-called Green Revolution in the 1960s and 70s, when new
innovations transformed agriculture across Southeast Asia.
The collection also includes wild rice species, which have been
used to develop varieties that tolerate heat and drought and resist pests and
diseases. Some have also been modified to resist iron toxicity, a common
problem that affects mostly lowland rice in Africa.
The landmark agreement on conserving IRRI’s gene bank
encompasses what Crop Trust executive director Marie Haga calls “20 years of
work and 50 years of thinking” on how the international community can safeguard
crops used for food and agriculture.
The IRRI is one of 11 gene banks belonging to the Consultative
Group for International Agriculture Research (CGIAR), a global research
partnership working to reducing poverty, enhancing food and nutrition security
and improving natural resources and ecosystem service.
SEARCA, IFS GATHER SCIENTISTS, EXPERTS
VS CLIMATE CHANGE
LOS BAÑOS, Laguna: Twenty-seven young scientists and 10 experts serving as
mentors from eight Southeast Asian countries met on Tuesday and Wednesday here
for a two-day workshop to enhance ongoing collaborative research on climate
change adaptation and mitigation in the agriculture sector.
The workshop, titled “IFS-SEARCA Mentoring Workshop on
Collaborative Research in Climate Change Adaptation and Mitigation,” was
organized by the Southeast Asian Regional Center for Graduate Study and
Research in Agriculture (Searca) and the International Foundation for
Science (IFS) based in Sweden. It was held at the Searca headquarters
here.
The 27 participants, 15 of whom were female, composed the 12
collaborative research teams from various government, research, academic and
private institutions in Southeast Asia that received a research grant financed
by the Carolina MacGillavry endowment and Searca.
The
Southeast Asian Regional Center for Graduate Study and Research in Agriculture
and the International Foundation for Science based in Sweden recently gathered
27 young scientists and 10 experts from eight Southeast Asian countries to enhance
ongoing collaborative research on climate change adaptation and mitigation in
the agriculture sector. SEARCA PHOTO
“This workshop is part of the
memorandum of agreement for an IFS-Searca Collaborative Research Grants Pilot.
This is the third batch of grantees facilitated by IFS but the first one in
Asia. The first and second pilots were implemented in Africa in 2013 and 2014,”
Searca said in a statement.
In the workshop orientation, Maria Celeste Cadiz, PhD, a
technical advisor of Searca, said the mentoring process is expected to help the
researchers in strengthening their processes, ensuring that their projects are
of high quality and producing useful results. The grants commenced in 2017 and
are expected to be completed by December 2020. Thus, the workshop was timed
while the researchers were in the midst of analyzing their research and writing
their reports.
During the first day of the workshop, participants identified
the following areas of their mentoring needs and concerns: research methods and
data analysis; project-
specific technical concerns; collaborative scientific report writing; journal
article writing and other means of communicating research results; intellectual
ownership/property rights; and future grant opportunities and additional budget.
The teams were able to report their research progress and get
feedback from their mentors in a one-on-one setting for project-specific
questions and in a plenary for cross-cutting concerns.
“The mentors are volunteers identified by Searca and IFS from a
pool of established regional and international scientists from esteemed
research and academic institutions including the Central Luzon State University
in the Philippines, International Rice Research Institute, Katsetsart
University in Thailand, Nanyang Technological University in Singapore,
University of the Philippines Los Baños, and University of the Philippines
Visayas,” Searca said.
Aside from their mentors, the research teams were also able to
get inputs from resource persons from IFS and Searca, while Nighisty Ghezae,
PhD, IFS director, presented the challenges and lessons learned from the first
and second pilot grantees. Bessie Burgos, PhD, technical advisor for Searca
research and development, presented the mid-term report of the current batch of
researchers.
The
Southeast Asian Regional Center for Graduate Study and Research in Agriculture
and the International Foundation for Science based in Sweden recently gathered
27 young scientists and 10 experts from eight Southeast Asian countries to enhance
ongoing collaborative research on climate change adaptation and mitigation in
the agriculture sector. SEARCA PHOTO