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Published on August 11, 2007

The International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) has sounded the alarm over what it described as troubling signs concerning the global rice crop, on which the majority of the world's population and most of its poor people depend as a staple food. The combination of problems facing rice could not have been worse: rising prices, higher production costs and stocks that have dropped to their lowest levels in the past three decades.

This is bad news for the world's poor. Rice is by far the most affordable and nutritious grain favoured by people in Asia and increasingly consumed by people in other parts of the world. If the unfavourable trends cited by IRRI continue unchecked, many developing countries, particularly the poorer and more populous ones, can no longer take for granted food security, which they have managed to achieve since the start of the Green Revolution in the 1960s. The spectre of famine, from which countries such as India, Bangladesh and China thought they had escaped, could come back to haunt them.

According to rice experts quoted by The Wall Street Journal earlier this week, global rice production isn't keeping up with demand. Prices have soared, and much arable farm land has been exhausted. Unless scientists succeed in developing hardier seed strains that can withstand and thrive in extreme conditions, such as droughts and floods, possible food crises may ensue.

Speaking at an international rural poverty conference in Manila, Robert Zeigler, the head of the IRRI, said Asia needed another Green Revolution to keep the kind of endemic poverty and food shortages, which they had until recently overcome, at bay. For this to happen, measures must be taken including the introduction of new technologies, better quality seeds, and innovative planting and production techniques that rely less on costly fertilisers and other chemicals.

Scientists admit that replicating the dramatic gains of the Green Revolution will not be easy, partly because of the degradation of soil quality in pre-existing farm lands as a result of the excessive use of fertilisers and chemicals in past decades. The pressure is now on scientists at IRRI and those in other major rice-growing countries like Thailand, Vietnam and the United States, to think up new ways to boost rice output while at the same time keeping long-term environmental damage to farm lands in check.

To complicate matters further, the rising demand for bio-fuels which has caused many rice growers to switch to bio-fuel crops like sugar cane, as well as urbanisation and industrialisation, also compete for land and water resources that would otherwise have been used for rice production.

Worse still, global warming could slash rice production in Asia by 7 per cent by 2020, according to some scientists. Temperature is a key determining factor affecting rice-crop development, growth and yield. It is estimated that for every degree Celsius increase in temperature, rice yields would drop by as much as 10 per cent.

Estimates on the upward trend in global mean air temperatures vary but climatologists agree that an increase between 1.4 degrees Celsius to 5.8 degrees Celsius is possible by the end of the century. The increase depends on such variable factors as changes in greenhouse gas concentrations and the effectiveness of measures implemented by the international community to combat global warming.

This is nothing short of a doomsday scenario. and may turn out to be far-fetched. But the international community should take heed of potential disasters and make every effort to enable itself to face these challenges. We would rather err on the side of being too cautious.

The world may have thought that it had proven Thomas Malthus, the 18th-century British demographer and economist, wrong and dismissed his prophecy that unchecked world population grew in a geometrical ratio and would outpace the world's food production capability, which increased in an arithmetical ratio.

The world's population may be growing at a slower rate than it has in the past thanks to population control, particularly the use of contraceptives. But overall growth rates and the absolute number of people, particularly in poorer and more populous countries, are still way too high based on their ability to feed themselves, which could be still further undermined. The world may not have overcome the Malthusian trap after all.