Asia's rice industry in crisis

Asia's rice industry in crisis

Agence France-Presse, Manila

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 on Friday.

"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."

Philippines-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.

The institute said Asia's rice producers enjoyed annual yield
increases of 2.5 percent and production gains of more than 3
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 Jamaah 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 U.S. 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.

Meanwhile, United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization
(FAO) on Friday opened a two-day international conference aimed
at increasing rice production through greater efficiency and
sustainability.

The conference is a part of the UN General Assembly's
International Year of Rice 2004 awareness and action campaign.