IPB Paddy Festival celebrates food

JAKARTA: The Bogor Institute of Agriculture (IPB), in cooperation with the Cultural Division of the French Foreign Ministry and CIRAD, a French research center on tropical agronomy, is holding the Paddy Festival at the IPB campus in Dermaga, Bogor.

The event was opened on Tuesday by IPB deputy rector Asep Saefuddin and Counselor for Cooperation and Cultural Affairs Jacques de Croizant of the French Embassy in Indonesia, and is to last until World Environment Day on June 5.

The theme of the festival is Food that Feeds the World.

The festival features various aspects of paddy, or unmilled rice, including its history, cultivation and processing, as well as economic and social discourses related to the scientific innovation of paddy.

There are also 50 posters that are expected to raise public awareness on problems in the development of paddy production.

"Gabah (paddy) and beras (milled rice) are two words that are very close to us. Ironically, this closeness makes us take rice for granted, as something unimportant," Asep said. "We never thought about our knowledge of unmilled rice and the process involved until the rice reaches our dinner table," he said. -- Antara