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Feed The World

Updated December 11, 2008 13:31:00

Riots in recent weeks have focused international attention on the shortages and skyrocketing prices that have created a global food crisis. However there is an urgent need to address food security among people going hungry right now, many of whom live in countries like the Philippines where rice is the staple. Australian researchers are at the forefront of efforts to increase the global rice yield. As Sean Murphy discovered even in the Philippines where queues for subsidised rice are now common, there is a growing backlash against technology and the debt burden that comes with it.

Source: Landline | Duration: 19min 11sec

Topics: rice, food-and-beverage, food-processing, science-and-technology, philippines


ANNE KRUGER, PRESENTER: Riots in recent weeks have focused international attention on the shortages and skyrocketing prices that have created a global food crisis. The United Nations wants major agricultural producers to re-double efforts to increase food supplies over the next two decades. And Australian researchers are at the forefront of that work.

SEAN MURPHY, REPORTER: They're cooking rice porridge for the children of Magdalena Tonda - a squatters' camp of 500 makeshift dwellings along an open sewerage canal in metropolitan Manila. Every day, charity workers provide a cooked meal for 100 children here - the only food many will get and, lately, containing less rice than usual because of a national shortage.

ANTON PASCUAL, CARITAS: Rice is a moral product in the Philippines. It is so basic a need that it can make or unmake any government in our country. It is a basic staple food of our country. Especially the table of the poor. Around 70 per cent of our country are poor. It constitutes the majority of our country are dependent on rice.

SEAN MURPHY: The Philippines is the world's largest importer of rice and with its national stockpile dwindling, its government has been forced to offer a daily ration of subsidised rice to the poor. Queues are now commonplace around the country for a kilogram of rice at around half the market price. It's part of a global phenomenon as the price of export-grade rice has almost tripled this year.

DR BETH WOODS, INTERNATIONAL RICE RESEARCH INSTITUTE: Well, basically, we've been eating more than we've been producing for quite a few years now and we've got to the point where the supplies, the stores of world food staples have been depleted and we're now in a just-in-time supply-demand situation.

SEAN MURPHY: Rice yields have been stable for decades, and the current supply crisis has caught many by surprise. According to the World Bank, more than 30 countries are at risk of social unrest because of rising prices and a dwindling supply of the world's most important staple. A growing middle class wanting more animal protein in developing nations such as China and India and demand for rice in new markets like Africa and the Pacific have fuelled the current crisis.

But with 1.1 billion people earning less than $1 a day, it's the world's poorest who are the hardest hit, often now paying up to half their income for rice alone.

DR BETH WOODS: Well, for the poorest of course it's drastic, because they need to buy rice, in many cases. I suppose that's another important trend. We've got an increasing number of poor people living in urban settings, whereas, historically, the great majority of poor people lived in rural areas, so they had immediate close-to-hand options about trying to increase their food supply. Once they're living in an urban situation, they've got to buy, they've got to buy in part of the global supply chain, and they really haven't got a choice once the price goes up.

SEAN MURPHY: Dr Beth Woods is a Queensland agricultural economist and now chair of the International Rice Research Institute. IIRI, as it's known, runs a 280 hectare research farm at Los Banos in the Philippines, which nay be crucial for finding solutions to increase the world's rice production.

Australians, such as cereal chemist Melissa Fitzgerald, are at the forefront of IRRI's scientific effort. At the centre's gene bank, she is working her way through 110,000 different rice samples to help develop new and better varieties.

MELISSA FITZGERALD, CEREAL CHEMIST: I'm working on rice quality. There are three components of rice quality - how nice the rice looks, how nice it tastes and how good it is for you. And, so, we do research on those three things and we measure those three things in the breeding programs to make sure that the rice varieties that are eventually released look good, taste good and are good for you.

SEAN MURPHY: In terms of increasing world production, she's working on so-called 'chalking' or breaking rice - a biological problem which attracts severe penalties on international markets.

MELISSA FITZGERALD: When we get those two parts or those two things in the rice, that's a huge or substantial loss in financial return to the farmer and a huge loss in income for the trader. And so what we do here is we test these traits in our grain and I'm going to look at one of our breeding lines now and look for the proportion of these broken grains and these chalky grains.

SEAN MURPHY: With more than 90 per cent of the world's rice production grown only for domestic markets, much of the focus at IRRI is on finding low-cost simple solutions to improving production on small farms, such as this poison-free community rat-trap.

GRANT SINGLETON, ANIMAL ECOLOGIST: In Asia we're looking at damages between 10 per cent and 15 per cent. If we're able to manage that loss by about - say we reduce it by 6 per cent that would give enough rice to feed about 220 million people for a year, which is about the population of Indonesia.

SEAN MURPHY: Grant Singleton is an animal ecologist specialising in rodents, but he also heads the Irrigated Rice Research Consortium.

GRANT SINGLETON: The Irrigated Rice Research Consortium focuses on the low-land irrigated cropping system, which is about 45 per cent of rice production in Asia - in terms of area, but it produces 75 per cent of the rice production. So it's a crucial low-land system for food security in Asia. And we are working on, focusing on, trying to increase production but in a sustainable manner - so we're looking at water saving, nutrient management, post-harvest issues, and looking also and helping save labour, and also management of pests, rodents and diseases, and we're working in 12 countries.

SEAN MURPHY: And just like Australia, much of the rice-growing world faces a future with less water.

LIZ HUMPHREYS, CROP WATER SPECIALIST: For example, on the outskirts of Beijing, people aren't allowed to grow rice in the conventional way anymore because of competition for water with the city. In the case of areas where irrigation water scarcity is the issue - and it could be because of restrictions in India, it's because of declining ground water.

SEAN MURPHY: Liz Humphreys is another Australian based at IRRI. She's overseeing an international program looking at producing more rice with less water.

LIZ HUMPHREYS: There's other ways of growing rice - instead of puddling it and keeping it flooded continuously, intermittent irrigation or alternate wetting and drying, as it's called, or in the challenge program, we've got a project which is looking at a system called aerobic rice cultivation. That system involves developing varieties that are capable of producing reasonably high yields with only one or two or three irrigations.

SEAN MURPHY: It may look like fun in the mud, but attracting new research talent is serious business for IRRI. This course is for young scientists and extension officers to give them a practical understanding of the industry.

NOGEL MAGOR, TRAINING SUPERVISOR: It's really important, 'cause if they go on into research and they're working in molecular - we find a lot of people that don't know what a rice plant looks like - so it gives them a link to production issues of farmers and for people who are working in the field with farmers and extension agents, et cetera, it gives them a really good idea of where the links with research, so it kind of builds a continuum between research right through to impact at farmer level.

SEAN MURPHY: In Asia alone, IRRI predicts 38 million tonnes of additional rice will have to be planted each year by 2015 to feed an expanding population. It believes known technologies, such as fertiliser, pesticides, weed control, hybrid rice varieties and better post-harvest management, are key to meeting this production demand. Since the so-called green revolution of the 1960s, fertilisers and pesticides have been commonly used in the Philippines. But with the increasing cost of oil, there's been a growing backlash against artificial inputs and a return to more traditional farming methods.

At Zambales, on the coast north-west of Manila, the Catholic Colomban Missionaries fund a demonstration farm to encourage farmers back to organic production. Agronomist Conrado Esemple runs the farm and is a keen supporter of MASIPAG - a loose coalition of farmers, scientists and local authorities promoting traditional agriculture.

CONRADO ESEMPLE, AGRONOMIST: We use zero chemicals, zero pesticide, zero chemical inputs but they are using only the Indigenous materials like the compost, the animal dungs, and anything that will make the soil fertile. We have to go back to the fertility of the soil, by returning back all of the organic matters to the soil.

SEAN MURPHY: Conrado Esemple says about 10 per cent of the Philippines' poor rice farmers have now joined MASIPAG, and even with a reduced yield, initially, they're far better off financially without having to pay for inputs.

CONRADO ESEMPLE: One of the purpose of this farm is to have a seed bank so we can provide seeds from the farmers, seeds which is traditional, pest resistance, and never require any chemical inputs.

DR BETH WOODS: We know that some of the organic-type systems don't have the same top-yield potential as the more traditional commercial farming systems. So, I think the issue for me is around an inability to meet the production targets that we know we need to feed people from here to 2050, say, through those more traditional means.

SEAN MURPHY: The majority of farmers, such as Floro Umali, are happily embracing technology, and the Philippines Government is now investing in hybrid seeds and irrigation to boost national production. On his half-hectare crop, Mr Umali says chemical inputs and certified seed have increased his production by about 30 per cent. The problem, though, like farmers everywhere, is that he isn't sharing the benefits of the soaring market price for rice.

FLORO UMALI, FARMER (TRANSLATION): When the price of rice in the market goes up, the price of palay on the farm should also go up. It should be fair, the farmer should also benefit from the increasing price of rice in the market.

SEAN MURPHY: Back at IRRI, scientists such as Melissa Fitzgerald have also been working on a new genetically modified variety known as golden rice. It's fortified with vitamin A - a key dietary deficiency in much of the rice-eating world. Besides fortifying rice varieties, IRRI believes genetic modification may also have a role in increasing world production.

MELISSA FITZGERALD: The factors that are going to impact upon the rice crisis are increasing the yield of edible rice, and that can be affected by resistance to pests, it can be affected by water, it can be affected by drought-resistance, it can be affected by tolerance to submergence, it can be affected by the way it takes up nitrogen, it can be affected by the way it harvests the sugars from the sun or harvests the energy from the sun, and if science unravels the genetic processes for those things in other crops, then there is potential to improve the yield components of rice through genetic modification.

SEAN MURPHY: Although genetically modified corn has been embraced by the Philippines Government, GM technology is highly controversial.

Greenpeace has raised the alarm about the United States possibly dumping contaminated rice on the Philippines, during its supply crisis.

DANNY OCAMPO, GREENPEACE: So far, we have, twice, we have found contaminated rice in the Philippines. The first instance was in 2006, and the next instance was a batch of rice being sold in supermarkets, which is coming also from States in the US where contaminated rice has been exported.

SEAN MURPHY: The Philippines is nearly 90 per cent Catholic, and while the church has nourished its people spiritually for centuries, it's increasingly also sustaining them physically. The church's social services arm, Caritas, has been distributing the National Food Authority's subsidised rice, but it's baulked at genetic modification.

ANTON PASCUAL: I have a directive from the Cardinal of the Archdiocese in Manila that they will not sell rice with GM or production, especially if it comes from the States. So getting rice from Thailand and from nearby countries in Asia.

SEAN MURPHY: The Philippines Government denies importing any contaminated rice, but activists within the church say a bigger problem is the government's enthusiasm for GM technology and what impact this may have on already impoverished rice-farmers.

AIDA VELASQUES, ENVIRONMENTALIST: We are really afraid that the local rice varieties will be contaminated and when that happens the farmers would not have a chance to save their own seedlings for the next crop. So they will be in a situation where the farmers would be buying seedlings every time they have to plant. They are poor enough. I don't think they should be robbed of their opportunity to get rise from that poverty.

SEAN MURPHY: IRRI says genetically modified rice may still be many years from the market.

DR BETH WOODS: Of course, we're highly sensitive to the fact that every country has a legal and ethical framework that sits around the use of GM crops in that country. So, all the work that we're doing has to fit inside those frameworks, which are intended to be able to manage the safety and ethical issues in a way that's suitable for each country.

(excerpt from news report)

JOURNALIST: Desperately needed aid is being delivered to some parts of the country, but with the death toll rising and an unknown number of people homeless, the situation is becoming acute.

(end of excerpt)

SEAN MURPHY: Of more urgent concern at IRRI is getting its people on the ground in cyclone-ravaged Burma to assess the damage to its main rice-growing regions.

GRANT SINGLETON: The Ayeyarwady division, which was hit the hardest, the land area is about 29 per cent of production for rice in the region. And so that is virtually the rice bowl for Myanmar. Initially, there are issues to do with salinity because of the tidal surge, but that usually gets from experience from the tsunami and also from the cyclone that hit Bangladesh last year, that those salinity issues usually get diluted fairly quickly from the monsoon rains, which are now about to hit Myanmar. So, the salinity issue will not be too high. It's mainly the flooding and also the destruction, which has led to the loss of life, the loss of draft animals, the loss of means to grow a crop.

SEAN MURPHY: In a future clouded by climate change, where yield may be even more affected by extreme weather events such as floods, storms or drought, IRRI says the importance of ongoing research funding is vital.

The institute has been helping to fill the world's rice bowl for almost 50 years, but demand for its research and extension services has never been greater.

DR BETH WOODS: I think there was a sense in some quarters that world food supply problems had been solved. Whereas in fact they were moving steadily to a situation where food was going to be again a crisis issue. So, I'm hopeful that one of the positive things that'll come out of what's a pretty terrible situation for a lot of poor people is a recognition that we actually need to continue to invest in production-oriented research. So, diseases keep evolving, pests keep evolving, production pressures, in terms of dropping fertility, keep becoming more pressing and if you don't keep the research going that keeps sort of dealing with those issues in a day-to-day, week-to-week way, then you actually start going backwards.