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Extractive summaries of and key takeaways from the articles curated from TOP TEN BUSINESS MAGAZINES to promote informed business decision-making | Week 290 | March 31-April 6, 2023

How to fix the global rice crisis

The Economist | March 30, 2023

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The green revolution was one of the greatest feats of human ingenuity. By promoting higher-yielding varieties of wheat and, especially, rice, plant-breeders in India, Mexico and the Philippines helped China emerge from a famine and India avoid one. From 1965 to 1995 Asia’s rice yields doubled and its poverty almost halved, even as its population soared.

Asia’s vast rice market is a legacy of that triumph. The starchy grain is the main source of sustenance for over half the world’s population. Asians produce over 90% of rice and get more than a quarter of their calories from it. And demand for the crop is projected to soar, on the back of population growth in Asia and Africa, another big rice consumer. By one estimate, the world will need to produce almost a third more rice by 2050. Yet that looks increasingly hard—and in some ways undesirable.

Rice production is spluttering. Yields have increased by less than 1% a year over the past decade, much less than in the previous one. The greatest slowdowns were in South-East Asia, where Indonesia and the Philippines—together, home to 400m people—are already big importers. This has many explanations. Urbanisation and industrialisation have made labour and farmland scarcer. Excessive use of pesticides, fertiliser and irrigation have poisoned and depleted soils and groundwater. But the biggest reason may be global warming.  Patchy monsoon rains and drought last year in India, the world’s biggest rice exporter, led to a reduced harvest and an export ban. Devastating floods in Pakistan, the fourth-biggest exporter, wiped out 15% of its rice harvest.

It gets worse. Rice is not merely a casualty of climate change, but also a contributor to it. By starving soils of oxygen, paddy cultivation encourages methane-emitting bacteria. It is a bigger source of greenhouse gas than any foodstuff except beef. Its emissions footprint is similar to that of aviation. If you count the conversion of forestland for rice paddy—the fate of much of Madagascar’s rainforest—that footprint is even bigger.

This amounts to an insidious feedback loop and, in all, a far more complicated set of problems than the food insecurity that spurred the green revolution. Indeed, eating too much rice turns out to be bad for people as well as the climate.  Governments need to nudge producers and consumers away from rice.

3 key takeaways from the article

1. The green revolution was one of the greatest feats of human ingenuity. By promoting higher-yielding varieties of wheat and, especially, rice, plant-breeders in India, Mexico and the Philippines helped China emerge from a famine and India avoid one. 
2. Rice production is spluttering. Yields have increased by less than 1% a year over the past decade, much less than in the previous one. This has many explanations. Urbanisation and industrialisation have made labour and farmland scarcer. Excessive use of pesticides, fertiliser and irrigation have poisoned and depleted soils and groundwater. But the biggest reason may be global warming.  Hence Rice is not merely a casualty of climate change, but also a contributor to it.  
3. Eating too much rice turns out to be bad for people as well as the climate.  Governments need to nudge producers and consumers away from rice.

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Topics:  Agriculture, Rice, Sustainable Development, Climate Change