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It has been well documented that the Asian Green Revolution (GR), which began in the 1960s with the introduction of modern, high-yielding rice varieties, has contributed to poverty alleviation by reducing the real rice price on the world market by more than half without depleting producers’ profit. The...

Farmers in China applying fertilizer on an aerobic rice field. (Photo: IRRI) As fertilizer prices increase, research and extension often send farmers...

Rice is the staple food for around two-thirds of the Chinese people. China ranks first in annual total rice production (about 185 million tons) and second, after India, in annual total planting area (29 million hectares). The country produces 35% of the world’s rice with 20% of the planting area. Rice production in China has more than tripled in the past five decades...

Ask someone to think of a rice field and odds are they’ll imagine a flooded paddy. Growing rice in puddled fields works well as long as there’s enough water to do it. But, increasingly, that’s not always the case. As populations increase and the industrial and urban sectors compete with agriculture for water, “aerobic rice” offers a water-saving alternative to...

In 1962, scientists at the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) debated the cause of low and stagnant rice yields in the tropics: was it variety or crop management? This debate ended with the release of the semidwarf IR8 in 1966, initiating the Green Revolution. The same variety, in the same year, extended this revolution to Latin America, beginning in Colombia...

The International Energy Agency (IEA) estimates that renewable energy sources account for about 13% of the world’s total primary energy supply. Nearly 80% of these renewables are in the form of combustible biomass—mostly wood, charcoal, crop residues, or other wastes burned for cooking, heating, and other activities in the developing world. Now, high oil prices and...

A common question but very difficult to answer. Depending on your definition of variety, the answer could be anything from zero to around 500,000 varieties of Oryza sativa (Asian cultivated rice). In the technical sense used by taxonomists (biologists who classify organisms into groups based on evolutionary relationships), descriptions have been published of 14 varieties,...

The simple answer to the question posed by the title is “no”— because most rice is not dangerous. On closer inspection, though, we find that some rice-cropping systems are more likely than others to take up metals that are toxic to humans. Such metals may be a natural part of the local environment or present in industrial pollution. Who is most at risk from contaminated...

Since land was first cultivated to create a favorable environment for crops, other less desirable plants have exploited the same land more effectively. Control of weeds has been described as humanity’s biggest single occupation, and while herbicides have greatly reduced the effort needed to control weeds in some farming systems, in others, controlling them requires more...

Rice research can play a major role in achieving many of the eight United Nations Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), particularly those that call for the eradication of poverty and hunger, and for environmental sustainability. The International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) conducts research that regularly leads to validated technologies that have the potential to improve...