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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...

In the late 1960s, newly developed, high-yielding rice varieties launched the Asian Green Revolution, which rapidly pushed up yields and allowed rice production to keep pace with population growth. In the Philippines, as in many other countries, widespread use of pesticides expanded in step with the new varieties. This was largely due to concerns that crop losses from...

Of the world’s 1.1 billion poor people, almost 700 million people with income of less than a dollar a day reside in rice-growing countries of Asia. Rice...

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

Several factors are combining to slow the growth in demand for rice. Rapid urbanization and increases in per capita income, particularly in the middle-and...

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...

Population growth is the dominant determinant of the demand for staple food. World population has more than doubled since the 1950s and has already surpassed...

In many developing countries, women are the primary managers and users of natural resources. Poor rural women play important roles in rice-based farming...