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Over the past 4 decades, rice research has achieved substantial progress in developing genetically improved rice varieties and more efficient management of natural resources and inputs (fertilizer, pesticides, new seeds and labor). These advances have helped farmers increase productivity and decrease production...

The price of rice has consistently fallen over the last 40 years. Since the beginnings of the Green Revolution in the mid-1960s, the real (inflation-adjusted) price of rice in the world market has been more than halved while global rice production has increased (Figure 1). This movement in price has not been smooth. An upward trend during the oil crisis in 1973-75 was...

Rice is, arguably, the world’s most important food crop. In spite of this prominence, the private sector for many years concentrated only on developing rice crop protection products such as herbicides and insecticides. There was little investment in improving rice varieties, and low participation in the crop seed  business. In the mid-1990s, however, several agricultural...

(Photo: Peter Fredenburg)</span Living standards can rise only as workers become steadily more productive. For rice farming, improving productivity...

The genebanks of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) are often portrayed in the popular press as villains, the archetypical biopirates who steal huge amounts of biodiversity from their rightful owners and ride roughshod over the rights of poor farmers. At the same time the genebanks are often portrayed as heroes, the saviors of biodiversity...

Perhaps surprisingly, farmers do not perform most of the labor on rice farms in South and Southeast Asia. In the Philippines and on the Indonesian island of Java, for example, rice farm families work  on average less than 40 days per year on the fundamental tasks of growing rice. If both husband and wife share this labor, each averages 13 hours per month. This is good...

Discussion of the system of rice intensification (SRI) is unfortunate because it implies SRI merits serious consideration. SRI does not deserve such attention. A multinational team has shown from both theoretical evaluations and a number of experimental tests that SRI offers no yield advantage. Significantly, these results by Sheehy et al. were published in Field Crops...

The system of rice intensification (SRI) was developed in Madagascar 20 years ago by Fr. Henri de Laulanié of the Society of Jesus after 2 decades of working with farmers to raise their rice production without depending on external inputs. Today, SRI is gaining acceptance around the world. Practiced only in Madagascar until 1999, it has since demonstrated its environmentally...

A wasp larvae is a parasite that attacks cutworm larva. (Photo: Friends Of The Rice Farmer: Helpful Insects, Spiders, And Pathogens) Rice farmers, like...

The world food crisis of 1973-75 continues to shape the attitude of Asian policymakers toward food security. Occurring as it did in a period of volatility...