China to use “seawater rice” to ensure food security

Chinese scientists have developed salt-tolerant rice variety dubbed as “seawater rice” which can be cultivated in salty soils near the sea. The new salt-tolerant rice contains a gene from a selected wild rice variety that is more resistant to saline and alkali.

In field tests in Tianjina, the new variety produces 4.6 metric tons per acre, higher than the national average yield of other rice varieties.

Seawater rice is is expected to help ensure the country’s food security under rising sea levels, increasing grain demand, and supply chain disruptions.

Read the story at Bloomberg

More on salt-tolerant rice:

A new wave of rice farming
In rice production, freshwater is the single most important component. Growing irrigated rice in most Asian rice farms requires large amounts of water. The total average water use in irrigated lowland rice fields ranges from 675 mm to 4450 mm, depending on the soil type, rice culture, and water management practices. In more specific terms, in India and the Philippines, farmers use an average of about 3,000 liters of water to produce 1 kilogram of rice.[5]

For Luke Young, a plant geneticist, and Rory Hornby, a biologist, the solution to the world’s food security is an audacious concept: growing rice in saltwater. In 2019, the two scientists founded the Agrisea Company that aims to solve world hunger by designing and implementing a sustainable food system. Their solution is sea farming or ocean agriculture by utilizing the natural mechanism of plants such as mangroves and seagrasses to live in a saltwater environment.

Myanmar partners produce high-yielding salinity-tolerant rice varieties
Sixty farmers participated in evaluating new salinity-tolerant rice varieties in a farmer’s field in Meikhtilar District, Mandalay, in December 2015. Of the participants, 43 were males and 17 were females.

The participatory selection of varieties aimed to identify new high-yielding varieties that could adapt to the conditions in Mandalay, and to determine the role gender plays in choosing varieties. The activity was also conducted for the farmers themselves to select the best varieties, and become aware of the sustainable adoption of improved varieties in stress-prone environments.

Wild parent spawns super salt-tolerant rice
Farmers are set to reclaim salt-ravaged land thanks to a single rice plant born of two unlikely parents that is spawning a new generation of rice that has double the salinity tolerance of other rice. Unlike regular rice, the new rice line can expel salt it takes from the soil into the air through salt glands it has on its leaves.

The new rice was bred by successfully crossing (or mating) two different rice parents – the exotic wild rice species Oryza coarctata and rice variety IR56 of the cultivated rice species O. sativa. What is extra special about this breakthrough is that O. coarctata is extremely difficult to cross with cultivated rice varieties. The location of O. coarctata in the rice genome sequence is at the other end of the spectrum from that of rice varieties such as IR56.