Agricultural advances in the past 3 decades have made remarkable progress in providing affordable cereals to most of the poor in the developing world. As a result — and despite the continuing plight of 800 million desperately poor — we hear less these days about famine and severe calorie and protein deficiency in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, the two most vulnerable...

(Photo: IRRI) A simmering controversy boiled over a couple years ago when newspaper articles accused American plant breeders of seeking to undercut Thailand’s...

The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) believes that meeting three fundamental needs of developing nations — ensuring food security,...

Almost everyone acknowledges that the Green Revolution has substantially increased the yield and supply of cereals in the developing world during the past...

(Photo: IRRI) The most recent World Food Summit, in 1996, set the target of halving by 2015 the number of people who go to bed hungry. Such rapid progress...

(Photo: IRRI) A defining moment in the history of biology was the elucidation of the laws of genetics by Gregor Mendel, whose work was rediscovered and...

An irrigated rice field in Laos. (Photo: IRRI) The most intensively cropped experimental site in Asia began four decades ago largely as a demonstration...

A vendor scooping rice in the marketplace in the Philippines. (Photo: IRRI) Approximately 70% of the world’s 1.3 billion poor people live in Asia, where...

(Photo: IRRI) In the years following World War II, there was growing concern about the food problem in Asia. The population was growing at close to 3%...

(Photo: IRRI) The first Green Revolution substantially increased rice production in the Philippines, using a package of new seeds, fertilizer and irrigation....