(Photo: Ariel Javellana) At least 840 million people worldwide do not have enough food to meet their daily energy needs. In addition, more than three...

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...

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...

(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...

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...