Tag Archives: research
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 costs, as well as reduce the crop maturity period, thereby...
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...
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...
