Health Impact News – by konfrontasi.com
Excerpts:
After 15 years of testing and implementation across the planet, “Green Super Rice,” developed jointly by the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences and the International Rice Research Institute in the Philippines, is beginning to have a dramatic effect on crop yields.
The target is to have 20 million hectares under cultivation in another 10 years, according to Dr Jauhar Ali, a senior scientist and regional project coordinator at IRRI in Los Banos, south of Manila. It is in effect another green revolution with the potential to make an enormous contribution to feeding the world’s poor in Asia and Africa.
At some point next year, as much as 1 million hectares in Asia and Africa will be planted in the new strains, which have been produced by intricate crossbreeding and “back crossbreeding” to produce multiple strains that are more resistant to salinity from rising seas, more impervious to drought and disease and can achieve above-average yields without the use of fertilizers or pesticides, making them environmentally safe, according to Ali in a telephone interview.
The multiple strains are also specifically bred for taste and feel in the regions where they are consumed. Some strains, according to Dr Ali, are so hardy that they will grow under conditions that kill conventional rice crops outright. Some 25,000 hectares have been planted in Vietnam and another 5,700 hectares in the Philippines. Additional lines have been planted in India, Bangladesh, Indonesia and other countries, achieving yields far above conventional strains and impelling farmers to ask for more.
Those 5,700 hectares being planted in the Philippines are expected to produce 90,000 tonnes of rice.
“At that point, they realized they have gold on their hands,” Ali said. “We are at the fruit-bearing stage. The harvest is good.”
Ali cited the case of a test plot in the Bohol region of the Philippines in which the farmer planted a strain in salt water conditions only to be followed by rains that under normal circumstances would have drowned the seedlings. In turn the area dried out at the flowering stage and received no more water.
“The results were amazing,” Ali said. “Normally he would have received no crop at all. But the plot produced 3.3 tonnes per hectare.”
The ability to grow rice without pesticides or fertilizers, besides saving farmers money, is enormously important for the environment. Asia is becoming the dominant source of nitrogen pollution, producing as much as the rest of the world’s nations combined, particularly in the Yangtze and Pearl River deltas. Pesticide pollution is equally bad.
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“The results were amazing,” Ali said. “Normally he would have received no crop at all. But the plot produced 3.3 tonnes per hectare.”
What’s Monsanto going to do about it?
The Philippines has made some great strides in rice production. But one must remember that when it say’s with out fertilizer. Father in Law still farms with a water buffalo. The set aside growned has a pig staked out in it to root over the ground and remove all roots and weeds. They turn the soil over and the chickens follow the pig. Rice is very low nitrogen useing. But it is what little I have tasted here. Good rice. Salt water rice is low proteen normally. And anti flooding rice has been used for some years now here. It has increased yealds. So some is better in rice production. But the typhoons are still a problem in production.