Around the world in eight commodities, episode three: Rice

Around the World in Eight Commodities delves into some of the planet’s most critical commodities, exploring the complex challenges they face and the innovative solutions being implemented around the globe.

In this episode, we’re taking a look at rice, a food staple for more than 3.5 billion people around the world.

Featuring:

• Sarida Khananusit, project director, Agriculture and Food team, GIZ, Thailand
• Seno Apriyanto Cahyadi, commodity advisor, United Nations Development Programme (UNDP)
• Takayuki Hagiwara, Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), India

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“Rice is one of the oldest grains in the world, and it continues to be the staple food for over half of the world’s population today.”

– Sarida Khananusit

Transcript

Eden Flaherty

Welcome to around the world in eight commodities, a podcast series by the Global Landscapes Forum in collaboration with the food systems land use and restoration Impact Program. This series delves into eight of the world’s most critical commodities, exploring the complex challenges they face and the innovative solutions being implemented around the globe. In this episode, we’re looking at Rice, a food staple for more than three and a half billion people around the world.

Sarida Khananusit
Rice is one of the oldest grains in the world, and it’s grown and eaten since several thousands of years ago, really, and it continues to be the staple food for over half of the world’s population today.

Eden Flaherty
Sarida Khanausit, part of the Agriculture and Food Team with GIZ in Thailand.

Sarida Khananusit
It’s grown on nearly every continent, every continent, except for Antarctica, I believe. And in the last few years, the world rice production was estimated to be over 500 million tons annually. So over 90% of that production is grown in Asia, in countries such as China, India and nations in Southeast Asia counted among the top producers globally.

Takayuki Hagiwara
India contributes 135 million metric tons. It is about a quarter of the total global production.

Eden Flaherty
Takayuki Hagiwara, aka Taka, is the FAO representative in India.

Takayuki Hagiwara
The first one is a China, but China also has the 1.2 billion people. And then India has 1.4 you know, those two countries really consume a lot of rice. And then India also exports rice, basmati rice.

Seno Apriyanto Cahyadi
On the global scale, there has been an artist in crystal consumption,

Eden Flaherty
Seno Apiyanto Cahyadi, commodity advisor at the United Nations Development Program in Indonesia

Seno Apriyanto Cahyadi
in 2019 until 2023 and also 2024 the increase for rice consumption is high and also increasing 20% each year.

Eden Flaherty
But such significant consumption and growth bring a variety of challenges to the rice value chain.

Sarida Khananusit
Some of the biggest current challenges in rice production really revolves around climate change. Rice cultivation is both a contributor to generating the greenhouse gasses that are driving climate change, and rice is also at risk from a changing climate itself.

So the first challenge I’d like to flag the emission footprint of rice at a global level is really comparable to that of the aviation or shipping industry. But this often isn’t discussed, but it’s beginning to be realized. Rice farming is a significant contributor to GHG emissions, mainly through methane, which is generated from the continuous flooding of paddy fields. This is part of the rice farming process, the conventional rice farming process, and the most conventional form of the practice, is called continuous flooding. That means you keep the field flooded basically for the entire growing season.

Now, when fields are flooded, the soils are not able to access oxygen, and flooded fields in combination with organic matter that might be underground, or, excuse me, not underground, but underwater. Let’s say so. This includes rice straw and other organic elements they go through a process that then generates methane emissions resulting. The more days you have fields flooded, the more methane gets generated during that time. And this results in an estimated 10% of global man made methane emissions coming from this rice cultivation process.

Eden Flaherty
And it’s not just the methane emissions from traditional flooding techniques that are causing concern. The water usage itself can lead to problems.

Takayuki Hagiwara
The major issue of rice is the water, you know, particularly Haryana and Punjab, where they produce a lot of rice, and then almost 100% of the non basmati rice being procured by the government. So rice requires a lot of water. And during the rainy season, even during the rainy season, you know, raining doesn’t is not constant.

And then often the case that the irrigation system do not cover the entire plane. So often the farmers takes the water out of the underground. There is the projection, and many people say that by 2025 the groundwater will be finished. If the groundwater finishes. Is then India will face a serious problems in producing rice.

So that’s why we are trying to promote the water efficiency and then diversification of the crops, not just rice, but the with other crops. If we want to diversify the crops from rice to maize, for example. But a maize doesn’t like the water, and the water log is the main major issue. And then, you know, the rice paddy requires a little bit in the lower land so that the water comes in, and then water have to stay in the paddy. But if we have that sort of the situation, the maize doesn’t grow. So then the diversification is that a major challenge as well.

Eden Flaherty
What’s more, the water that is left available can become contaminated by input intensive methods of rice cultivation.

Takayuki Hagiwara
During the rice you put the chemical, you put the fertilizer, and there is so much rain, then runoff starts because of the, you know, consecutive the production of rice and the wheat, and then during the spring season, they also cultivate maize or the green gram, and then go back to the rice and the wheat and then other crop, and then go back to rice.

So there is no time for land or soil to rest, and incorporation of the green manure or the organic matter into the soil is limited because of the consecutive cultivation. So that worries us. As I said, water amount is going down, but at the same time, because of the heavy application of the fertilizer and the chemical, the water has been also contaminated and with the chemical.

Eden Flaherty
And there are similar concerns in Indonesia with the added risk of salination.

Seno Apriyanto Cahyadi
In the water, best practice, because most of the farmer depends to the subsidized fertilizer, and they lack of knowledge in terms of the best practice. They don’t know how to use the right number of the nutrient, the right process and the right time to apply the nutrient that can be influenced the productivity and also the quality of the rice production and also the other issue that related to the land competition, because the land that remains for the agriculture is very often for the activity.

So some of issue related to the certainty tradition, intensive farming practice, deforestry and etc, can be influenced the performance and productivity of the rice and related to the environmental impact that improves of the agriculture chemical and just a lot of agriculture chemical that can be reducing the fertility and the productivity of the rice and also the soil. The las one is related to the salination. So when we don’t have the right irrigation practices and etc, the soil accumulation of the salt is higher and making less suitable for the crop to grow in the following years.

Eden Flaherty
And beyond being problems in their own right, the effects of climate change, soil degradation, water shortages and input pollution are also likely to undermine the income of farmers, who are already often some of the poorest workers in rice-cultivating countries.

Takayuki Hagiwara
They can get about $500 of rice per acre. And then many of the farmer would have the small scale farmers would have the, you know, two acres, maximum three to four. So the amount of that that they can get from their agriculture is very, very minimal. So agriculture is not the good business for the farmers. And whenever I talk to the farmers, very rare to find that the farmers say that they would like their sons or their daughters to inherit in agriculture.

Sarida Khananusit
Rice farmers are among the poorest occupational groups in Thailand and in many other rice producing countries that are small holder centric. They have limited ability to adapt to shocks, including having high vulnerability to changing climate and because rice yields are so heavily dependent on weather conditions, we’ve seen yields decline significantly in drought years and temperature increases are projected to further reduce yields, by some estimates, such as by the International Rice Research Institute, the projection is that a two degree Celsius increase can lead to rice yield falls by 17% to 20% without any changes in practices.

So this is quite significant changes in temperature, rainfall, and the frequency or intensity of. Extreme weather events of various sorts directly affects farmers yields as well as their household food security, the investments they’re putting in to farming, the income they earn, their well being and with trickling effects to global food supply chains as well. So these are among the top challenges that we’re facing in rice production today.

Eden Flaherty

But those challenges are being addressed through changing practices, technology and many other approaches.

Sarida Khananusit

There are many institutions working on the ground with rice small holders, GIZ being one of them. We are working with small rice holders in Thailand to achieve lower production costs, more efficient resource use, coupled with higher productivity and more income for farmers. So many of the measures that we’re promoting also aim to enhance biodiversity, reduce air pollution and contribute to reforesting nearby areas.

At the core of this work, we work closely with public extension services and private sector partners in the rice value chain, also to really first raise awareness of farmers on practice options that can have less impact on their surroundings, and then to build farmers capacity to make sound decisions with good information season over season.

So how we work is to engage with ready farmers and ready farmer groups to demonstrate different practices, different approaches that they can apply on real farms to have these positive impacts. And we support those demonstration farms to be learning centers for their community, and steadily scale these practices, these peer-proven practices, to surrounding farmer groups. We’re always actively looking for how the system as a whole can be changed so that rice farming households can have stronger livelihoods in the end.

And for example, by adjusting how we manage water use in paddy fields, we can reduce methane emissions, we can reduce draw on scarce freshwater resources, and we can provide farmers with more options to be resilient given climate uncertainties. So going a little deeper, some innovations in this area, this area of water management include using laser land leveling techniques. So this is a high-precision leveling technology that works especially well in irrigated farming areas. It makes fields flatter, and thus a farmer can really control water levels well, control Water levels accurately, so there’s not too much water and not too little water in the field at all times, just enough for the rice plant, according to its needs and nutrients can be absorbed across the plot evenly as well.

So this land laser leveling technique combined with another technique called alternate wetting and drying, this means letting fields dry intermittently during the growing season to reduce the number of days that the field is flooded. This technique can result in vast water savings as well as emission reductions.

Eden Flaherty
And the same alternate wet and dry system is being promoted in India. Taka explains.

Takayuki Hagiwara
In order to talk about the challenges of climate change, we need to reduce the some some sort of the methane emission from the paddy. And one of the prominent methods is alternate wet and dry. If we promote the alternate wet and dry, we could reduce the methane emission by 30% according to the research done by a scientist in Japan. So by doing it, we can reduce the consumption, consumption of the water, as well as the reduce the methane emission from the paddy.

Sarida Khananusit
These techniques so both leveling of land and alternate wetting or drying or intermittent drying of paddy fields, they’re not entirely new. They’re quite tested and tried and waiting to be scaled. But in the tested settings, the results for yield have been quite good. So ensuring that a rice plant receives the optimum inputs that it needs also contributes to the health of the rice plant. So ensuring it receives water when it needs it, and draining only at the times where that water supply might not be essential for the rice plant actually promotes the strength of the rice plants roots and contributes to it ultimately yielding more come time for harvest.

Staying along the theme of water. Additionally, there’s also innovations in rain-fed areas, not just irrigated areas, which can also include building of on site reservoirs for water to harvest excess rain water during rainy seasons, for example, where the stored water could be used for either the rice crop in case of delayed rains, given again changing or unexpected weather patterns or the stored water. It can also be used for growing crops during the non rice season. And so non rice crops that can provide both the food source and income for these small holder farming households.

Eden Flaherty
And this diversification into non rice crops is also happening in India.

Takayuki Hagiwara
There are lots of the project ongoing by the World Bank and ADB and JICA to promoting the vegetable production. We can reduce this the risk of the water depletion by planting the different type of the vegetable and then introducing the drip irrigation or the, you know, greenhouse or the plastic houses, so that they can grow within the limited area, and their more effective in terms of the yield. But I don’t know how much the diversification would contribute to the issue of the rice production. We need to have the bigger context in India.

We need to maintain the food security. If we start saying that, okay, reduce the rice production, save the water, promote the more diversification, etc, etc, then we may undermine the food security of the India. But at the same time, if we continue to produce rice, then we will have the big shock because of the no water, no water available in 2025 or beyond. I don’t say that that I know the solution and you know, we can, if we do this and then we solve this, there is nothing like that. So everything is always trade off.

Eden Flaherty
This has been around the world in eight commodities produced by the Global Landscapes Forum in collaboration with the food systems land use and restoration Impact Program. Thank you to the speakers, Sarita kananus, it part of the Agriculture and Food Team with GIZ in Thailand. Takayuki hagawara, aka taka FAO, representative in India, sen aprianto chaide, commodity advisor at the United Nations Development Program in Indonesia.