Rice in crisis
International Herald Tribune April 17, 2008

The rice mill at Deniliquin in the Riverina is the largest rice mill in the Southern Hemisphere. It once processed enough grain to satisfy the daily needs of 20 million people. But six long years of drought have taken a toll, reducing Australia's rice crop by 98 percent and leading to the mothballing of the mill last December. In fact, the last time any organic or biodynamic rice was planted in Australia was 2005; we've been eating away at the stockpile ever since. But like all stockpiles that aren't regularly topped up they eventually run low, which is why supplies of organic brown rice are sporadic at the moment.

The collapse of Australia's rice production is one of several factors contributing to a doubling of rice prices in the last three months — increases that have led the world's largest exporters to ban or restrict exports severely, spurred panicked hoarding in Hong Kong and the Philippines, and set off angry protests in countries including Cameroon, Egypt, Ethiopia, Haiti, Indonesia, Italy, Ivory Coast, Mauritania, the Philippines, Thailand, Uzbekistan and Yemen.

The drought is one factor contributing to skyrocketing prices, and many scientists believe it’s among the earliest signs that a warming planet is starting to affect food production. While a link between short-term changes in weather and long-term climate change is not certain, the unusually severe drought is consistent with what climatologists predict will be a growing problem.

And indeed, some farmers are abandoning rice, which requires large amounts of water, to plant less water-intensive crops like wheat or, especially in southeastern Australia, wine grapes. Other rice farmers have sold their fields or their water rights, usually to grape growers.

Scientists and economists worry that the reallocation of scarce water resources — away from rice and other grains toward more lucrative crops and livestock — threatens poor countries that import rice as a staple. The crisis also threatens to pit the developed against the developing over the need for cleaner transport fuels versus the need for affordable food. Many poorer nations worry that subsidies from rich countries to support biofuels, which turn foods such as corn into fuel, are pushing up the price of staples.

With rice, which is not used to make biofuel, the problem is availability. Even in normal times, little of the (go to page 2) world's rice is exported — more than 90 percent is consumed in the countries where it's grown. In the last quarter-century, rice consumption has outpaced production, with global reserves plunging by half since 2000. Current economic uncertainty has led producers to hoard rice, with speculators and investors seeing it as a lucrative, or at least safe, investment. All of this has made countries that buy rice on the global market vulnerable to extreme price swings.

For Australian rice farmers, conventional and organic alike, the effects of the current drought are already significant. Those who do not give up and sell their land or water rights are experimenting with varieties or techniques that require less water. Australia now has some of the world's highest rice yields for a given quantity of water.

Be that as it may, our total rice capacity has declined by about a third because many farmers have permanently sold their water rights. As well, production last year was far lower because of a severe shortage of water; rice farmers received just one-eighth of the water they are usually promised by the government.

SEEKING HARDIER RICE
Researchers are looking for solutions to the shortage — for example, rice that blooms earlier in the day, when it is cooler, to counter global warming. Rice plants that bloom on hot days are less likely to produce grains of rice, a difficulty that’s already starting to emerge in inland areas of China and other Asian countries as temperatures begin to climb.

"There will be problems very soon unless we have new varieties of rice in place," says Reiner Wassmann, climate change coordinator at the International Rice Research Institute in the Philippines, a leader in developing higher-yielding strains of rice for nearly half a century.

The recent reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change carried an important caveat that could make the news even worse: the panel said that existing models for the effects of climate change on agriculture did not yet include newer findings that global warming could reduce rainfall and make it more variable.

Many agronomists contend that changes in the timing and amount of rain are more important for crops than temperature changes. The panel's chair, Rajendra Pachauri, says long-range climate forecasts for precipitation would require another five to 20 years of research, depending on the region.

In addition to drought, climate change could also produce more extreme weather, more outbreaks of pests and weeds, and changes in sea level as polar ice melts. Most of the world's increase in rice production over the last quarter-century has occurred close to sea level, in the deltas of rivers like the Mekong in Vietnam, Chao Phraya in Thailand and Ganges-Brahmaputra in Bangladesh.

Yet the effects of climate change are not uniformly bad for rice. Rising levels of carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas, can help rice plants and other crops — although the effect dwindles or disappears if the plants face excessive heat, inadequate water, severe pollution or other stresses. And that's one of the big unknowns.

Still, the flexibility of farmers has persuaded some climate experts that, particularly in developed countries, the effects of climate change may be mitigated, if not completely avoided. "I'm not as pessimistic as most people," says Will Steffen, the director of the Fenner School of Environment and Society at the Australian National University in Canberra. "Farmers are learning how to do things differently."

Meanwhile, changes such as using water to grow wine grapes instead of rice carry their own costs, as the developing world is discovering. "Rice is a staple food," notes Graeme Haley, Deniliquin's general manager. "Chardonnay is not."

So, for now supplies of brown rice will be very limited or non-existent. Alfalfa House will keep trying to source supplies wherever we can but, in the meantime, you might want to try alternatives such as quinoa and amaranth instead.

FURTHER READING ABC TV1 Landline report Rice shortage critical May 4, 2008