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ROCKETING PRICES: Poor Pakistans reaching out for the free rice at a distribution centre in Karachi.
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MANILA - IN A patchwork of rice fields near an expressway on the outskirts of Manila's southern suburbs, billboards advertise a swish property development planned for the area.
It is an apt image of how urbanisation and industrialisation across Asia have cut deeply into farmland: Factories, housing estates - even golf courses - now sprawl across land that once grew rice, the region's staple food.
But the developers' bulldozers are just one of a confluence of factors that have caused global rice production to fall behind consumption over the past several years.
With global buffer stocks running down, and only 7 per cent of the world's rice output traded on the international market, fears of a shortage have driven prices through the roof and triggered food riots in some countries.
That should be a salutary lesson to governments for neglecting their agriculture economies in the rush to industrialise, say rice experts.
'Countries realise they really took their eye off the ball and are desperately trying to turn things around,' said Dr Robert Ziegler, director-general of the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI), which helped spur the 'green revolution' of the 1960s.
So what would it take to put global rice output back in kilter with consumption?
Asia's farmers produced around 90 per cent of the world's rice production of 645 million tonnes last year. China and India accounted for more than half of the total crop.
The IRRI reckons that by 2015, global output must rise to 700 million tonnes to keep up with expected consumption and population growth.
So much rice land has been lost to urbanisation that in most Asian countries, expanding the land for cultivation is no longer an option. In Bangladesh, for example, around 90,000ha a year of farmland are lost to developers.
The IRRI is proposing to the governments of rice-producing countries and multilateral agencies a nine-point plan (see box) to create a second green revolution and restore rice self-sufficiency in Asia.
Massive investments will be needed, particularly infrastructure such as roads and irrigation schemes.
The International Food Policy Research Institute estimates that to revitalise overall agriculture in the region, an additional US$15 billion (S$21 billion) to US$20 billion a year must be invested.
The good news is that the fundamentals underpinning rice production in Thailand and Vietnam - Asia's biggest rice exporters - look sound.
The United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) noted with approval that Thailand's rice lands are expanding, and yields have been rising at a rate of 2 per cent a year since 1988.
'I see no reason why Thailand should not continue to be a major rice exporter for at least the next five to 10 years,' said Mr Sumiter Singh Broca of the FAO's Asia-Pacific office.
Unlike many of Asia's rice-producing countries, Vietnam has not suffered heavy padi losses from urbanisation or younger members of farming families moving to the cities on a level that could affect production. That is a major problem in rural China.
'Our last harvest was a very good one. The productivity was quite high per hectare. So there will be no rice shortages in Vietnam in the foreseeable future,' said Mr Huynh Cong Thanh, deputy chief executive of the Food Company of Ho Chi Minh City, one of the country's largest dealers.
There is plenty of scope to increase production in India, said the father of the country's 'green revolution', Dr Norman Borlaug.
'The only thing that has held back higher grain production is complacency. New techniques and technology are available to increase food production,' he told the Times of India.
To provide rice security for a population set to reach 1.5 billion by 2025, India's per hectare yields must rise by 50 per cent, and the area of irrigated fields increase 25 per cent from the present 18 million ha, according to government projections.
Improving the livelihoods of Asia's rice farmers will be essential to boosting production in the long term and stopping the drift to cultivating more lucrative cash crops.
In China, where rice production is not keeping pace with population growth, farm incomes - based on 2006 data - are falling.
Studies have shown that in a two-crop year, many small farmers in Asia earn little more than US$1,000 from a hectare of land.
Rice prices have soared - but so have fertiliser and fuel costs. The windfall of higher prices is mainly being reaped by millers and traders.
'The net economic benefit for farmers out of all this has been relatively small,' said IRRI research head Achim Dobermann.
As one Indian politician put it bluntly: 'Padi is poverty.'
amcindoe@yahoo.com
Additional reporting by Nirmal Ghosh in Bangkok, P. Jayaram in New Delhi, Roger Mitton in Vietnam, Chow Kum Hor in Kuala Lumpur and Vince Chong in Beijing.
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