The country hasn’t approved the crop for cultivation, but if it does, the grain could be the first genetically modified rice grown in the world, the release said. The Philippines is also the first country to approve Golden Rice where it will also be distributed.

Golden Rice is rice genetically engineered to produce beta carotene, which the body can convert to vitamin A. Beta carotene also gives the grain its yellow colour.

The International Rice Research Institute developed the rice as a tool to fight vitamin A deficiency, particularly in south and southeast Asia where two-thirds or more of daily caloric intake can come from rice.

According to the World Health Organization, vitamin A deficiency is the leading cause of preventable blindness in children and increases risk of disease and death from severe infections.

However, no regulatory authority has assessed Golden Rice’s ability to address vitamin A deficiency, CBAN said.

“This is a safety approval for a product that is not yet demonstrated to work as promised,” said CBAN researcher Taarini Chopra. “This approval sounds like a step forward for Golden Rice but it doesn’t make the product any more effective.”

CBAN released a report in November that found Golden Rice has low and variable levels of beta carotene, the beta carotene degrades significantly during storage and cooking, and has not been adequately tested for bioavailability.

“Up to now, proponents have failed to address concerns on the Golden Rice’s negligible beta carotene content, its fast degradation and the possible toxicity associated with the beta carotene degradation,” said Cris Panerio, national co-ordinator of MASIPAG, a farmers’ network in the Philippines which is part of a pan-Asian network called the Stop Golden Rice! Network.

Golden Rice has received three positive food safety evaluations, the IRRI website says, including from Health Canada in 2018.

“No potential public health and safety concerns were identified in the assessment of GR2E Golden Rice,” IRRI said.

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His 7,000-acre farm near the Australian town of Cootamundra is testament to the plight facing farmers around the globe: increasingly wilder weather is making food production more unpredictable. It’s the new normal they must prepare for.

Bragg’s farm in New South Wales state has been in the family for generations and has weather records for the area stretching back 110 years. After seven years of costly drought, the weather switched last year to unseasonably wet with flooding rains.

“It’s screaming to me that things are getting hotter and drier at different times of the year,” said the 40-year-old Bragg during a recent visit to his property, about two hours’ drive to the west of Canberra, the Australian capital.

“Our summers are getting wetter and if this trend continues, then we will have to find different means of farming,” he said.

RETHINK

Across the globe, rising temperatures and more intense droughts, floods and storms are forcing a rethink in how to grow food, from breeding hardier crop varieties and changing planting times to complete genetic overhauls of plants.

Growing populations, changing diets and insatiable demand for grains, meat and vegetables is putting pressure on global food production and prices like never before.

Soaring food prices, civil unrest and worries about weather have spurred a global race to create more productive crops that can thrive in a warmer – and more prosperous – world.

The World Bank estimates 925 million people are hungry in the world today. The figure has been rising since 1995-97 due to rising food prices, a succession of economic crises, and a neglect of agricultural innovation, especially relevant to the poor.

It is going to get much worse for the hungry because global food prices will more than double within 20 years, aid agency Oxfam International said in a June 1 report. Flatlining yields, a scramble for fertile land and water, and environmental crises are reversing decades of progress against hunger, it said.

The challenge is to speed up the creation of new crops more adaptable to climate change and capable of much greater yields. A laboratory in the leafy heart of Canberra could hold some of the answers.

Inside, hundreds of seedlings on a conveyor belt file through a high-tech chamber, each plant bar-coded and scanned for signs of genetic superiority. A selection process that took months in the past, now takes a fraction of the time.

DIGITAL AGRICULTURE

“I call this digital agriculture,” said plant scientist Bob Furbank of Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO). The three-metre high PlantScan chamber uses 3D laser radar and other devices to measure size, growth and water use.

“It’s like the plant Olympics. We have to rapidly pick the best of the best,” Furbank, scientific director of CSIRO’s Plant Phenomics centre in Canberra, said on a recent visit to the laboratory brimming with high-tech equipment after a multimillion-dollar refit.

The centre is part of renewed global efforts to create a new generation of crops that will dramatically boost yields, particularly for wheat and rice.

Investment into creating a new generation of staple crops, especially wheat and rice, has lagged since the Green Revolution of the 1960s, which led to years of bumper harvests, easing worries about lack of food.

The new green revolutionaries must find ways of doubling yields as the global population, set to hit seven billion later this year, heads for nine billion by 2050, with greater affluence changing diets and triggering ever-greater demand.

HEAT IS ON

To feed two billion more mouths by 2050, food production will have to increase by 70 per cent, the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) says.

Climate change is perhaps the greatest threat to meeting the target as rising temperatures and droughts dry out farmlands or more intense floods and storms inundate them.

“What we expect in the future is there will be much more unexpected events, much more extreme climate change,” said Concepcion Calpe, a senior economist with the FAO in Rome.

Boosting yields has become almost an obsession with governments, seed companies such as Syngenta and Monsanto, and scientific bodies such as Australia’s CSIRO.

Global yield growth of wheat and rice has stagnated at 0.6 per cent to 0.7 per cent annually over the past 10 years – about half the production growth rate of 1.2 to 1.4 per cent annually needed from now to 2050, the FAO says.

Scientists say they are running out of time to boost yields.

With greenhouse gas emissions rising quickly, the world is already on track to exceed a 2 C threshold that scientists say risks triggering dangerous climate change. The planet has already warmed about 0.8 C on average since 1900.

Unless emissions growth is slammed into hard reverse, the world could be 2 to 3 warmer on average by 2050, and much more by 2100.

Computer climate models show large areas of Australia, Africa, the United States, eastern Brazil and southern Europe drying out in the coming decades. But Russia, Canada and Indochina would become wetter, potentially benefiting crop production or allowing new crops to be grown in previously cooler climes.

Overall, for many major cereal crop-growing regions, the future will hinge on drought and heat-tolerant varieties, better weather forecasts and a likely shift in cropping to new areas.

A U.S. study published last month in the journal Sciencefound climate change was already exerting a considerable drag on the yield growth of crops.

The authors used crop yield models with and without changes in temperature and rainfall to show global falls in wheat output of 5.5 per cent and 3.8 per cent for corn as a result of climate change from 1980-2008.

That was equivalent to the entire annual corn crop of Mexico, or the wheat crop of France, the European Union’s biggest producer, it said.

SEEDS OF CHANGE

The global forecast is for increasingly bad weather, amid spiralling demand from an expanding global middle class.

“Two and one-half billion people entering the world’s middle class is a lot more important than climate change,” said Jeffrey Currie, global head of commodities for Goldman Sachs in London.

The World Bank’s food price index, which measures global prices, jumped 36 per cent in April from a year ago to near its 2008 peak, before dropping again.

“While it might not be the primary cause, it definitely is an underlying cause for some of the instability you’re seeing in North Africa and the Middle East right now,” said Rick Leach, chief executive of the World Food Program USA. “The very poor can spend up to 80 per cent of their income on food,” he said, adding: “We’re now moving into a period of extreme worry in terms of the implications of food price increases.”

More than 680 million people in Asia and the Pacific region live on less than US$1.25 a day, the International Fund for Agricultural Development, a UN agency, says.

More than 70 per cent of these are in South Asia – Bangladesh, India, Nepal and Pakistan – making the region among the most vulnerable to food price inflation and climate change.

The World Bank in February said rising food prices had pushed an estimated 44 million more people into extreme poverty over the course of eight months, triggering unrest.

That is putting ever-mounting pressure on governments, agronomists and the farm industry to come up with ways of growing more food on less land and under harsher conditions.

“Everything we do in terms of developing our technology, bringing that to growers worldwide, is really about addressing the need to grow more from less,” said Davor Pisk, chief operating officer for Syngenta, the world’s largest agrochemicals firm.

The Swiss firm’s seeds business has flourished, growing to $2.8 billion in 2010, out of total sales of $11.6 billion, in large part for demand for geneti- cally modified (GM) seeds to meet soaring demand in the United States for corn ethanol and for soyoil and soymeal in China.

INVESTMENT

Corn and soy, major elements of animal feed and biofuels, have attracted significant investment for new GM food varieties that have substantially boosted yields. Corn and soybean are also much simpler genetically than wheat and rice.

Syngenta has developed corn and soy varieties that repel pests, fungi and are tolerant to a range of chemicals that kill weeds – all threats expected to get worse during climate change. It has also just released a hybrid called Agrisure Artesian that has resistance to drought.

“What we’re confident of being able to demonstrate is that we can achieve a 15 per cent decline in percentage of losses due to drought. So if you like, we get 15 per cent yield preservation,” Pisk said. The next generation of varieties would aim for 25 per cent.

GM is just one part of a suite of technologies growers need to meet demand and fight the impact of climate change, he said.

The problem is knowing just what sort of future lies ahead for farmers and exactly what varieties were needed for different growing areas.

Computer climate models have become quite good at showing how temperatures will change across the globe, but are less precise on how rainfall and storm patterns will change, particularly at local levels.

SEARCH FOR BETTER YIELDS

If you can’t predict the weather then you can try to beat it – with new genetic strains of grain plants that will boost yields.

But crop yields would have to rise a lot faster than they have been. Scientists say yields will have to increase by around 1.5 per cent a year to match the growth in the world’s population of around one per cent a year. That may sound small, but the current pace of yield growth is well below that.

Overall, rice yields have more than doubled over the past half-century from 1.85 tonnes per hectare in 1960 to 4.29 tonnes in 2011-12, USDA data shows.

But the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) in the Philippines says rice yields will have to rise another 11 per cent to about 4.8 tonnes per ha by 2018-19 just to keep rice prices steady.

By comparison, corn yields have risen from 1.95 tonnes per ha in 1960 to 5.22 tonnes in 2011-12, propelled by soaring demand for animal feed and ethanol. Wheat yields have gained more modestly to three tonnes in 2011-12 from 1.15 tonnes in 1960.

The production of rice, the staple for more than half the world’s population, has kept pace so far with consumption, thanks to advances made in the Green Revolution. But yields will have to keep rising and stocks kept at healthy levels to avoid the kind of panic purchases by governments and export restrictions that helped drive the food price crisis of 2008.

The danger is that climate change could cause yields to drop, in some cases dramatically so, according to a study by the International Food Policy Research Institute.

MODELS FOR CHANGE

Its modelling of the impact of climate change on cereal crops showed yields in 2050 are likely to be lower than they were in 2000, with the most vulnerable being wheat.

But developing a new variety of higher-yielding wheat takes a minimum of seven to 10 years, mostly because it has highly complex genetics. It’s one reason why wheat, and to a similar extent rice, have fallen behind in yield growth and investment.

“In breeding new varieties for use in 20 years’ time, we need to have the necessary genes now. And I think that’s going to be tricky,” said Greg Rebetzke, a wheat breeder for CSIRO in Canberra.

One trick is to boost the early growth of wheat plants. The dwarfing genes that triggered the Green Revolution cut the height of wheat plants and allowed the plant to focus on filling the grain head.

But the shoot that emerges from the seed is too short, limiting planting depth and access to water deeper in the soil. Rebetzke said CSIRO has found “alternative dwarfing genes” with no negative effects on early growth, which are “a major thrust in our breeding effort.”

FUTURE RICE PLANT

To the north of London, the world’s oldest agricultural research station is working on ways to boost British wheat potential yields to 20 or even 25 tonnes in the long term, far above the eight tonnes produced there now.

The 1.6-ha Broadbalk field on Rothamsted farm dates back to 1843 when its founder, John Bennet Lawes, decided to test the power of artificial fertilizers. He had built the world’s first fertilizer factory a year earlier.

Walking in the same field where those trials started, project team leader Martin Parry explained how his team at Rothamsted and in the United States was looking at ways to supercharge photosynthesis in wheat by doubling the amount of CO2 inside the plant.

Parry, like many agronomists, believes a new global effort akin to what happened in the 1970s is needed to feed the world, beyond the promise of technology.

“We’re going to have to do it much more effectively. We’re going to have to use our resources like fertilizer much more efficiently and we’ll have to do it with less land,” he said.

Developing countries will be a big focus in those efforts.

According to the USDA, yields for major crops, including corn, wheat, soybean and rice, are more than 40 per cent lower in developing nations than rich nations, highlighting the paradox that production is lowest where demand is greatest.

BREAKTHROUGH

The biggest breakthrough on the yields front could come in creating a new type of rice plant, the staple for many countries in the developing world.

“We expect the weather conditions and temperature to be more severe in the coming years,” said IRRI director general Robert Zeigler during a recent open day at the institute, near Manila.

“That’s why we need to develop more rice varieties that can tolerate flooding, drought, higher temperature, and can also tolerate salt water,” he said as farmers chatted with scientists at the institute to learn about new varieties.

IRRI has already released commercial varieties that are drought and flood tolerant, limiting losses during bad weather.

Saltwater tolerance will also be crucial as seas rise and more powerful storms push seawater farther into fertile river deltas, such as the Mekong Delta in Vietnam and large areas of coastal Bangladesh. Faster-growing varieties can also help farmers get in a crop before the typhoon season starts.

IRRI, the CSIRO, as well as researchers in Britain and elsewhere are working on creating supercharged rice to try to double yields, by boosting the rate of photosynthesis.

The project, funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, could take 20 years, said CSIRO’s Furbank, but will also lead to new ways to ramp up wheat yields as well.

Crucial as well to bridging the yield gap is better agronomy, or farm management practices.

Syngenta has developed a way to boost rice yields in India by an average of 30 per cent as well as cutting labour. Its Tegra system uses seeds coated with an insecticide, mechanical planting of seedlings and training for farmers.

That can make a huge difference in a country of 1.2 billion people where two-thirds of the population are employed by the farm sector and where a failed monsoon can send shock waves through international markets.

“It should be an agronomy revolution,” Calpe, the FAO economist said. “This has been missing tremendously in a lot of countries.”

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“We expect global demand in rice to be strong for the foreseeable future as the population grows,” said Robert Zeigler, director general at the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI).

Meanwhile, weather conditions are expected to be more severe in the coming years, with more frequent droughts and flooding that would stall rice production.

IRRI has developed new rice varieties that can help farmers boost production even in extreme weather conditions, Zeigler said.

“We have developed flood-tolerant varieties that have already been released in the Philippines and Bangladesh, and farmers are very happy with the yield and the quality,” he said, adding that IRRI remained confident of developing more climate change-ready varieties.

The Philippines has set a target of attaining rice self-sufficiency by 2013, and it plans to do so by using climate change-ready rice varieties.

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The government’s pledge of security of food supplies touched a key agenda topic at two conferences that opened in Hanoi recently, bringing together more than 1,300 scientists, policy-makers and traders from nearly 70 countries.

With more than half of the world’s six billion people eating rice as a staple food, changes in availability and prices often affect the poorest and most vulnerable people, said Robert Zeigler, director general of the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI).

“Projected demand for rice will outstrip supply in the near to medium term unless something is done to reverse current trends of slow productivity growth and inefficient, often unsustainable management of natural resources,” Zeigler said in his opening remarks at one conference.

The past three years have witnessed some of the most volatile commodities prices ever, including for rice. In April 2008 Thai rice jumped to a record $1,080 a tonne, sparking food riots in some parts of the world.

Since then Thai rice prices more than halved to $480 a tonne in late October. Rice in Vietnam dropped to $350 in April and $475-$485 now from the record of $1,000 in May 2008.

Rice prices will not rise much above the level of $600 a tonne next year, predicted Eric Wailes, professor in agricultural economics of Arkansas university.

Vietnam has transformed itself from a rice importer in the 1980s into the world’s second-largest exporter of the grain after Thailand.

However, it now has to deal with the severe effects of “rapid population growth, decreasing farm area and water resources, more frequent natural disasters, floods, droughts, and diseases,” Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung said.

“The Vietnamese government has identified that ensuring long-term national food security under any circumstance is essential for the country’s socio-economic development,” Dung told delegates at a conference organized by the Manila-based IRRI and Vietnam’s Agriculture Ministry.

The two were running parallel conferences, one on rice research and another on rice policy and investment, with a shared opening ceremony.

He said Vietnam aimed to keep the area for rice production stable, increase investment in irrigation, mechandise production and processing, and use scientific and technological advances to improve rice varieties.

YIELD ABOVE WORLD’S LEVEL

Vietnam’s rice yield has reached 5.3 tonnes per hectare per crop, well above the world average of 4.2 tonnes, and its rice exports of around six million tonnes a year account for a fifth of the world’s total trade in the grain.

The country is forecast to export nearly six million tonnes of rice next year, Wailes forecast, down from a record shipment of 6.5 million expected this year.

But Agriculture Minister Cao Duc Phat said Vietnam still needed to do more as countries seek to increase global food production by 70 per cent and to double food production in developing countries by 2050 to feed fast-growing populations.

“We need new varieties with higher yields, good quality, and short maturity duration, as well as advanced production processes that are input efficient and cost effective,” Phat said.

In the Mekong Delta food basket, scientists have been developing new rice varieties to resist salination, which is forecast to strike fields in southern coastal provinces severely in the next few months.

Salination caused by the encroaching of sea water on rice fields due to high tides or low water levels during the flooding season in the Mekong Delta can stunt the growth of rice plants and even destroy the crop.

The new strains are expected to be in mass production from 2012, director Le Van Banh of the Cuulong Rice Research Institute told Reuters.

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