BAAC expands insurance programme
Bangkok Post: The Bank for Agriculture and Agricultural Co-operatives (BAAC) plans to expand its crop insurance scheme to cover rice next year. BAAC president Teerapong Tungteerasunun said yesterday that the state-owned bank may provide an insurance programme for rice farmers to guard against natural disasters. A study on the feasibility of the plan will be conducted between July and September. The insurance would first cover key rice production areas such as Phetchaburi, Phitsanulok, Sukhothai and other central provinces.
Saturday, July 05, 2008
Govt to step up aid to Visayas rice farms hit by ‘Frank’
Inquirer.net: Bacolod City, Negros Occidental, Philippines - The government will step up its infusion of assistance to rice farms hit by Typhoon Frank to ensure that Western Visayas hits its 2.1 million metric tons production target of the staple this year, according to a regional agriculture official. Manuel Olanday, the regional rice program coordinator of the Department of Agriculture (DA) in Western Visayas, gave this assurance on Thursday at a briefing on the provincial rice sufficiency plan at the Provincial Capitol in Bacolod City attended by Governor Isidro Zayco and the mayors of Negros Occidental. Typhoon Frank hit 14,000 hectares of rice lands in Western Visayas causing the loss of 33,000 MT of the staple.
Saturday, July 05, 2008
Vietnamese agronomists do magic in Africa
VietNamNet Bridge: In just a year Vietnamese farmers managed to help Sierra Leone double annual rice crops to two and quadruple per-ha rice yield to four tonnes, an unbelievable success that international experts had for long dreamt at. The success has been made by a group of experienced farmers led by Prof. Dr. Vo Tong Xuan, who went to Sierra Leone from the second half of 2007 to provide farmers there with rice farming expertise under a project on “Exporting Mekong Delta farmers to Sierra Leone”. The biggest achievement gained in the project is to help local farmers overcome the shortage of machinery and a poor irrigation system as well as to reserve 3 tonnes of rice seeds for a large scaled farming in the upcoming crop. It is a dream that has never come true to international experts despite their huge investments.
Saturday, July 05, 2008
Irrawaddy Delta farmers’ woes continue
Relief Web: At least 70 percent of farmland in the Irrawaddy delta remains uncultivated, as an inadequate supply of suitable rice seeds and power tillers continues to beset efforts to plant before the beginning of the rainy season, according to local sources. Farmers are in a race against time, as they say it will be impossible to plant after the middle of July, when the summer monsoon begins and fields fill with water. The planting season traditionally ends before the full-moon day of the lunar-calendar month of Waso, which marks the beginning of the Buddhist lent. This year, the day falls on July 17. Two months after Cyclone Nargis, and with just two weeks to go before the end of the planting season, many farmers say they are still struggling with the loss of rice seeds and buffaloes.
Friday, July 04, 2008
Test new rice farming method, Agriculture dep’t urged
GMA News: Manila Philippines - A rice farming system developed in Madagascar backed by US experts but sharply criticized by the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) may yet provide the answer to the country’s long-term quest for rice sufficiency. Called the system for rice intensification (SRI), the method lays emphasis on plant quality rather than quantity and espouses early planting of seeds and end the flooding of fields. Under this system, water and seed costs are reduced substantially since it allows better root and leaf growth. The principal result of this type of cultivation is the doubling of harvests, with at least one million farmers from Madagascar, India and Laos reporting harvests as high as eight tons per hectare, nearly double the current Philippine average of 4.2 tons per hectare.
Friday, July 04, 2008
Mozambique to import Vietnam rice to curb shortages
Reuters: Maputo - Mozambique will import 1.2 million tonnes of rice from Vietnam over the next three years to curb food shortages, a top government official said on Thursday. Industry and Trade Minister Antonio Fernando told reporters Mozambique would import 400,000 tonnes of rice a year for the next three years, at a price to be negotiated between Mozambican importing companies and Vietnamese authorities. "Vietnam has pledged to continue exporting rice to Mozambique, and we managed to persuade them to grant 1.2 million tonnes for the next three years," Fernando said.
Thursday, July 03, 2008
Food for thought: What fuels hunger?
Commodity Online: Haiti has fallen. Food riots have occurred in 22 countries, including Egypt, Yemen, Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Cameroon, Bangladesh, Malaysia, Indonesia, Ivory Coast, Mauritania, Madagascar, Mozambique, Philippines and Senegal. In North Korea, where food shortages and famine have been endemic for years, the average adolescent is 18 cm shorter than his counter part in South Korea. According to International Rice Research Institute, Vietnam, Thailand and Bangladesh are loosing tens of thousands of hectares of prime land every year to urban and industrial sprawl. In Malaysia, the government has promoted export driven palm-oil plantations.
Thursday, July 03, 2008
The politics of rice
The Island (Sri Lanka): Experts worry that while influential countries are able to secure food supplies, low-income and less influential countries are left with no food to import. A week after Cyclone Nargis struck Burma in May, Ma Mya Ayes was queuing for food in Labutta. Ma Ayes and a small group of villagers waited for two days in their village for government relief and rescue teams to arrive but they never came. The group decided to walk for a day to the Labutta in the Ayeyarwady division to get help. But it was never easy to get a single grain of rice. Duncan Macintosh, IRRI’s development director, noted that much of Asia’s economic growth has been driven by the rice sector. Rice farming is a major source of employment and income for rural households and rice is a staple food for the region’s 2.6 billion population.
Wednesday, July 02, 2008
Editorial: A second Green Revolution
Manila Times: The need for a second Asian Green Revolution amid a growing world food and rice crisis became a dominant theme at the Asian-European Editors Forum recently in Bangkok, Thailand. The forum gathered journalists and rice experts from Asia and Europe in a discussion of policy issues on the world food crisis, its effects on Asia, along with the search for solutions to a global problem. Two experts, current and past, from the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) in Los Baños, spoke at the forum. Duncan Macintosh, development director and spokesperson, IRRI, led the discussions on the rice crisis as a way to another Green Revolution. Dr. Kwanchai Gomez, executive director, the Asia Rice Foundation in Los Baños, discussed an Asia minus rice (“it isn’t Asia anymore”). She worked with IRRI from 1967 to 1996.
Wednesday, July 02, 2008
Genomics Research Focuses on Rice Variety Improvement
University of Arkansas Daily: Fayetteville, Ark. – Crop varieties can be improved through the study of genomics without creating genetically transformed varieties. That is the mission of a multistate research project led by the University of Arkansas System’s Division of Agriculture. RiceCAP, or Rice Coordinated Agricultural Project, is funded by a $5 million grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Jim Correll, a Division of Agriculture professor of plant pathology, coordinates projects by 25 principal investigators in 12 states, the International Rice Research Institute in the Philippines and the International Center for Tropical Agriculture in Colombia.
Tuesday, July 01, 2008
Vietnam grows larger summer rice crop
HANOI (The Economic Times, India): Vietnamese farmers are expanding the southern planting area of the summer-autumn rice crop to catch up with high prices, with acreage up 4.4 per cent from last year at 1.81 million hectares, the government said on Tuesday. Prospects of a larger harvest this year prompted the government to lift a ban on rice exports last month and set a target to ship 4.5 million tonnes in the whole of 2008, similar to 2007. "The planting area under the summer-autumn rice crop in southern provinces this year is larger than last year's summer-autumn crop as food prices are at high levels, triggering farmers to expand the acreage," the General Statistics Office said in a report. It gave no output forecasts for the crop, the second-highest yielding in Vietnam after the winter-spring crop, which the report said has produced 18.03 million tonnes of paddy, up 5.9 per cent from last year's crop.
Tuesday, July 01, 2008
In food crisis, Asians look to agriculture
KARAWANG, Indonesia (USA Today) — In this Indonesian city, what used to be 100 acres of rice paddy is a maze of row houses and pastel-colored storefronts: a motorcycle garage, a printer, a medical clinic and a noodle shop. Until recently, this would have been just another green patch gone in a country where 100,000 acres of farmland vanish every year because of breakneck economic growth. That may be changing. The global food crisis means that countries across Asia are making agriculture a higher priority and taking steps to grow more crops within their own borders. "People suddenly care about agriculture" says Neil McCulloch, director for economics programs at the Asia Foundation office in the Indonesian capital, Jakarta. "It takes a crisis to make everyone wake up and realize agriculture has been neglected."
Tuesday, July 01, 2008
After 30 percent slide, Asia rice could find floor
BANGKOK (Reuters) - Asian rice prices have tumbled even faster than they surged to record highs earlier this year, but the nearly 30 percent slide will soon end as a Thai government price-support scheme is about to kick in. Even bumper crops in leading producers and renewed exports from Vietnam and Cambodia are unlikely to force benchmark Thai rice prices much below $700 a tonne, the price at which Bangkok has agreed to buy supplies from farmers. That's down from a record $1,080 in April, but still double its $383 in January. After six months of exceptional volatility, a return to the price stability that characterized the thinly traded rice market for most of the past three decades would be a relief to policy makers and governments fighting food inflation worldwide, and anxious about the security of supplies.
Tuesday, July 01, 2008
Sri Lanka Says Mannar `Rice Bowl' Seized From Rebels
Bloomberg -- Sri Lanka said the army cut a main supply route for the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam when soldiers captured Mannar's rice-producing area in the latest blow to rebels holding onto their last bases in the north. "Advancing security forces took control over the entire Mannar 'rice bowl' area" yesterday, the Defense Ministry said in a statement early today. Soldiers captured 120 square kilometers (46 square miles) that "mainly consists of the island's most fertile paddy fields." Soldiers seized 12 kilometers of the main A-32 road in Mannar district, one of the LTTE's main supply routes, the ministry cited Brigadier Udaya Nanayakkara, a spokesman, as saying. The LTTE hasn't commented on the fighting. The LTTE lost the eastern region to the army a year ago in its worst defeat in its 25-year fight for a separate Tamil homeland in Sri Lanka's north and east.
Monday, June 30, 2008
Fighting to survive on mountain of trash
Toronto Star: Manila - A spike in rice prices means increased hardship for millions of Filipinos living on less than $2 a day ... In the Philippines the impact of recent increases in the price of food has been profound: 35 million of its 88 million citizens are as poor as the people of Smokey Mountain, surviving on less than $2 per day. Six months ago, a kilogram of rice in Manila cost just 18 Filipino pesos (about 41 cents). Today, international rice shortages have driven that price to 34 pesos per kilo (76 cents) ... But it's not as though the world wasn't warned about the onset of the current food crisis and the impact it would have on these poorest of the poor. Robert Zeigler, executive director of the Philippines-based International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) warned the world as early as June 9, 2005, in a speech in Ottawa to the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA).
Monday, June 30, 2008
India to Receive Normal Rains in July, Boosting Crops
June 30 (Bloomberg) -- India's monsoon rains will be normal next month, boosting the prospects for rice, lentils and soybeans and easing food prices that have helped drive inflation to the highest in 13 years. Rains in July, which account for a third of the four-month monsoon showers, will be 98 percent of the average of 293 millimeters (11.5 inches), said M. Rajeevan, deputy director general of the India Meteorological Department, in a telephone interview from New Delhi. The forecast allows for an error margin of 9 percentage points. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's government is counting on increased food production to rein in an inflation rate that's doubled this year. A normal monsoon will also help the country's 234 million farmers benefit from record prices of commodities.
Monday, June 30, 2008
Supreme Court endorses ban on non-Basmati rice exports
New Delhi, June 30 (IANS) The Supreme Court Monday upheld the ban on export of non-Basmati rice imposed by the central government earlier this year due to the fears of an impending food crisis in the country. Endorsing the ban, a vacation bench of Justice Altmas Kabir and Justice G.S. Singhvi suspended an Andhra Pradesh High Court order, waiving the ban for some state-based rice exporting firms and permitting them to continue exports. It also ordered suspension of all proposed rice shipments abroad by various firms. The bench’s ruling came on a lawsuit by the central government. Additional Solicitor General P.P Malhotra, appearing for the government, pleaded that the country faces the danger of an impending food crisis and the ban was imposed to avert this crisis. The government had also sought the apex court direction to transfer to itself at least 38 lawsuits pending in various high courts seeking permission to waive the ban.
Monday, June 30, 2008
Analysis of global food crisis: Ill-conceived rush to ethanol
Toronto Star: If you were trying to develop a less effective means of kicking the gasoline habit and coping with climate change you'd be challenged to improve on North America's misguided biofuels policy, which is centred on corn-based ethanol and is contributing to the global food crisis. The need for higher-yielding, disease- and pest-resistant crops as global food demand explodes. A change in North American diets. Architects of such a blueprint would, as an early step, redeploy some of the investment in the false promise of corn-based ethanol into the food-research centres in the developing world that were making significant progress until their budgets were slashed by national governments. These include the International Rice Research Institute in the Philippines and Mexico's International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center.
Sunday, June 29, 2008
Overlooked in the global food crisis: A problem with dirt
Southcoasttoday.com (USA): Science has provided the souped-up seeds to feed the world, through biotechnology and old-fashioned crossbreeding. Now the problem is the dirt they're planted in. Fixing soil just isn't "sexy" enough to interest governments or charities, said Robert Zeigler, director general of the International Rice Research Institute in Manila. Philippines. Zeigler's center this sprimg planted its 133rd crop of rice in the same land since 1963, trying to pinpoint the right combination of nitrogen and fertilizer. Better seeds worked wonders. But finding money for soil health is difficult and because of that, less work is accomplished, he said.
Sunday, June 29, 2008
Hungry for answers
Toronto Star: A single grain of rice symbolizes the breakdown of the global food system. In recent months, prices of staples have jumped and millions have joined the ranks of the marginally fed. Hungry people desperate for bread or corn or rice, the staples of simple diets. But a shortfall in supplies has doubled and tripled the prices of these basics, shoving them far out of reach of the poorest people on Earth, the one billion who live on less than $1 a day. The crisis was a shock, but not actually a surprise. Josette Sheeran, head of the World Food Program, likened it to a "silent tsunami" that had taken years to build.
Saturday, June 28, 2008