Rice – scenario :: INDIA

Rice – scenario :: INDIA

68% of the world’s irrigated area is in Asia, and that about half of this land is used for rice.

Rice is also the most important crop to millions of small farmers who grow it on millions of hectares throughout the region, and to the many landless workers who derive income from working on these farms. 

Economic pressure is likely to move land, water, and labor away from rice to other activities.

Under the Business as usual reference scenario, the price of rice will increase almost 50% by 2025, and will continue to increase, although at a slower pace, from 2025 to 2050.

Labor :: By far the main costs in rice farming are land and labor, saving labor in rice cultivation has a price because many poor laborers receive a substantial portion of their income from available work in rice fields, and lower rice prices may force wages down. In the short run, laborers will have difficulty finding new jobs. Rural-urban migration are leading to rural labor shortages and higher rural labor wage rates, further discouraging labor-intensive rice farming.

Rise of $ :: Most commodities, including crude oil and grains are priced in U.S. dollars, but are purchased in the local currency. The world market price of rice in dollars is a poor indicator of profitability in the domestic market. Inflation in the market drops the price of rice but if the price doubles the domestic market shows a relatively no rise in price over the past few decades.

Lower prices do not necessarily mean lower profitability. The main factor driving the long-term decline in agricultural prices is technological progress that contributes to a drop in the unit cost of production.

Crude price :: Crude price will continue to rise in future. Rise in crude price will lead to rise in cost of fertilizers and insecticides needed to harvest the ‘Green revolution’ rice verities causing the increase of expenditure of the farmer. 

Insecticides and fertilizers :: Reoccurring pest outbreaks. - Many pests that caused major problems for rice intensification programs in the 1970s and 1980s have returned as major threats to production, primarily due to breakdowns in crop resistance and the excessive use of broad-spectrum, long-residual insecticides that disrupt natural pest control mechanisms.

Urban food habits :: At high levels of income, rice becomes an inferior commodity, and consumers prefer diverse foods with more protein and vitamins, such as vegetables, bread, fish and meat. Growing urbanization that accompanies economic growth leads to changes in food habits and the practice of eating away from home, which further reduces per capita rice consumption.

Rise in retail price of rice and its effects :: Rice retail food prices have increased due to such reasons as increasing food demand, high crop prices, increasing labor cost(excluding labor at rice field) and energy costs. These effects are not likely to stop, and the same increases will be experienced in future. A rise in the price of rice is equivalent to a drop in real income for the majority of the poor who are net consumers of rice. Higher prices increase the number of poor people and push people deeper into poverty and hunger, forcing them to sacrifice essentials such as more nutritious food, health care, and children’s education—thus condemning future generations to a vicious poverty cycle. The rice price will continue to rise because of low yield growth and limited area expansion. Statistical analysis of these factors and other key trends suggests that prices will remain near their current levels for the medium term. The one possible countervailing factor is the long-term slowdown in yield growth that has occurred throughout. If yield growth continues to decelerate, and does so more quickly than population growth, per capita production will begin to decline, and this may cause rice prices to rise again.

Trade Import/Export:: India is not a major factor in determining world commodity prices at world market because they do not trade. Increasingly popular food in Africa, with imports into Africa accounting for almost one-third of the total world trade. Latest trend of agricultural investment is seen by Indian firms in African continent.

Rice farmers :: Despite the higher cultivation costs of modern rice varieties has left the farmer poorer over the 40 years. Spending on education or health care for their children is a luxury many rural poor cannot afford at all. This condemns one generation after another to a prison of poverty and debt reinforced by cost of farming on to the farmer. In turn, malnutrition perpetuates poverty as it directly reduces the productive ability of those afflicted. Lead to a reduction in rice area there as farmers switch to other high-value crops. The High wages elsewhere, small town boredom, changing mindset of rural population towards city facilities, some may say but so is the believe that farming is low status job unworthy of modern youth causing the youth to drift as hired workers provide the vast bulk of labor to the cities.

Bio- fuel ::  Rising marketing costs (the difference between farm value and what consumers spend on food) are accounting for an increasing share of retail food expenditures. Higher and more volatile energy prices are quickly being passed onto the consumer. At the same time, the share of retail food expenditures spent on farm commodities is declining. Global economic conditions may result in continued food inflation. Global crop stocks are at record lows due to crops being used for non-food purposes. The use of raw materials in the fast-growing bio-fuel industry for the production of the petroleum-substitute ethanol

Population :: World population has more than doubled since the 1950s. . It may increase another 3 billion before stabilizing in 2100. Population growth is outstripping production growth. Expanding global populations with rising incomes are also cutting into global food supplies. This growth in population and consumption could outpace the projected growth of agricultural production and maintain high food inflation unless agricultural productivity is boosted.

Real estate land grabbing :: Over the years little room for expansion of rice area. The possibility of increasing the rice area is almost exhausted in most Asian countries. In many areas, highly productive rice land has been lost to housing and industrial development. The rice area will remain at this level or decline in future because of scarcity and competition from other agricultural and non-agricultural uses such as industrialization and urbanization urbanization in spite of global rise in stocks of rice production will fails to keep pace with demand growth.

RICE :: INDIA

The net area sown is nearly 142 M ha, of which only 51 percent is irrigated, while the gross cropped area is approximately 189 M ha. There are about 106 million operational holdings with an average size of 1.57 ha. About 78 percent of the holdings are less than 2 ha, belonging to small and marginal farmers, and cover 32 percent of the total cultivated area. 44.6 M ha in rice, of the total rice area, only 51 percent is irrigated, so 49 percent is rainfed. 

Rice :: Area, production and productivity in India

Rice versus total grain production in India

India :: rice production from 1980 -2006

 India :: fertilizer use in rice production from 1980 -2006


In parallel developments, by the early 1990s the widespread planting of the semidwarf HYVs and hybrid rices in densely planted areas of Asia amounted to about 72 million hectares. These HYVs share a common semidwarf gene (sd1) and largely the same cytoplasm (either from "China" in older HYVs or "Wild Abortive" in the hybrids). This poses a serious threat of production losses due to a much narrowed genetic base if wide-ranging pest epidemics should break out, as was the case with hybrid maize in the United States during 1970—1 (Chang 1984).

(Green revolution) Since the early 1970s, poorly educated rice farmers in South and Southeast Asia have planted the same HYV in successive crop seasons and have staggered plantings across two crops. Such a biologically unsound practice has led to the emergence of new and more virulent biotypes of insect pests and disease pathogens that have overcome the resistance genes in the newly bred and widely grown HYVs. The result has been heavy crop losses in several tropical countries in a cyclic pattern (Chang and Li 1991; Chang 1994).

West Bengal(15.5%), was the largest rice producer followed by Uttar Pradesh(13.5%), Andhra Pradesh(13.3%), Punjab(9.2%), Tamil Nadu(9.6%), Bhir(7.7%), Orissa(6.3%) and Madhya Pardesh (6.2%)

Rice –INDIA -2000

India produces 22.40 % of the world rice second to China 31.76% during 2000

Rice is the single most important food grain; it occupies 36% of the gross cropped area and accounts for 42% of the total food-grain production in India during 2000-01. More than 50 percent of country’s population depends fully or partially on rice as it constitutes the main cereal food crop of the diet. During 1999-2000, in the states like Andhra Pradesh, Assam, Kerala, Orissa, Tamil Nadu and West Bengal, rice consumption accounted for more than 80 percent share in total cereal intake.

Along the Malabar Coast of southwestern India. For millions rice is the chief dish, if not the only dish, at every meal. Rice originated in a tropical, very rainy, marshy country. Today there are more than 2400 varieties including about 1000 in India alone -- special strains adapted to local differences in soil, temperature and rainfall.

The eastern Indian states of Uttar Pradesh, Chattisgarh, Bihar, Jharkhand, Assam, West Bengal, and Orissa are the major rice-growing areas, accounting for about half of the total rice production in the country. Much of this production is carried out under rain fed conditions. It is estimated that about 10 percent of foodgrains produced in India, are lost in processing and storage. It has been reported that about 9 percent of paddy is lost due to use of old and outdated methods of drying and milling, improper and unscientific methods of storage, transport and handling. It has been estimated that total post harvest losses of paddy at producers’ level was about 2.71 percent of total production. 

With rising costs in labor, chemicals, fuel, and water, the farmers in irrigated areas will be squeezed between production costs and market price. The latter, dictated by government pricing policy in most countries, remains lower than the real rice price (David 1991). Meanwhile, urbanization and industrialization will continue to deprive the shrinking farming communities of skilled workers, especially young men. Such changes in rice-farming communities will have serious and widespread socioeconomic implications.


Rice :: Export from India 

In early 2008, India imposed export bans on non-basmati rice or restrictions to protect the domestic consumers.

Rice :: Asia 1920 - 1990

Rice is a staple food for more than a third of mankind. It constitutes the diet of one thousand six hundred million people and another four hundred million rely on it for between a quarter and half of their diet. Nutritive value of Rice protein (biological value =80) is much higher than that of the wheat (biological value =60) and maize (biological value =50) or other cereals.

Rice is a self-fertilizing plant. Around 1920, however, Japanese and U.S. rice breeders took the lead in using scientific approaches (hybridization selection and testing) to improve rice varieties. Elsewhere, pure line selection among farmers’ varieties was the main method of breeding.

After World War II, many Asian countries started to use hybridization as the main breeding approach. Through the sponsorship of the FAO, several countries in South and Southeast Asia joined in the Indica-Japonica Hybridization Project during the 1950s, exchanging rice germ plasm and using diverse parents in hybridization.

These efforts, however, provided very limited improvement in grain yield (Parthasarathy 1972), and the first real breakthrough came during the mid— 1950s when Taiwan (first) and mainland China (second) independently succeeded in using their semidwarf rices in developing short-statured, nitrogen-responsive and high-yielding semidwarf varieties (HYVs). These HYVs spread quickly among Chinese rice farmers (Chang 1961; Huang, Chang, and Chang 1972; Shen 1980).

Taiwan’s semidwarf "Taichung Native 1" (TN1) was introduced into India through the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) located in the Philippines. "TNI" and IRRI-bred "IR8" triggered the "Green Revolution" in tropical rices (Chandler 1968; Huang et al. 1972). Subsequent developments in the dramatic spread of the HYVs and an associated rise in area grain yield and production have been documented (Chang 1979a; Dalrymple 1986), and refinements in breeding approaches and international collaboration have been described (Brady 1975; Khush 1984; Chang and Li 1991).

Rice production in Asian countries steadily increased from 240 million metric tons during 1964—6 to 474 million tons in 1989—90 (IRRI 1991). Among the factors were expansion in rice area and/or irrigated area; adoption of high-yielding, semidwarf varieties (HYVs); use of nitrogen fertilizers and other chemicals (insecticides, herbicides, and fungicides); improved cultural methods; and intensified land use through multiple cropping (Herdt and Capule 1983; Chang and Luh 1991).

In the early 1970s, China scored another breakthrough in rice yield when a series of hybrid rices (F1 hybrids) were developed by the use of a cytoplasmic pollen-sterile source found in a self-sterile wild plant ("Wild Abortive") on Hainan Island (Lin and Yuan 1980). The hybrids brought another yield increment (15 to 30 percent) over the widely grown semidwarfs.

Along with the rapid and large-scale adoption of the HYVs and with deforestation and development projects, innumerable farmers’ traditional varieties of all three ecogenetic races and their wild relatives have disappeared from their original habitats — an irreversible process of "genetic erosion." The lowland group of the javanic race (bulu, gundill) suffered the heaviest losses on Java and Bali in Indonesia. Sizable plantings of the long-bearded bulus can now be found only in the Ifugao rice terraces of the Philippines.