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Genetic modification may be the only viable way to produce
sufficient quantities of rice in the future as drought, climate
change and dwindling acreage impact yields, experts said in a new
report.
Rice was the staple food of around three billion
people and the main challenge facing producers was how to raise
yields of the water-dependent crop as 70 percent of the world’s
food-growing areas turn increasingly parched, said the International
Rice Research Institute (IRRI) in its latest quarterly magazine.
Biotechnology, the process of modifying the
genes of an organism to produce new products, was becoming an
increasingly important tool for the Philippines-based institute as
it tackles the impact of climate change, the Institute reported in
its Rice Today publication.
The Institute, based in the university town of
Los Baños in Laguna province, south of Manila, developed many of
the high-yielding varieties of rice during the so-called Green
Revolution of agricultural breakthroughs in the late 1960s and early
1970s.
Former Institute Director General Nyle Brady
said that IRRI must use biotechnology to “develop rice lines that
efficiently utilize plant nutrients, that tolerate adverse
conditions such as drought and that are resistant to insects and
diseases” to reduce the need for pesticides.
Brady said that he recognized “the political
reasons why this is difficult because some countries don’t want
biotechnology to be used for this purpose.”
“But the developing countries need the
improved crops much more than we do in the United States,” he
added.
Gurdev Khush, a University of California
professor who was a former senior IRRI scientist, agreed that “the
environment for accepting genetically modified crops is not as good
as it should be.”
The institute estimates between 15 million to 20
million hectares (about 37million to 49 million acres) of irrigated
rice would be hit by “some degree of water scarcity” by 2025.
Areas growing genetically modified crops rose
9.4 percent from a year earlier to more than 120 million hectares
across 25 countries last year, it said.
-- AFP
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