The contribution of rice research to poverty alleviation

Rice is the dominant staple food of Asia, accounting for more than 70% of caloric intake in some countries. Furthermore, Asia is home to approximately 70% of the world’s 1.3 billion poor, and the most severe malnutrition in the world occurs in South Asia. These considerations mean that rice research has a key role to play in global poverty alleviation. Rice research contributes to poverty alleviation through several pathways, and these contributions benefit both producers and consumers. The direct pathway leads to higher productivity and higher profits for farmers. The indirect pathway arises from the lower prices for consumers that are the inevitable result of higher farm productivity for any given level of demand. In the short run, lower prices for consumers reduce poverty because many poor people (the urban poor, the rural landless, and nonrice farmers) are net buyers of rice, and lower prices increase their effective incomes. In the long run, lower prices for consumers reduce the cost to employers of hiring workers (without sacrificing any welfare on the part of those workers). This stimulates job creation in the higher productivity industrial and service sectors of the economy, and eventually draws labor out of agriculture. This structural transformation of the economy is essential for long-term poverty alleviation. In fact, no country has ever become wealthy without removing a significant fraction of its labor force from the agricultural sector. After the initial success of the Green Revolution, rice yields have stagnated or grown slowly in many countries, and this slow growth retards the process of poverty alleviation. Creation of a C 4 rice plant has the potential to generate substantially higher farm yields and make an important contribution to global poverty alleviation efforts.