Rice Cultivation

“You’re eating that again?”

I was sitting in my school's dining facility with my roommate Tam. Normally she's the sweetest person I know, but at that moment she was uncharacteristically annoyed. Her boyfriend had just returned to the table with a bowl of cereal. For reasons unbeknownst to us this was highly offensive.

“You have that at every meal,” she grumbled. I’m the sort of person who makes jokes to relieve tension, (which usually doesn’t work, but that’s another story,) so I said:

“Well Tam, cereal is like the American version of rice.”

For once my poor sense of humor was effective. I explained Ty’s addiction for cereal in a way that made sense to my roommate. Tam’s Vietnamese, so she knows how important rice is. The average Asian consumes 200 to 400 pounds of this starch annually, while Americans consume about 25 pounds per year. People in Thailand have been eating rice for over 6,000 years. Their word for poor translates into English as ‘to be without rice’. Chinese have been growing rice for at least the last 4,000 years. Their word for agriculture is synonymous with rice cultivation. Today half of the world's population subsists mainly on rice. More than half a billion metric tons are produced every year.

Why do so many people eat rice? For starters, it’s cheap. Rice has been modified to the point that it’s a superplant. Rice also provides quick energy. It’s a good source of thiamine, riboflavin, and niacin. There are other uses for rice besides food, too. The hulls are used to stuff mattresses, the straw is turned into hats and shoes, the polishings provide furfural, and where would the world be without sake?

Of course rice isn’t all wonderful. Relying on one crop for so much of the human population has had drastic consequences on our health and the environment. Before the Civil War, slaves were used on American plantations. Since rice is grown in water, the threat of alligators, snakes, and disease carrying mosquitoes made the grueling work doubly dangerous. The open water also creates the perfect habitat for Clonorchis sinensis, a liver fluke that’s infected around 30,000,000 people in Japan, China, Taiwan, and Southeast Asia.

Rice also has a lot of (surprise, surprise) political connotations. After WWII, America was determined to prevent a terror like that from happening again. A good way to avoid World War III was to analyze why the previous global atrocity occurred. What they came up with the theory of population and national security. It states that overpopulation leads to exhausted resources, which leads to hunger, which leads to political instability, which leads to war. The depression of the 1930’s brought the destruction of the 1940’s. Germany’s population kept rising, but they didn’t have enough land to feed themselves. So some turned to fascism.

Harry Truman stated in his inaugural address:

"More than half the people of the world are living in conditions approaching misery. Their food is inadequate… Their poverty is a handicap and a threat both to them and to more prosperous areas… Greater production is the key to prosperity and peace. And the key to greater production is a wider and more vigorous application of modern scientific and technical knowledge."

Along came the Green Revolution. America’s method of preventing war was to promote agriculture. The Rockefeller and Ford Foundations founded the International Rice Research Institute, or IRRI, in 1959. The organization’s goal is to “find sustainable ways to improve the well being of present and future generations of poor rice farmers and consumers while at the same time protecting the natural environment.” They developed a dwarf plant of rice that’s hardier and more productive for farmers. It sounds lovely, but I read very few positive reports on the Institute. Unlike traditional rice, “miracle rice” requires pesticides. The chemicals runoff into the ocean and contaminate coral reefs. According to the World Wildlife Fund, less than 5 percent of Bali’s reefs are healthy because of the introduction of miracle rice. At the IRRI’s 40th anniversary celebration, hundreds of Filipino rice farmers protested for causing massive loss of biological diversity in rice paddies throughout Asia.

Miracle rice is supposed to bring in more revenue for poor farmers, but research shows that this is not the case. Although they produce about 40 percent more grain, they need three times as much water. Countries like India and the Philippines have relied more and more on irrigation since the Green Revolution started in the 1960’s, but there isn’t enough groundwater for that amount of strain. The Punjab Aquifer in Pakistan, for example, is dropping 10 to 30 feet per year.

Yet another conspiratorial issue is what the IRRI has dubbed “golden rice.” Traditional and miracle rice deplete the consumers’ level of vitamin A in the body. It is estimated that 26 countries suffer from severe vitamin A deficiency, which causes night blindness, increased chance of illness, and death. To eradicate this problem, General Motors has helped pay to buff up rice with carotenoids from daffodil genes. This causes the rice to appear yellow, hence the name “golden rice.”

Not everyone thinks this is a good idea, though. Vitamin A pills, which have worked quite successfully in the past, cost about two cents each. Golden rice, on the other hand, has already cost 100 million dollars. An even simpler option would be to turn some of the rice paddies into a garden for leafy greens. Then there would be less vitamin A deficiency, a healthier diet, and more biodiversity. People could even eat rice unhusked, which does have vitamin A.

Humans are constantly reminded that going from hunters and gatherers to an agricultural society may not have been a smart move. Rice is one of the many negative results of that shift, but it’s also one of the positives. Rice is an invaluable part to dozens of human cultures. It beats cereal hands down.