The Story of Rice..

Rice is the world’s most important food. More than half of the world’s population depends on rice for food calories and protein, especially in developing countries.

According to the Economic Survey 2015-2016, in wheat, India's average yield in 2013 of 3075 kg/ha is lower than the world average of 3257 kg/ha. The picture is starker in paddy production where all Indian states have yields below that of China and most states have yields below that of Bangladesh. India's best state, Punjab, has paddy yield close to 6000 kg/ha whereas China's yield is 6709 k .. 

The inefficient use of water for agriculture is affecting the productivity. Although water is one of India's most scarce natural resources, India uses 2 to 4 times more water to produce a unit of major food crop than does China and Brazil. 

The world’s largest rice producers by far are China and India. The next largest rice producers are Indonesia, Bangladesh, Vietnam, Myanmar, and Thailand. These seven countries together account for more than 80% of world production.

The ‘Green Revolution’ is the name given to the dramatic increase in cereal crop yields through modern agricultural inputs – irrigation, fertilizers, improved seeds, and pesticides – in the 1960s. For rice, the revolution began with the release by IRRI of the high- yielding semidwarf variety IR8 in 1966. The world average rice yield in 1960, the product of thousands of years of experience, was about 2 tonnes/hectare (T/ha). Astonishingly, in only 40 more years, as the Green Revolution spread, it doubled, reaching 4 t/ha in 2000. The rice varieties and technologies developed during the Green Revolution have increased yields in some areas to 6–10 t/ha. 

Although the Green Revolution was mainly a technology revolution, it required strong public support and policies to develop the technologies, build the required infrastructure, ensure that markets, finance, and input systems worked and that farmers had enough knowledge and economic incentive to adopt the new practices. Public interventions were especially crucial in Asia for ensuring that small farmers were not left behind, and without which the Green Revolution would have been much less pro- poor. On average, Asian countries were spending 15.4% of their total government spending on agriculture by 1972 and they doubled the real value of their agricultural expenditure by 1985. 

Governments also shored up farm credit systems, subsidized key inputs – especially fertilizer, power, and water – and intervened in markets to ensure that farmers received adequate prices each year to make the technologies profitable. Many governments used their interventions to ensure that small farms did not get left behind. Substantial empirical evidence at the time showed that small farms were the more efficient producers in Asia and land reform and small farm development programs were implemented to create and support large numbers of small farms. Small farm–led agricultural growth proved to be not only more efficient but also more pro-poor, a win-win proposition for growth and poverty reduction.

Since the mid-1990s, population growth has exceeded rice yield growth and the gap has been growing steadily larger, creating a significant imbalance between supply and demand. This trend is evident for Asia as a whole, but also separately for East Asia, Southeast Asia, and South Asia. Stagnation in area harvested further contributed to the problem, and prices eventually began to rise. Indeed, world market rice prices rose steadily by a cumulative 67% between April 2001 and September 2007.

There are several possible reasons for the slowdown in rice yield growth and production: displacement of cereals on better lands by more profitable crops such as groundnuts, diminishing returns to modern varieties when irrigation and fertilizer use are already high, and the fact that cereal prices have fallen relative to input costs, making additional intensification less profitable. There is also concern that pest and disease resistance to modern pesticides now slows yield growth, and that breeders have largely exploited the yield potential of major Green Revolution crops. 

Environmental problems that have arisen in different areas include excessive and inappropriate use of fertilizers and pesticides that pollute waterways and kill beneficial insects and other wildlife, irrigation practices that lead to salt buildup and eventual abandonment of some of the best farming lands, increasing water scarcities in major river basins, and retreating groundwater levels in areas where more water is being pumped for irrigation than can be replenished. Some of these outcomes were inevitable as millions of largely illiterate farmers began to use modern inputs for the first time, but the problem was exacerbated by inadequate extension and training, an absence of effective regulation of water use and quality, and input pricing and subsidy policies that made modern inputs too cheap and encouraged their excessive use.

Globally, farmers need to produce at least 8–10 million tons more paddy rice each year—an annual increase of 1.2–1.5% over the coming decade, equivalent to an average yield increase of 0.6 t/ha during the next decade. Over the longer run, global rice consumption growth is expected to slow down but yields will have to continue to grow faster than at present because of pressure on rice lands in the developing world from urbanization, climate change, and competition from other, high-value agriculture. Rice yield growth of 1.0–1.2% annually beyond 2020 will be needed to feed the still-growing world and keep prices affordable.

Acknowledgement : This section sourced largely from this article.