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Increasingly, it is what fighting climate change will entail. Yet policymakers should get used to blending complicated economic and technological fixes in this way.

Farmers are almost everywhere a powerful constituency. Thereby, it would correct a market skewed towards environmental damage and poor health.īringing about such change in Asia and beyond will be far harder than promoting new wonder seeds was.

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Poor Indians would be free to choose a more balanced diet.

That would encourage farmers to choose the best crop for their local conditions-much of India’s agricultural north-west would switch from rice to wheat overnight. It should make its interventions more crop-agnostic, by replacing subsidies and free rice with income support for farmers and cash transfers for the poor. India, for example, procures rice from farmers, often at above-market rates, then distributes it as food aid. Scrapping subsidies that favour rice over other crops would make such efforts more effective. India and Indonesia are promoting millet, which is more nutritious and uses a lot less water. Governments need to nudge producers and consumers away from rice. By encouraging crop insurance-a good idea in itself-governments could also help reassure farmers as they switch from old ways to new. A better approach would make state support contingent on best practice. Farmers have been slow to adopt such improvements, partly because of overgenerous subsidies that shield them from the rice crisis. In tandem with improved practices, such as direct seeding of paddy, they could also shorten the growing cycle and reduce the amount of water required, mitigating environmental harm. In the places most suitable for rice cultivation, such as hot and sticky South-East Asia, faster adoption of new technologies, such as flood-resistant and more nutritious seeds, could provide a big productivity boost. Policymakers need to increase rice yields, then, but more selectively than in the 1960s. In South Asia rice-heavy diets have been linked to high rates of diabetes and persistent malnutrition. White rice is more fattening than bread or maize, and is not especially nutritious. Indeed, eating too much rice turns out to be bad for people as well as the climate. This amounts to an insidious feedback loop and, in all, a far more complicated set of problems than the food insecurity that spurred the green revolution. If you count the conversion of forestland for rice paddy-the fate of much of Madagascar’s rainforest-that footprint is even bigger. Its emissions footprint is similar to that of aviation. It is a bigger source of greenhouse gas than any foodstuff except beef. By starving soils of oxygen, paddy cultivation encourages methane-emitting bacteria. Rice is not merely a casualty of climate change, but also a contributor to it. Rising sea-levels are causing salt to seep into the Mekong Delta, Vietnam’s “rice bowl”. Devastating floods in Pakistan, the fourth-biggest exporter, wiped out 15% of its rice harvest. Patchy monsoon rains and drought last year in India, the world’s biggest rice exporter, led to a reduced harvest and an export ban. Rice is particularly susceptible to extreme conditions and is often grown in places where they are increasingly evident. But the biggest reason may be global warming. Excessive use of pesticides, fertiliser and irrigation have poisoned and depleted soils and groundwater. Urbanisation and industrialisation have made labour and farmland scarcer. The greatest slowdowns were in South-East Asia, where Indonesia and the Philippines-together, home to 400m people-are already big importers. Yields have increased by less than 1% a year over the past decade, much less than in the previous one. Yet that looks increasingly hard-and in some ways undesirable.

By one estimate, the world will need to produce almost a third more rice by 2050. And demand for the crop is projected to soar, on the back of population growth in Asia and Africa, another big rice consumer. Asians produce over 90% of rice and get more than a quarter of their calories from it. The starchy grain is the main source of sustenance for over half the world’s population. Asia’s vast rice market is a legacy of that triumph.

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