Farmers in India and Bangladesh will likely start commercial production of flood-tolerant rice next year giving them protection against crop losses from typhoons and heavy monsoon rains. “We now have a fairly big program in India and Bangladesh to multiply the seed,” David Mackill, program leader for rain-fed environments at the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) in the Philippines, told Reuters on Tuesday. “It would survive for about two weeks under water.” Flood waters regularly engulf vast rainfed lowland areas of Asia and crop losses from prolonged submergence are estimated at around $1 billion a year, Mackill said. With the Sub1 flood-resistant gene, farmers could produce 6 tons of rice per hectare under normal conditions and around 3 tons if the paddy was submerged for two weeks. Normal varieties would only yield 1 ton or less if subject to that sort of submergence. “The variety that has this gene still performs as well as the original without submergence,” said Mackill. “It's like an insurance policy.” The flood-tolerant gene is introduced to existing rice varieties through normal cross-breeding techniques and not via genetic modification. Myanmar, once the world's biggest rice exporter, faces the risk of food shortages after a cyclone flooded 5,000 sq km of its rice bowl earlier this month. Before Cyclone Nargis struck, Myanmar had offered to sell Bangladesh 300,000 tons of rice annually after the south Asian country lost 2 million tons of planted rice due to a cyclone and two spells of flooding last year. Mackill said Indonesia was likely to be the first country in Southeast Asia to introduce the flood-tolerant rice and China had also expressed interest in working with it. “What we would like to do is to transfer the Sub1 gene into a larger number of varieties that would mean the technology would be available to farmers in wider areas.” IRRI, which started a Green Revolution in the 1960s and 1970s with the development of high-yielding rice seeds, is also working on drought-resistant varieties of the grain to deal with a world beset by global warming. Mackill said it could take up to 5 years before such varieties, which would have similar yield advantages as the flood-tolerant seeds, would be ready for commercial production. “We are doing a lot of work,” he said. “But genetically it's more complicated.”
