This past September, China held perhaps the largest international conference on hybrid rice in history. Scientists and politicians from around the world gathered in Changsa, home to the lavish Hunan Hybrid Rice Research Centre. There were delegations from over 20 countries, many of them African, such as Benin, Congo, Guinea-Bissau, Kenya, Liberia, Mali, Nigeria, and Sierra Leone.
The participating politicians and scientists flew home enthusiastic about bringing Chinese hybrid rice varieties to their own countries. But how much did they really see of China's experience with hybrid rice? Had they looked behind the thick curtain, they would have encountered a disturbing reality. The fact is that China's hybrid rice experiment is in a crisis.
The problem with planthoppers
The mere thought of planthoppers sends fear into the hearts of rice farmers and scientists. The pest abruptly shattered the green revolution's success story in the 1970s and 80s, when it overwhelmed the programme's high-yielding varieties and pesticides. Massive crop losses occurred across much of Asia and a pesticide treadmill began that took many years to address. Nobody wants this pest to make a comeback.
Prof Yuan Longping taking scientists on a tour of hybrid rice fields in Hunan.
Professor Jian Cheng is China's leading scientific authority on planthoppers. From his base at Zhejiang University he's been tracking the country's problems with these pests since the 1970s.
While the planthopper outbreaks that so devastated the green revolution in the rest of Asia are well known, few outside of China are aware that China's own green revolution, which actually preceded the others, unleashed the same devastating planthopper epidemics a decade prior. China, says Cheng, did not communicate its experience to the outside world.
China's problems with planthoppers have actually never gone away. Indeed, Cheng says that now they are getting dramatically worse. And he thinks that the introduction and expansion of hybrid rice varieties have a lot to do with it.
Cheng says that, during the period between the late 1970s to the late 1990s, there was a strong correlation between the areas in China attacked by the white-backed planthopper and the expanded use of hybrid rice varieties (see graph).
The problems with planthoppers in China are most severe in the areas where there is a high-level of hybrid rice production. And in these areas the amount of agrochemicals being used to combat the pests is escalating, as the insects develop increasing resistance to what the farmers are spraying. According to Cheng, "Planthoppers are developing multiple fold resistance to many insecticides, outbreaks are getting more frequent and more intense and reliance on insecticides is at its worst and a new virus disease in hybrid rice vectored by the white backed planthopper has been identified." Two insecticides introduced in China only ten years ago, imidacloprid and fiprinol, "have become virtually useless because planthoppers have evolved adaptation to these chemicals," says Chang. While planthoppers were destroying about 1 million tonnes of rice per year during the 1980s and 90s, in 2005 Chinese farmers lost 2.8 million tonnes to the pest (about 1.6% of the total rice crop, and enough rice to feed over 30 million Chinese, based on average per capita consumption).
(Source: Professor Jian Cheng)
Globalising the disaster
China seems to be once again trying to keep its planthopper troubles hidden from the rest of the world. But, as Chinese companies push to expand international sales of their hybrid rice seeds, scientists and farmers from other countries are getting first hand experiences with the problem. China's planthopper crisis is now an international problem.
The blog site of the international Rice Planthopper Project contains numerous reports about planthopper outbreaks in hybrid rice fields in other Asian countries. Scientists in Indonesia report that their tests show that all hybrid varieties in the country are highly susceptible to planthoppers, both brown planthoppers and white-backed plant hoppers. In Bangladesh, there has been a worrying increase in planthopper infestations over the past couple of years, which scientists are linking to "hybrid rice cultivation intensification". Scientists in the Philippines report on a visit with a farmer who had never experienced serious planthopper problems until he started using a Chinese hybrid rice variety that season. He had to spray his fields with insecticides eight times to deal with the "severe infestation".
At this point, the Chinese government does not have a strategy for dealing with its domestic planthopper problem. But this has not stopped it from pursuing the promotion of hybrid rice elsewhere. The government is teaming up with a Beijing-based United Nations programme, known as APCAEM, to promote Chinese hybrid rice varieties in other Asian countries and it is currently testing a new wave of so-called "green super" hybrid rice varieties in several African countries through a joint program with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
Whether at home or abroad it seems that the priority for the Chinese government is to promote the interests of its seed companies. It is telling that the main organiser of the Changsa conference was the Ministry of Commerce, not the Ministry of Agriculture. And just one company occupies an enormous amount of space in China's hybrid rice efforts-- Yuan Longping High-Tech Agriculture, which is partly owned by China's most famous rice scientist, Yuan Longping, and the French multinational seed company Limagrain. Today, there is virtually no separation between this company's international commercial activities and China's overseas policies in support of hybrid rice. At the Changsa conference, the Minister of Commerce announced that the company was "designated as China's first training base for the spread of hybrid rice breeding and cultivation technique (sic)." Already the Yuan Longping High-Tech Agriculture company claims to have trained more than 2,000 foreign government officials and scientists from 50 countries. With the Chinese government's support it now aims to train another 3,000 and establish 10 overseas breeding centers on around 10,000 hectares of land within the next 10 years.
Professor Yuan Longping speaking at the international hybrid rice conference in Changsa, 2009.
The hybrid rice push has never been so strong. Varieties of hybrid rice are being deployed and commercialised in a growing number of countries across Asia, Africa and Latin America. The market for rice seed is getting bigger, and the powerful commercial interests from both inside and outside of China that stand to gain from the expansion of hybrid rice, do not seem to care about the consequences this will have on people and the environment. China's experience with hybrid rice-- the real one, not the mythical one that is always projected-- is a wake-up call that needs to be exposed and learned from before the rest of the world makes the same mistake.
On 17 November 2009, members of the Peasant Movement of the Philippines (KMP), Kalipunan ng mga Samahang Magbubukid sa Timog Katagalugan (KASAMA-TK), Farmer-Scientist Partnership for Development (MASIPAG), Philippine Network of Food Security Programmes (PNFSP), Resistance and Solidarity against Agrochemical TNCs (RESIST Network) and Asian Peasant Coalition (APC) led a protest action in front of the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) in Los Banos, Laguna, Philippines. About 200 protesters, mostly farmers from different parts of the country, gathered in front of the Institute's main gate to call for its abolition.
Their message was simple: "IRRI was hailed for sparking the Green Revolution in 1966 with the invention of IR8. However, while it claims that this agricultural breakthrough rescued millions of Asians from famine, poverty in rural Asia had in fact worsened only a few decades into the Green Revolution. Over one bilion people are hungry these days. The Green Revolution robbed Asia’s rice producers and brought on even greater burdens such as debts, declining yields, health problems, a ruined ecosystem, and loss of biodiversity.”
The IRRI management was not interested to hear what the protesters had to say. In the old days, IRRI's former Director General Klaus Lampe would at least invite protesters inside the IRRI compound for a dialogue, but this time IRRI mobilised a large team of local police officers to greet the protestors outside of its gate.
Asked what they were doing, cordoning off the protests, the police chief said: “We're just here to protect you.” “From what?” asked the farmers.
On the same day, IRRI issued a press release with its Director General, Robert Zeigler saying “The plight of over 1 billion people stricken with poverty, 70% of whom live in Asia and depend on rice as their staple food, is our driving force for our research . . . In fifty years, IRRI’s high-yielding rice varieties and other technologies, plus extensive training, have contributed to the doubling of average world rice yields. This has averted famine and prevented millions of hectares of natural ecosystems being converted to farmland.” Zeigler's calling for a “New Green Revolution” to resolve the current food crisis.
The protesting groups don't buy it. “IRRI’s so-called solution to the crisis does not differ much from its earlier approach. It is obvious that IRRI has refused to recognize the failure of the first Green Revolution to lift rice farmers from poverty. In reality, it is using the current food crisis as an opportunity to push for the promotion of hybrid and GE rice,” they said.
GRAIN went to the protest in solidarity with the farmers. Below is a photo essay of the event.
Mauritius' Minister of Foreign Affairs says his government has secured a large area of land in Mozambique to produce rice for his country. Speaking at a "brainstorming session" on August 13, Arvin Boolell says his Ministry "used all its diplomatic weight to acquire prime land" for rice production covering 20,000 ha. Most of the land is in the district of Marracuene in the southern province of Maputo where conflicts over land are already intense.
The land acquisition in Mozambique is part of a joint venture "mega project" that Mauritius launched around a year ago, after being approached by the Singaporean company Vitagrain. Vitagrain is controlled by the private equity firm Intrasia Captial, founded by Australian financier Graeme Robertson, who is a major player in the mining, real estate and energy sectors of the Indian Ocean region. Robertson is one of a growing number of investors who, since the outbreak of last year's food crisis, are looking at agriculture as a strategic investment play. The company intends to develop specialty varieties of hybrid rice that it can sell on the global market.
Mauritius is to serve as the company's base of operations for hybrid rice seed development and production. The Government of Mauritius has given the company a long-term lease on 500 ha of land from a former state sugarcane plantation and they have established a joint R&D programme on hybrid rice involving the country's main agricultural research institutions. Reports on the deal have also mentioned plans to enact plant breeders' rights legislation.
While there has been some talk of eventually producing rice for food in Mauritius, the focus is much more on setting up the financial base and doing the seed production on the island and securing land in other countries for rice production. The actual plan of the mega project, which can be gleaned from the various statements and comments made by representatives of the government, appears like this:
- Seeds of hybrid rice will be produced by Vitagrain in Mauritius; - The seeds will be grown on a large-scale in neighbouring countries under the control of Vitagrain; and - The rice will then be shipped back to Mauritius for milling by Vitagrain's Mauritian subsidiary, Vita Rice.
Satish Faugoo, the Minister of Agro Industry, says that they intend to produce 150,000 tonnes of rice per year through the project, and, since signing the deal with Vitagrain, Mauritius has sent diplomatic missions to several countries to try and secure lands. It reached a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with Madagascar to facilitate trade of agricultural products and the two countries were at advanced negotiations on a deal to enable Mauritian investors to invest in food production before the Malagasy government was overthrown in March 2009. Mozambique is the first country where they have secured access to land.
Out of the 20,000 ha that Mauritius says it has acquired in Mozambique, 10,000 ha are to be used by Vitagrain. The Mauritian government will hold the lease to these lands and will sub-lease them to Vitagrain. Boolell says Vitagrain has already submitted the project proposal for this $43.5m Mozambican rice venture. A scientific tour is planned for the end of September 2009, when, in collaboration with the Mozambican Ministry of Agriculture, Vitagrain will start testing its hybrid rice varieties on the land.
Boolell maintains that this is just the start of its venture into food production in Mozambique. Mauritius is working on another 10,000 ha deal with Ning Group of Swaziland and Boolell says, "the doors are equally open to new projects on other land to be made available."
Part of a trend
With the ink not yet dry on the deal with Mauritius, another group of investors announced the launch of a similar 20,000 ha rice project in Mozambique. The Libya Africa Investment Portfolio (LAP), a sovereign wealth fund of the Libyan government, and the Mozambican company Ubuntu SA say they have secured land for rice production in Bela Vista, capital of Mozambique’s southernmost district of Matutuine. They claim they are set to begin production on an initial 9,000 hectares, which will gradually increase to cover the full 20,000 ha.
This is the LAP's third large-scale rice project in Africa. It has a 15,000 ha rice project in Liberia and, through its local subsidiary Mailbya, a 100,000 ha project in Mali that will mainly produce rice. Both of these projects will pursue large-scale, mechanised production of hybrid rice. In the promotion of the projects, the emphasis is on production for the domestic markets and the benefits that local people will derive. Yet, the intention is clearly there to produce for export. Moreover, in the case of Mali, the national federation of farmers organisations (CNOP) and the local chapter of Via Campesina have already documented a number of negative impacts on local communities.
Questions are also being raised about China's alleged investments in Mozambican farmland. China has pledged $800 million to "modernise" agriculture in Mozambique and allegations have been made that they are using a $2bn loan for the construction of a dam on the Zambezi River to gain access to "large land leases to establish Chinese-run mega farms." In June 2007, the two countries are alleged to have signed an MOU that would allow 3,000 Chinese farmers to settle in the provinces of Tete and Zambezia. China's also committed to establish an agricultural research and technology transfer centre at Umbeluzi, in Maputo province, which will test and introduce Chinese hybrid rice varieties.
Vietnam, for its part, signed a 3-year contract for the development of rice production, also in Zambezia. The deal involves the establishment of a rice research centre.
Esperança Chamba is the cooperation officer at the National Agriculture Research Institute of Mozambique. Her post was created last year to help the government better assess such agreements. But, in an interview with a reporter from the Institute of International Journalism, she admits that they still do not fully understand the motivation behind the surging foreign interest in investment in the country's agriculture. "We do not really know what exactly is behind these agreements and policies but it is up to the government to monitor these policies and come up with measures that ensure sustainability and local participation and ownership,” she says.
Yet, with its emphasis on hybrid rice seed, which cannot be saved by farmers and which is designed for high-input, mechanised farming, it is hard to see how "local participation and ownership" could be part of the agenda of projects such as that of Vitagrain.
Local groups in Mozambique are surprised by the news of the Vitagrain deal. Diamantino Nhampossa, executive director of the National Small Scale Farmers Union (UNAC), says that a decree was enacted in 2007 to halt the giving away of land in the Province of Maputo where Mauritius says it has acquired the lands. "This decree has not been lifted and we will be surprised if land is made available for foreign investment," says Diamantino.
"Marracuene [the site of the project] also has less land than what is being asked for, so it does not make sense," adds Diamantino. "This is an area that is known for the land conflict between locals and wealthy people from Maputo. Giving away land will add to the conflict."
The pressures on Mozambique are immense. Klaus Deininger of the World Bank says that there have been 13 million hectares worth of applications for land concessions since the government opened the door to investment in land about a year and a half ago. Deininger says that around 1.3 million of these hectares have already been accorded provisional rights to land, known as Direito de uso e aproveitamento da terra (DUAT). The people of Mozambique have so-far been kept in the dark about this large-scale transfer of their lands. As more details emerge and things start moving on the ground, investors are bound to run up against local communities who do not share their enthusiasm, and who will not give up the lands they need to secure their livelihoods and feed their own people.
A new report from the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) calls on the Government of the Philippines to abandon its support for hybrid rice and to focus on inbred varieties instead. While many other reports have reached similar conclusions, this is the first report from a centre of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) to do so. Through its International Rice Research Institute (IRRI), the CGIAR is one of most important promoters of hybrid rice in the Philippines and other rice growing countries. IRRI and the national agricultural rice research instittue of the Philippines, PhilRice, recently reached an agreement for the commercialization of IRRI's hybrid rice lines in the country.
"Instead of supporting the [hybrid rice programme] the government should spend its limited resources on research and development that focuses on improving the yield of inbred rice," reads the report. "Enhancing an inbred-based system that is adapted to farmers’ familiar practice of saving, reusing, and exchanging seeds would be a more responsive approach to improving productivity than promoting such costly technologies as hybrid rice, which has not yet achieved commercially viable levels."
The IFPRI report was approved by its Director General and, according to IFPRI, underwent "extensive external and internal reviews."
The full report is available on the IFPRI website and here.
More than a hundred groups across Asia are calling for IRRI's closure less than a year before the Institute celebrates its grand 50th.
IRRI is an international research institution established in 1960, entrusted by the United Nations to safeguard the diversity of the world's rice germplasm at its International Rice Genebank, and mandated to support the development of rice research within national agricultural research systems (NARS). It is the self-proclaimed "home of Green Revolution in Asia"; the central institution through which the Green Revolution model for rice expanded throughout Asia in the 1970s.
It will celebrate its 50th anniversary in the midst of a global food crisis. As of this writing, more than 6.2 million people have already died of hunger while over 1 billion people more are undernourished according to stopthehunger.com.
While IRRI maintains that one of its priorities is to "reduce poverty through improved and diversified rice-based systems", its research continues to be oriented towards plantation-type monocultures based on a narrow diversity of "modern" rice varieties that only respond well to the heavy use of fertilizers, pesticides and irrigation. Resource-poor farmers and landless peasants have been marginalised and removed from the entire food production process. Over the past half a century, not only has a rich diversity disappeared from the fields to be kept frozen at IRRI's genebank, but many of the traditional knowledge systems that once accompanied seed development on the ground have also been lost. IRRI's model of centralised research has been a dismal failure.
Farmer seed systems and community conservation can do wonders for food security if we would only support them and let them thrive. Various forms of farmer-controlled seed conservation and breeding activities exist in many counties in Asia, like in Thailand and the Philippines where thousands of farmers are growing local rice varieties and improving them, under their own terms, methods and ways of farming. Sadly, these initiatives are not only ignored by formal research institutions and governments, but also side swept in favour of quick techno-fixes. No wonder 50 years of Green Revolution, yet our food systems are in crisis with poverty and hunger rising across Asia.
New technologies and modern varieties are clearly not the answer. The best thing IRRI can do for rice is to close down and give the seeds it has collected, back to the farmers.
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