East Asian Cultural Studies Tour

Willie A. Brown, Jr.

East Asian Cultural Studies Tour

June 9, 2006

Topic of the Day: Rice Production in China

Rice has fed more people than any other crop has for thousands of years. The ancient Indian name for rice, Dhanya, means “sustenance for the human race.” Especially in much of Asia, life without rice has been unthinkable. Rice feeds more than half of the world population, but most rice is consumed within ten miles of where it is produced.

Rice is the world’s single most important food crop and a primary food source for more than a third of the world’s population. More than 90% of the world’s rice is grown and consumed in Asia where about 60% of the earth’s people live. Rice is planted on about 146 million hectares annually, or 11% of the world’s cultivated land. Wheat covers a slightly larger land area, but much of the wheat crop is fed to animals. Rice is the only major cereal crop that is consumed almost exclusively by humans. In the densely populated countries of Asia, especially Bangladesh, China, India, Indonesia, Iran, Japan, Korea, Pakistan and Sri Lanka, rice is the most important staple food. As much as 80% of the daily caloric intake of people in the Asiatic countries is derived from rice. Rice is also consumed in the form of noodles, puffed rice, fermented sweet rice, and snack foods made by extrusion cooking. It is used in making beer, rice wine and vinegar. Some Asian desserts require the use of glutinous or sweet rice, which consists entirely of amylopectin and amylase (10-30%). Rice oil extracted from the bran is rich in vitamin E and has received considerable attention by researchers as a source of oil for the developing countries.

Rice is probably the world’s most diverse crop. It is grown as far north as Manchuria in China (50°) and as far South as Uruguay and New South Wales, Australia (around 35° S). It grows at elevations of more than 3000m in Nepal and Bhutan and 3m below sea level in Kerala, India. Rice is cultivated under five major ecosystems namely irrigated, rain-fed lowland, upland, deepwater, and tidal wetlands. About 80 million hectares or 55% of the world’s rice land is irrigated and has adequate water supply throughout the growing season. In much of this area, rainfall supplements irrigation water. Seventy-five percent of the world’s rice production comes from irrigated areas.

Like wheat, corn, rye, oats, and barley, rice belongs to Gramineae or the grass family. The genus Oryza probably originated at least 130 million years ago and spread as a wild grass in Gondwanaland, the super continent that eventually broke and drifted apart to become Asia, Africa, the Americas, Australia, and Antarctica. Today’s species of genus Oryza are distributed in all of these continents except Antarctica. The cultivated rice Oryza sativa was perhaps domesticated about 10, 000 years ago. The domestication process may have occurred independently at several locations in a broad belt extending from the foothills of the Himalayas to Vietnam and Southern China. This dispersal, along with farmer selection over several millennia, has led to about 120,000 different varieties of O.sativa, the Asian cultivated rice.

China, the world’s largest rice-producing country, accounts for the bulk of the 2005-2006 global production increase, with China’s rice production projected at 127.4 million tons.

China produced 188 million tons followed by India (110 million tons), Indonesia (47 million tons), Bangladesh (29 million tons), Thailand (20 million tons), and Vietnam (19 million tons). Only about 12 million tons or 3.5% of the world’s rice production is traded internationally.

The crop is 2-million-tons larger than a year earlier, but well below the record 140.5 million tons produced in 1997-1998. China expanded rice area 2 percent to 29 million hectares in 2005-2006, the largest since 2000-2001. The yield is projected to be fractionally below a year earlier due to some weather problems in major growing areas. Despite the larger crop, rice supplies in China in 2005-2006 are expected to decline for the sixth consecutive year, as consumption is projected to exceed production by almost 8 million tons.

In 2005, China maintained the grain policy it adopted a year earlier that provided direct subsidies to farmers to grow rice and eliminated some taxes on grain producers. In early 2004, China reversed its grain policy that had been designed in 1999 to lower grain production and reduce stocks from excessive levels accumulated after the mid-1990s. Consumer prices for rice rose substantially in China in the second half of 2003-2004, as a result of tighter grain supplies. China responded to the higher rice prices by changing its grain policy, increasing rice imports, reducing rice exports and releasing government rice stocks in some provinces. The combination of higher grain prices, and__ to a lesser degree__the policy changes, boosted rice area production seven percent in 2004-2005.

China is virtually self-sufficient in rice, with imports and exports currently accounting for a very small share of total supply and use. China was a major rice exporter most years from the mid-1960s to 2003, typically exporting up to 1-2 million tons of rice annually. The late 1980s and mid-1990s__when China was a net-importer__were exceptions. Due to tight supplies in 2004, China sharply reduced exports and began__for the first time in a decade__importing substantial amounts of regular milled white rice from Southeast Asia. Prior to 2004, in most years China’s imports were nearly all premium fragrant rice (jasmine) from Thailand purchased primarily for high-income urban consumers. Since 2005, China has purchased almost exclusively fragrant rice__mostly from Thailand__ and has not returned to the global market for non-fragrant rice. China has announced it intends to remain self-sufficient in rice and will likely continue to export a small amount of rice annually.