By Craig Cormick
More than one-third of the world's population depends on rice to sustain life.
Yet the world is only just able to produce enough rice to feed these estimated 1.75 billion people. The rice-consuming population is growing each year by about 100 million.
If rice production cannot rise by at least 2.5% a year, millions will starve.
Scientists at the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) in the Philippines are tackling the problem by developing new strains with increased yields.
For the millions of small farmers dependent on rice, there is little escape from the tyranny of the highly labour-intensive crop. With small rice yields, they can only manage to feed themselves. By investing in fertilisers and limited machinery, they produce more, but as rice yields increase, prices drop and they are in danger of being caught in a credit trap.
It is a problem that the scientists at IRRI acknowledge. Dr James Litsinger of the Entomology Division said, "Rice is a political crop. The government keeps the price low so that the urban poor can afford it."
Governments regulate rice supplies, buying big when it is cheap and keeping the price low when it would otherwise be more expensive.
"In Liberia the government fell over rice. In Japan the rice farmers are very unionised. Governments can't afford to raise the cost of rice", Litsinger said.
Yet Dr Eleazer Hunt, a visiting researcher in the Agro-ecology Division at IRRI, said the institute's priority had to be to increase rice quantities.
He said that many millions of people were already on the border of malnutrition, and while there was a certain tyranny of labour associated with rice, it was the only hope of feeding many millions of people.
The underlying problems of alleviating the poverty of subsistence farmers are of course more complex than simply increasing the yields of a single crop.
"The issue isn't one of enough foodstuffs or amount of nutrition", Hunt said. "It is one of resources.
"The statistics I like to quote are that for every child in the USA, the resources they consume are equal to 37 children in a developing country."
He said that while developing countries needed to increase their use of resources, developed countries need to decrease theirs.
Another problem for small farmers was the use of agricultural land for cash crops. A classic example occurred in the Philippines in the 1960s, when major areas of land were converted for sugar cane; in the late 1970s the bottom fell out of the market, leaving many people destitute.
The average rice plot in the Philippines is three to four hectares, yet in countries like India it was often less than one hectare per family.
"We ultimately have to look at rice production at family level", Hunt said.
IRRI's stated goal is "improved well-being of present and future generations of rice farmers and consumers, particularly those with low incomes".
It tries to do this not only through research aimed at increasing yields, but also through developing simple and practical agricultural equipment and through programs such as the "Women in Rice Farming" program.
The problems are immense: degrading land, decreasing land availability, and an extra 100 million people a year to feed.
Yet Dr Bernardo, the deputy director general for international programs at IRRI, said, "We feel confident that, given support, we can develop the necessary technologies".