Nakorn Pathom, Thailand - For Thai rice researchers, there's nothing like a natural disaster to test a new variety.
In October, when widespread flooding left 640,000 hectares of agricultural land under water for weeks in central Thailand, farmers who had planted Hom Cholasit rice emerged Noah-like from the disaster, their crops intact.
“After that, there was a big demand for this variety,” said Theerayut Toojinda, a rice molecular specialist at the National Centre for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology (Biotec), at the Nakorn Pathom campus of Kasetsart University.
Hom Cholasit, a variety developed by Biotec four years ago using molecular selection and cross breeding, can survive under water for 24 days, making it well-suited to one of the symptoms of climate change -more flooding.
Unfortunately, it is not resilient to the brown plant hopper, a flaw that had limited its popularity among Thai rice farmers previously.
“No variety is all good,” Theerayut said. “You can't get everything.”
But some scientists are trying. Apichart Vanavichit, director of Kasetsart's Rice Science Centre, has been working for the past two years on a “super jasmine” rice variety that is resilient to submersion, diseases and insects.
Apichart was the Thai scientist who a decade ago located the aromatic gene in the DNA of jasmine rice, a good-smelling variety that Thailand is famed for.
He hopes to finish genotyping a new strain of flood-resilient, disease-resilient and bug-resilient jasmine by year-end. “Drought will be the last one,” Apichart said of his super-jasmine variety.
His current research program received a 10-million-baht (333,000 dollar) grant from the government's Agriculture Research and Development Agency for new equipment.
“It made me jump for joy,” Apichart said.
Not all rice researchers are so fortunate.
Although Thailand is the world's largest rice exporter, earning an estimated 6 billion dollars a year, the government's average annual expenditure on rice research is only about 16 million dollars.
Rice research intensity, measured by the amount spent compared with the overall value of the crop, has been on the decline in recent years despite the growing threats from climate change.
“In the 1990s we used to invest 0.94 percent, almost one percent, of the value of our rice crop into research,” said Nipon Poapongsakorn, president of the Thailand Development Research Institute. “Now it's dropped to something like 0.45 percent.”
The world's two largest rice growers, China and India, spend significantly more on rice research in efforts to boost productivity and meet domestic demand.
Thailand's political system does not lend itself to investment in research activities. Governments rarely survive their four-year terms before being dissolved or overthrown by coups, leading to rather short-sighted policies.
“The benefits of research are long-term, so politicians don't care,” Nipon said.
The short-term approach may alter with the growing impact from extreme weather events and rising relief costs, scientists hope.
For example, the government spent an estimated 300 million dollars to compensate farmers for crops lost in October's floods.
“If the government gave us 300 million dollars for research we could solve the long-term problems of drought and flooding,” Biotec's Theerayut said.
“What we need when it comes to climate change is to do everything quicker. It used to take eight years to develop a new variety; now it takes two to four but we need new technology to speed it up.”
Biotec not only lacks sufficient funding but in the near future it may lack scientists.
“Now the senior scientists are retiring and no young blood is replacing them,” Nipon warned. “That's because of the incentive system to go into research.”
Nipon has urged the government to raise the level of rice research intensity back to 1 per cent, and up to two percent in 10
years, if Thailand wishes to remain the world's top rice exporter.
“We have to push for quality rice in Thailand, and that will require more research,” he said. - Sapa-dpa