Scientists in China have developed rice strains that are tolerant to saltwater in a bid to ensure food security as sea levels rise from climate change.
Jinghai district in northern China is not known as a rice-growing paradise. Located along the coast of the Bohai Sea, over half of the region’s land is made of salty, alkaline soil which makes crop farming close to impossible. Yet, last autumn, Jinghai produced 100 hectares of rice.
The secret to the bountiful harvest is new salt-tolerant rice strains developed by Chinese scientists in the hope of ensuring food security that has been threatened by rising sea levels, increasing grain demand and supply chain disruptions.
According to statistics website Statista, China had the highest rice consumption in the world, consuming around 149 million metric tons of rice between 2020-2021 with this figure was forecasted to increase in the coming years as population and wealth grows.
In China, both rice and noodles are staple foods, but the consumption patterns depend on the region.
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Rice is consumed more in the south while noodles are more popular in the north. Typically, rice is served plain to be eaten with other dishes, but there are also other variations of rice such as congees and fried rice, which can be also consumed on their own.
Known as “seawater rice” because it is grown in salty soil near the sea, the strains were created by over-expressing a gene from selected wild rice that is more resistant to saline and alkali soils.
Test fields in Tianjin, the municipality that encompasses Jinghai, recorded a yield of 4.6 metric tons per acre last year, higher than the national average for the production of standard rice varieties.
The breakthrough comes as China searches for ways to secure domestic food and energy supplies as global warming and geopolitical tensions make imports less reliable. The nation has around 20% of the world’s population to feed with less than 10% of the Earth’s arable land.
China has been studying salt-tolerant rice since at least the 1950s. But the term “seawater rice” only started to gain mainstream attention in recent years after the late Yuan Longping, once the nation’s top agricultural scientists began researching the idea in 2012.
“We could feed 80 million more people” with salt-tolerant rice, Yuan said in a documentary broadcast in 2020. “Agricultural researchers like us should shoulder the responsibility to safeguard food security,” he told a local newspaper in 2018.
Rice is a popular food throughout Asia, and many Asian countries are leading production as well as consumption levels worldwide.
These include India, Indonesia, Bangladesh, and Vietnam. Despite the consistently increasing domestic production of rice in China, the country was still the biggest rice importer in the world.