Philippines pushes hybrid rice to solve soaring food prices

Farmers will be encouraged to shift to hybrid varieties of rice as the Philippines attempts to copy the China model for rice self-sufficiency, the agriculture department said Friday.
Though Philippine rice production reached an all-time high of 16.24 million tonnes last year, Manila has been scrambling to boost stocks and raise yields to avoid the sort of food riots that has hit other countries. The price of the grain, the staple food for 90 million Filipinos as well as half of humanity, has nearly doubled amid rising global demand and weather-related production setbacks.
Agriculture Secretary Arthur Yap said he is to ask President Gloria Arroyo to approve a subsidy programme to promote higher-yielding hybrid seeds as part of government efforts to attain rice self-sufficiency by 2010. Manila now imports about eight percent of the country's daily consumption requirement of 33,000 tonnes.
Pioneered by China, the world's top rice producer and consumer, hybrids are bred by crossing three genetically different varieties to produce a rice plant that grows faster and produces yields of up to 20 percent higher. More than half of China's rice farms now use hybrid rice.
Farmers need to buy new seeds to plant every year, which raises costs, because using seeds from the previous hybrid crop are unreliable. Hybrid seeds cost double that of the varieties now being used. While they cost more, hybrid seeds yield up to seven tonnes of paddy rice per hectare (2.47 acres) compared to only 4.5 tonnes a hectare using so-called inbred seeds now favoured by Filipino farmers, Yap told reporters Friday.
"It would be more sensible for government to expand subsidies for hybrid seeds to encourage agribusiness companies to produce more of these hybrid seeds and for a lot more farmers to use them," Yap said.
"We will also encourage farmers to use organic fertilisers, which are cheaper and promote sustainable agriculture," he added. The government earlier this week announced a billion-dollar investment in the farm sector over three years to boost yields. Yap said the agriculture department wants to encourage farmers to use hybrid seeds in up to 250,000 hectares of rice farms this year.