UC Davis plant geneticist Pamela Ronald wants to create rice varieties that can survive in harsher conditions, including more frequent droughts.
Researchers at the International Rice Research Institute here say that they know how to create rice varieties resistant to the insects but that budget cuts have prevented them from doing so.
In one talk with a Buddhist monk the subject is deforestation and its consequences, as trees are cut down to create rice fields.
Dr. Ronald P. Cantrell, director of the International Rice Research Institute in the Philippines, said the decoding of the rice genome would "have a tremendous impact on the poor" by enabling plant breeders to create rice varieties with better nutrients and growing qualities.
"Give me 10 years and we'll be back," said Tin Maung Thann, an adviser to a newly created rice industry association and the president of Myanmar Egress, a nonprofit development group.
Chinese geneticists are identifying the functions of specific genes and will soon create rice with fewer stalks per plant, but twice as many kernels per stalk, for example, or rice that needs less water or rice with a higher protein content.
Foods like carrots and sweet potatoes have high levels of the vitamin A precursor beta-carotene; when humans eat these foods (or beta-carotene capsules,) a percentage of the ingested beta-carotene is converted to vitamin A. Using our knowledge of biochemistry, would it be possible to create rice that has high beta-carotene levels?
The results also indicate that TGMS lines which could be used as female parents were different from the other groups making them good candidates used to create rice hybrids having high yields.
Efforts are also being made to create rice plants with superior yield traits and resistance to biotic and abiotic stresses using genetic engineering techniques.
Throughout 2016, Hargreaves also created Rice-Ko, a series of recreations of Rothko works made entirely of different colored rice and Staff Meals of the World, a website consisting of a photographic and textual exploration of what workplaces around the world feed their staff and why they do so.
