PH Rice Sufficiency & The Question Of Hybrid Rice
That would have been via hybrid rice,
but that Incredible Dream just died.
The romantic novel For Dreams Must Die was written by Zoilo M Galang[1] about PH national hero Jose Rizal and Leonor Rivera, his/her first love. They were cousins, and love was mercilessly killed – he went to Europe to study cultures other than Filipino, and her parents married her off to a foreigner, a railroad engineer. She died pining for his love; he died with love pining for his country.
For dreams must dieis the exact if unintended story of hybrid rice in the hands of the Hybrid Rice Development Consortium, HRDC, an organization attached to IRRI that “promotes innovation and access to new germplasm and information on hybrid rice technology[2].” Today, Monday, 26 October 2020, on my composite image above, on the HRDC webpage still appears “The Philippines could be rice sufficient by 2020” – the HRDC needs a magnificent new dream! (The HRDC also needs a damned good Editor and/or Webmaster.)
Not to worry – I am a dreamer myself. And so I am dreaming for HRDC to help provide and promote my country’s hybrid rice program to become rice sufficient by 2025, 5 years from now.
But hybrid rice cannot be just high-yielding;
it must be Q&Q, Quantity and Quality!
How will HRDC encourage Filipino farmers to plant more hybrid rice than ever? The HRDC experts will have to satisfy families’ demands for Q&Q: grain (appearance), cooking, eating, and nutritional.
I like my cooked rice grains with the following qualities (my guide here is the 21 April 2017 paper “Comparisons Of Cooking And Eating Qualities Of Two Indica Rice Cultivars[3]” (Indian Bashmati 385 and Chinese Hua Jing Xian 74), authored by Chinese rice scientists Nnaemeka Emmanuel Okpala et al and published online in Journal of Rice Research. So I learn we Asian rice eaters desire grains that when cooked have:
1. extensive elongation, say 100%
2. higher amylose content, which means better eating quality
3. low pasting temperature, related to good cooking quality
4. high viscosity, with grains having a better appearance
5. bigger airspaces and more pronounced starch granules, requiring less water and resulting in faster cooking.
So, if you have those 5 qualities in your hybrid rice, the world of rice eaters will love you, first of all me!
But that is only as far as the Quality of the Rice Grain is concerned. What about the Quality of Life of the Rice Farmers?
The question of hybrid rice cannot be dissociated from the question of low net incomes of rice farmers. The PH Department of Agriculture must see to it that all rice farmers become entrepreneurial in their aim and actions: To mind their own business! But not at the expense of others.
Above all, the profits of the production of hybrid rice must be packaged in such a way that the poor rice farmers emerge from poverty into prosperity and remain there as long as they work!@517
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