For every one billion people added to the global population, an additional 100 million tons of rice needs to be produced every year.
Nairobi, 30 June 2016: Rice is incredibly important for human beings. It is the daily staple for half the global population - more than 3.5 billion people, many of them food-insecure. Over 90 per cent of the world’s rice is produced and consumed in Asia. In all, over one billion people depend on rice production for their livelihoods.
With the global population set to rise to 9.6 billion by 2050 and rice production struggling to meet growing demand, something needs to be done. 2050 rice yields will decline up to 20 per cent compared with 2000, according to some sources. “It seems unlikely that the required increase in supply will be achievable by 2050,” says James Lomax, UNEP’s Agri-Food Programme Manager.
Global rice consumption is projected to increase from 450 million tons in 2011 to about 490 million tons in 2020 and to around 650 million tons by 2050. However, supply projections seem to agree that the global rice supply is unlikely to be able to meet this 44% projected growth in demand. The global rice area harvested increased by 1.38% per year between 1961 and 1977, but since then slowed to just 0.33% per year.
The slowdown is attributed to factors such as limited availability of new land, conversion of existing rice land, salinization, and increased water scarcity. Annual rice yield growth has also stagnated, falling from 2.2% during 1970-90 to less than 0.8% since then. Global supply growth can no longer keep pace with population growth, argue some.
The challenge is to develop mechanisms that create value for farmers to incentivize adoption of sustainable practices, whilst avoiding the pitfall of further marginalizing resource-poor small farmers. At the same time the system must create value (e.g. financial or reputational) for buyers in destination markets.
The Sustainable Rice Platform (SRP) www.sustainablerice.org is aiming to rise to this challenge. Co-convened by UNEP and the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI), SRP is a multi-stakeholder platform with 52 partner institutions, established in 2011 to promote sustainable and climate smart rice production.
Its main goal is to get one million farmers to adopt climate-smart sustainable best practices within five years (2016-2021).
SRP’s mission is to provide private, non-profit and public actors in the global rice sector with sustainable production standards, outreach and incentive mechanisms.
World's first standard for sustainable rice
In October 2015 SRP launched the world's first standard for sustainable rice, which set new and more efficient standards for rice cultivation.
It is the first agricultural standard to measure impact from the word “go”.
Performance Indicators within the standard enable farmers and market supply chain actors to gauge the sustainability of any rice system, and to monitor and reward progress towards full sustainability.
“The SRP is a true Public-Private-Partnership that highlights the importance of convening stakeholders from government, civil society, research and the private sector around the need for a transformation to a sustainable and climate-smart rice sector. As the world's most consumed and, some might say, 'politicized' grain crop, UNEP is particularly proud to be driving the SRP together with our co-convenor IRRI and partners in the private sector, research community and civil society. Together we aim to contribute towards innovative, practical solutions at both field and policy levels in countries where rice plays such a critical role in society,” says Lomax, who chairs the SRP’s Advisory Committee.
The development of the SRP Standard drew on global experience in other sustainable commodity initiatives such as sugarcane, cotton, coffee and palm oil. It comprises 46 requirements ranging from productivity, food safety, worker health and labour rights, to biodiversity and women’s empowerment.
The Standard aims to deliver:
- A credible, robust and feasible benchmark for farmers, that serves as an objective definition of sustainability in the context of rice
- A mechanism for passing benefits through the value chain
- A mechanism to drive large-scale farmer adoption.
Challenges
UNEP’s Wyn Ellis, who serves as the SRP’s Coordinator, identifies several rice sustainability challenges facing the global sector, including:
- Resource use efficiency (land, water, agrochemicals, labour)
- Global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions (CH4, N2O, CO2)
- Impacts on ecosystem services
- Soil impacts (e.g. salinization, arsenic)
- Pest and disease impacts
- Climate change impacts.
Use of resources (particularly water and agrochemicals) and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from flooded rice paddies are of particular concern. Globally, about 100 million hectares (ha) of (harvested) rice area are irrigated, accounting for some 34-43 percent of the world’s irrigation water. The imperative for improving water-use efficiency is further underlined by the sharply increasing incidence of local water scarcity, even in irrigated rice areas. It has been estimated that by 2025, 15-20 million ha of irrigated rice will suffer some degree of water scarcity.
Total fertilizer consumption has increased for most countries in the last 50 years, and this is also the case for rice. Based on the most recent crop-specific fertilizer consumption statistics, the world’s rice fields receive some 15 percent (or 24.3 million tons) of global fertilizer use – the same amount as the world’s wheat and maize fields combined.
Health and environmental impacts of excessive use of fertilizers in intensive systems are compounded by low fertilizer use efficiencies; poor application timing can result in only 20-40 percent or less of applied nitrogen fertilizer captured by the crop. Much of this will enter waterways, disrupting river and coastal ecosystems as well as increasing risks to human and animal health.
Why a Standard?
“[Having a] Standard makes the sustainability claim credible and tradeable. It helps communicate the claim throughout the supply chain, from producers to consumers. And in that way the Standard creates value for all actors,” explains Wyn Ellis.
Most requirements have several possible levels of performance to allow use of the standard both for assessment and as a directional improvement tool to promote farmer adoption. A scoring system allows for stepwise compliance with the 46 requirements in order to encourage and reward progress.
Following the 2011-14 start-up phase, SRP is now undertaking a multi-country field validation study, which will form the basis for a major upscaling and post-2017 roll-out phase.
“Following the launch of the standard, and an announcement by Mars Foods committing the company to 100 per cent sustainable sourcing for all its rice by 2020, we are seeing a clear uptick in interest among European buyers in purchasing sustainable rice, which in turn has translated into corresponding upstream interest among their own suppliers as well as competitors,” says Ellis, adding:
“It’s especially important to note also that, learning lessons from other commodity supply chains, the SRP Standard is not just a tool for compliance; it is a tool to drive improvement; this distinction is an important one as the SRP’s approach supports the development objective of UNEP and of our government and civil society partners.”
For more information, please contact: James Lomax: James.Lomax@unep.org
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