A groundbreaking study published on the 9th in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS) indicates that even a minimal increase in global temperatures will reduce rice production in Asia. Over the past 25 years, rice production in many rice-producing regions of Asia has decreased by 10% to 20%, and the trend of declining rice production due to global warming means that more people will fall into poverty and hunger.
Researchers from the United States, the Philippines, and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) examined the impact of rising daily minimum and maximum temperatures between 1994 and 1999 on the yields of 227 irrigated rice paddies in six major rice-producing countries: China, India, Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam. The results showed that the main cause of the reduced rice yield was the increase in daily minimum temperatures.
"When minimum temperatures rise, or when nights get warmer, rice yields will decrease," said Wilshire of the University of California, San Diego, the report's lead author. "To some extent, higher daytime temperatures will increase rice yields, but future yield reductions caused by higher nighttime temperatures may outweigh the gains from higher daytime temperatures because nighttime temperatures rise faster."
He pointed out that if daytime temperatures rise too high, rice yields will also begin to be affected. If humans cannot change the way rice is produced or develop heat-resistant rice varieties, rice production will decrease over the next decade or so due to rising day and night temperatures: "This situation will worsen as temperatures will rise further by the middle of this century." Rice is a vital global grain, consumed by approximately three billion people daily. Of the world's one billion poorest people, six hundred million are Asians whose staple food is rice; a decline in rice production means even more people will fall into poverty and hunger.
This is a series of the latest research findings pointing to climate change making it increasingly difficult for the global population to feed themselves. In 2004, another research team found that for every degree Celsius increase in nighttime temperature in the Philippines, rice production would decrease by 10%.
–Source: Liberty Times
