How rice farmers clean up the environment conserve biodiversity, raise more food, make higher profits
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The political stability and economic development of Asia depend more on an assured supply of rice than any other factor endogenous to Asia. With that supply, real development can start. The emergence of the world's first national scale market economy in southern China during the Song Dynasty about 1000 years ago was triggered after short duration photoperiod insensitive rice varieties were brought and distributed by government policy from Vietnam (Barker and Herdt 1985). These variet ies and their management practices also extended to farmers by government policy allowed two crops of rice where only one grew before (Bray 1982). In the Green Revolution that followed south China outgrew north China for more than 500 sustainable years. One peripheral side effect of the market engine powering that take off was the gradual integration of tiny towns far to the west, by slow boat and caravan, into their first world economic system; this integration in turn fueled the Ital ian Renaissance (McNeill 1982). Rice supply is not the sole factor in Asian development, but without that supply governments dissolve, market trade collapses, the environment is plundered, and development degenerates to survival. Total rice production in an Asian market locality is not a sufficient guarantee of supply to the people living there (Sen 1981) but it is a necessary precondition. Asian self-sufficiency in rice has been taken for granted for about 20 years, with total pro duction from the mid 1960s through the early 1980s staying ahead of population growth by a comfortable margin. For the bulk of Asia that is tropical and sub-tropical much of that margin came from production advances in irrigated rice systems pioneered in the Philippines at the International Rice Research Institute.