Rice may be the most important food crop in the world. Rice grains provide nourishment and calories for 3 billion of the planet's people every day, most of them in Asia. Thailand is the world's largest rice exporter, with half its farmland under paddy cultivation and 40% of jobs in agriculture.
That is why the most important global scientific meeting in rice breeding and cultivation, the International Rice Congress 2014, is being held in Bangkok this week. More than a thousand rice scientists will meet to discuss the latest strategies to tackle pests and diseases, to increase rice productivity and feed a growing global population.
This latter issue may well be the biggest challenge of all. We have to produce food for a human population heading toward 9.5 to 10 billion over the next 35 years. We probably therefore have to double overall food production, but do so without increasing the area of cropland in order to spare rainforests and other remaining natural ecosystems. This is already proving difficult, as the high rates of tropical deforestation in some Asian countries show.
We also have to make agriculture more sustainable overall — to reduce the environmental damage done by fertilisers, pesticides and other chemical inputs. And we have to do all this within the context of a rapidly-changing climatic situation where global temperatures may well have risen by 2C or more by mid-century. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicts that this temperature change will lead to increased droughts, heat waves, floods, pests and diseases.
Asia is the epicentre of this challenge — it contains the most densely populated large areas, and is also growing most rapidly economically. Most Asian countries will have achieved developed world status within the 2050 timeframe, and will therefore increase their food and energy consumption substantially. Asia is also of course the main rice producing and consuming region.
It has been estimated that for every 1 billion people added to the world's population, 100 million more tonnes of paddy rice need to be produced annually — using less land, water, nitrogen and energy, and resulting in less greenhouse gas emissions, of which rice is a currently a major source.
Crop genetics comes into every aspect of this picture. Changing the biology of rice plants offers the chance to combat major and emerging diseases, to tackle pests with fewer and less toxic pesticides, to increase water- and nitrogen-use efficiency and to increase overall productivity to feed more people on less land.
Familiar tools include conventional cross-breeding and hybridisation, marker-assisted selection and mutagenesis. However, in order to be able to access the widest-possible pool of genetic material it will be essential for rice breeders to be able to use transgenic techniques (so-called GMOs) as well as conventional breeding.
Unfortunately, the use of these molecular biotechnology techniques, which are improving all the time in accuracy, variety and usability, remains controversial.
Indeed politics can surely be the only reason why, after two decades of rice breeding involving many projects using molecular techniques for genetic improvement, there is still currently no commercially available rice anywhere in the world that might attract this dreaded moniker "GMO".
Even though there were an estimated 175 million hectares of genetically modified crops grown worldwide in 2013, none of these hectares of officially approved GMOs were of rice.
This does not mean that there are not very promising GMO rice projects in the pipeline, however. In West Africa, field trials of NEWEST rice — standing for Nitrogen Efficient, Water Efficient, Salt-Tolerant — are proceeding well, and could promise larger rice harvests using less water and chemicals than at present for smallholder farmers in sub-Saharan Africa.
At the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) in the Philippines, scientists are hoping to develop a way to take the so-called C4 photosynthetic pathway found in maize and integrate it into rice, which currently uses the less efficient C3 type photosynthesis. If successful, this could offer a step-change in rice productivity.
Perhaps the best-known GMO rice project being undertaken for humanitarian purposes is "Golden Rice", also being developed by IRRI in the Philippines. This aims to help address vitamin A-deficiency, a serious problem in Asia, which worldwide kills or leaves blind around 2 million children annually.
Unfortunately, GMO projects always seem to attract opposition from anti-GMO activists, and Golden Rice has proven no exception. A campaign against it is currently being waged by the powerful Netherlands-based NGO Greenpeace, and in August last year different activist groups vandalised and destroyed a Golden Rice field trial in the Philippines.
Just this week in Bangkok, timed to coincide with the International Rice Congress 2014 scientific meeting, Greenpeace is launching a new anti-GMO report insisting that transgenic techniques are unnecessary. This is clearly untrue for Golden Rice, which simply could not have been created any other way.
None of these potentially life-saving projects could go ahead if GMOs are banned, as many activists seek.
This debate has great resonance in Thailand, which stood to benefit from the introduction of virus-resistant GMO papaya in 2005. This is the same technology that saved the Hawaiian papaya industry from virtual extinction in the mid-1990s after the rapid spread of papaya ringspot virus on the islands.
But when researchers employed by the Thai government attempted to bring virus-resistant papaya to Thailand, Greenpeace successfully caused a media firestorm by discovering that some seeds were already in cultivation by farmers before official approval. The project was stopped, and the scientists were forced to destroy their own work.
As a result, all other crop biotechnology fieldwork was also stopped, and the deadlock has still not been resolved to this day.
It is important for all voices to be heard in important debates about issues like GMOs, Greenpeace's included. However, it is also important for the voices of activists not to drown out the voices of academics.
As a speaker at the International Rice Congress 2014, my main concern is that rice is too important a crop to be locked out of the biotechnology revolution.
For the sake of 3 billion rice consumers, and for the sake of the world's environment, we can and must use this technology where appropriate to make farming more productive and more environmentally sustainable.
Mark Lynas is a British environmentalist and author. His latest book is entitled, 'The God Species: Saving the Planet in the Age of Humans'.