Rice is a staple for almost half the people on this planet, making it one of the most important staple foods. Yet behind the unassuming bowl of rice, pressure is building. The International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) anticipates that rice production needs to increase by 25% in the next 25 years in order to meet global demand.
However, the global rice sector is entering a period of turbulence, with yields stagnating after decades of intensive cultivation that have degraded soils and depleted water resources. Climate shocks, labour shortages, rising production costs and shifting policies are reshaping how rice is grown, traded and priced, exposing deep structural weaknesses in an already fragile sector.
Rice is integral to global food systems, with 1.5 billion people depending on rice for their livelihoods, mostly smallholders in the APAC region. According to a 2024 report by the International Finance Corporation (IFC), some 144 million farm households are involved in rice production and mostly grow the crop on less than two hectares of land.
These unprecedented reverberations are felt most in the Asia Pacific region, which accounts for most of global rice production and consumption. But beyond that, rice is an important symbol in Asia, symbolising fertility, prosperity and life itself. It is more than a dietary staple or a key agricultural commodity; it sits at the centre of the region’s culture and food security.
“Rice is legendary. For generations upon generations – perhaps as long as 10,000 or even 50,000 years – people have been eating rice. Conditions may have been challenging even then, but today we are facing an onslaught from climate change,” said Dr Yvonne Pinto, director general of IRRI.
At the same time, rice production itself exerts a significant environmental toll. The enduring traditional image of flooded paddy fields that define much of Asia’s rice landscape create anaerobic conditions where methane-producing bacteria flourish.
The challenges facing rice production is at a critical point and the issue is stark: without the right actions, there may not even be rice tomorrow.
“People will continue to eat rice for many generations to come. The opportunity before us is to ask what we have in our toolkit to improve how rice is produced – to make it healthier and safer for planetary health, rather than undermining it – while enabling farmers to continue farming. We depend on rice as a staple, and there simply is not enough of it to make careless decisions about how it is produced,” said Pinto.
Against this backdrop, technology is knitting together solutions ranging from stress-tolerant varieties to alternative irrigation practices to digital advisory tools, to strengthen the productivity and resilience of rice systems. Yet adoption remains stubbornly low, constrained by barriers such as cost and access.
“Now, the sector is reaching a moment where innovation – driven by science-led partnerships, policy and entrepreneurship – is helping to reimagine how rice is grown in ways that are more climate-smart, efficient and inclusive,” said Beverley Postma, executive director of Grow Asia.
Paddies in progress: Tackling water, yield, and climate challenges
Modern rice farming faces multiple pressures, from high water consumption and methane emissions to fluctuating yields, pest pressures, and the economic vulnerabilities of smallholder farmers. Rice cultivation is evolving with several solutions reshaping traditional practices and addressing obstacles in practically.
With traditional rice cultivation, a whopping 40% of the world’s irrigation water is used for rice production. There is a central focus on water and cultivation management with techniques such as alternate wetting and drying (AWD) allow farmers to periodically drain rice paddies, reducing water use while cutting methane emissions by up to 30%.
Another potential solution to address these challenges is direct seeded rice (DSR). According to IRRI, DSR is seen to be one of the most efficient, sustainable, and economically viable rice production systems, able to reduce water use by 12 to 35 per cent.
“Direct seeding is really critical, because water availability is diminishing. So direct seeding with AWD, those two combined can reduce the amount of water you need by 50%, and so that makes it a much more sustainable proposition for farmers. They can sustain production, ensure they have the best varieties, have the best advice on how to implement the technologies, and have pretty robust way of coping with the shifts and challenges they face,” said Pinto.
According to Pinto, a DSR system has demonstrated that farmers are able to halve their seed use, reduce fertiliser use by 20 per cent, and use 35 per cent less water.
“Imagine the cost savings. All of these things make it cheaper for [farmers] to produce more with less. That’s the tagline – cheaper for them to produce more with less. That’s the secret to solving our critical problem.”
With extreme weather events happening more often, farmers are encouraged to adopt digital solutions to help them mitigate the losses. Vinaseed Chairwoman, Nguyen Thi Tra My, stressed that applying science and technology was now a vital necessity during a dialogue between the Vietnamese government and farmers December.
“In the past, farming meant watching the sky, the land and the clouds; now it means watching data and figures.”
Vinaseed, a subsidiary of the PAN Group, is a crop seed production and trading company from Vietnam with its core business in rice. Over the past two years, it has witnessed how technology has become more integrated into production.
Nguyen said the firm has encouraged the adoption of technology across six areas of the Mekong Delta over the last three years. The initiative has steadily grown, aiming to cover 50,000 hectares by 2026, more than double this year’s 20,000 hectares. By doing so, it has enabled farmers to make decisions based on data rather than intuition.
Reliable data is difficult to obtain in the rice sector, where smallholder farmers dominate production, even as demand for better data grows more urgent. Earth observation company EarthDaily, which has been rolling out a 10-satellite constellation with high-resolution imagery capabilities, believes its technology can overcome the challenges of monitoring rice.
As rice is typically grown in humid, cloud-heavy conditions, is has been difficult to capture from satellites. Furthermore, the smaller fields pose additional challenges for imaging.
The company’s new constellation overcomes the challenges with daily revisit and its high-resolution addressing challenges in humid environments and smallholder farms. The improved data and analytics capabilities could transform how smallholder farms are supported, providing insights into crop health, water use, and soil conditions.
Rice farming faces a complex mix of challenge and progress requires innovations across multiple fronts. And solutions do not always need to involve space engineering, many effective solutions remain rooted in practical, down-to-earth approaches.
Traditionally, gathering reliable farm-level data in rice has been difficult due to fragmented landholdings and limited infrastructure. However, Olam Agri has developed affordable water sensors, making data accessible to farmers.
“One of the most exciting innovations is around water sensors. Early water sensors cost $75 plus $35 upkeep, which was prohibitive. By collaborating with chip manufacturers, we’ve developed DIY sensors for less than $7, and manufactured versions for under $9. These sensors monitor water automatically, allowing farmers to focus on cultivation while providing accurate data for sustainability and carbon reporting,” said Paul Nicholson, head of rice research and sustainability at Olam Agri.
This reflects a broader shift toward practical, low-cost technologies that can scale across smallholder farms. By making accurate data accessible, it supports wider sustainability goals by validate climate-smart practices, quantify carbon reduction, and assess the effectiveness of interventions.
Nicholson also stressed the growing demand for data to demonstrate impact to the relevant stakeholders.
“Governments, donors, and customers want evidence that investments lead to real change, so we also collect a large amount of data to demonstrate impact on the ground,” he said.
Plant breeding and varietal development are also playing a growing role in efforts to reduce rice’s environmental footprint while building resilience and stabilising yields. Recently, a multi-institutional study conducted in Bangladesh found that pairing reduced nitrogen use with low-emission rice varieties could cut emissions without compromising yield.
It conducted multi-location field trials across non-saline and coastal saline soils over consecutive dry and wet seasons. They found that selecting the right rice variety was one of the most effective ways to lower methane emissions. The research demonstrated that simple and scalable interventions could make rice cultivation more sustainable, helping farmers meet both productivity and environmental goals.
Like much of agriculture, one-size-fits-all solutions rarely work, and rice farming needs approaches tailored to local realities. In December, 31 new rice varieties developed by India’s National Agricultural Research and Extension System (NARES) and IRRI were rolled out in India. The approved varieties were developed to fit India’s diverse eco landscape, adapted for irrigated ecosystems, rainfed lowlands, direct-seeded rice (DSR) systems, and aerobic and early transplanted areas.
According to IRRI, several of the varieties are also stress-tolerant, delivering 10 to 30 per cent higher yields than traditional types even under drought or flood conditions.
Pinto highlighted the growing importance understanding the soil microbiome in building resilience in rice farming. She believed that additional gains can be achieved by understanding the complex networks of microbes in the soil that help plants resist drought and other stresses.
“We can deliver some resilience through genetics. We can deliver some resilience through the farming practices and water conservation techniques. And we think we can deliver more resilience by looking at the environment, particularly the soil microbiology.
“It’s such a big, complex field that nobody’s really engaged in. There’s misconception and even misunderstanding of it,” said Pinto.
She highlighted that advances in computational biology are allowing researchers to map these microbial networks, which can help in identifying which species maintain critical functions and how they interact with the rice plants.
With a better understanding of the soil microbiome, it could also impact another important area – biologicals. While some products are already on the market, Pinto noted that many work without clear scientific understanding of the whys.
Research into the microbiome, could help determine when and where biologicals are most effective, enhancing their impact while ensuring they are safe. Furthermore, a better understanding of the microbiome can ensure biological solutions are targeted to local needs.
“What is very clear about biologicals is you can’t take one biological and distributed across the world. It needs to be more locally tailored based on the farming system, the ecology, the way rice is produced in that part of the world, in that country, or even in that district,” said Pinto.
Slow to take root
Even as proof builds around practices that are practical and scalable, progress on adoption has been stubbornly low and uneven. Pinto emphasised that meaningful gains would require sweeping changes across the sector.
“If mitigation is our objective, which means less methane, therefore less climatic constraint, we have to do it on a landscape level. We need millions of farmers doing it. Of the 100 million producing it, we need at least half of them doing it.”
She added that adoption was no where near a number that would move the needle. To enable widespread transition, farmers must have access to credit and finance.
“We’ve got to enable farmers to make that transition, and the only way we can safeguard them is to make credit and finance available to them so they can invest in it. That might be in-kind. It could be us paying to provide them with seed and train them until they get their first couple of crops, and then they get the savings, and then they make the money. Or it’s about finance coming from banks to farmers, or it’s about governments providing subsidies to farmers to access the inputs to investment.”
Pinto said formal financing from financial institutions was the most sustainable option as it provides stability and long-term viability. On the other hand, subsidies are costly for governments and difficult to sustain over time. In-kind contributions, meanwhile, depend on grants and donations, which are inherently uncertain.
She highlighted that with major funding reductions, reliance on aid becomes increasingly unrealistic.
“Can we really rely on those to preserve our food system? We’ve got to create stability in what is a very vulnerable, fragile system. It’s critical. We’ve got these uncertainties that relate to geopolitics, uncertainties related to weather, uncertainties related to the lifestyle for farmers to enable them to succeed, because every time they get an extreme weather event, they’re having to step back into and respond to it.”
Even with funding in place, Song Saran, CEO of Amru Rice, said significant challenges remain. Over the past decade, the company has focused on sustainability and value addition, notably by bringing Cambodian organic rice to international markets. Saran noted that gaps in understanding and awareness among farmers continue to hinder wider adoption of sustainable practices.
“From our experience, the challenge is not funding alone. Farmers are often reluctant to drain fields twice under AWD practices. If farmers are well educated, the first drainage is manageable. But not all farmers have the same level of education, and many are still behind.”
In reality, rice farmers remain reluctant to adopt emerging low-emission practices because persistent on-farm constraints and limited local proof leave them unconvinced about moving away from traditional systems.
Using AWD as an example, Kofi Boateng, agriculture program officer at the Global Methane Hub, said implementing it would require a reliable water supply and some form of irrigation system, which many smallholders do not have.
“AWD has been shown to reduce methane emissions but rice farmers who cannot implement the practice will need new and additional innovations that reflect their realities,” said Boateng.
While there is a range of alternative low-emission practices, such as DSR, these options also face other challenges.
“A major barrier to scaling these approaches is that their emissions reduction potential is limited to specific regions and tied to some level of mechanisation. Without validation at the local level, farmers will be less inclined to adopt them,” said Boateng.
At the same time, there are approaches such as breeding low-emitting rice varieties or developing microbial strategies to suppress methane production. However, these methods still need to be validated.
“Other strategies, such as improving rice plant genetics and physiology through selection and breeding of low emitting varieties and developing microbial based emission strategies, have received little attention to date because their long-term effectiveness at scale are yet to be locally demonstrated in key rice geographies. But ongoing advances offer the promise of improved breeds, including aerobic rice, which grows in non-flooded conditions and can offer near-zero emissions,” said Boateng.
Behind the push for climate-smart rice
The environmental footprint of rice is coming under sharper scrutiny as it is the biggest producer of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in agriculture – only second to livestock.
“Rice has been cultivated for thousands of years and feeds around four billion people. An estimated 100 million smallholder farmers produce roughly 550 million metric tonnes of rice, yet the crop also accounts for about 12 per cent of global methane emissions, while using 50 per cent of cropland and 30 per cent of freshwater resources,” said Postma.
Additionally, rice cultivation is being pressured by increasing consumer awareness of the environmental cost of rice farming. Nguyen highlighted how consumers are not just demanding high-quality food, they also expect it to be environmentally friendly, which is pushing farmers and agribusinesses to adapt.
Saran said its farmer-centric model was built on the principle that “we grow together”. Starting with just 100 farmers, the company now works with around 20,000 farmers across 16 provinces, supported by four rice mills located close to farming communities.
It has also converted 4,000 hectares to Sustainable Rice Platform (SRP) standards at level three, achieving strong sustainability scores.
“What excites me most is seeing fields become greener and healthier, with higher yields and lower production costs. Farmers receive some incentives, not large ones, but enough to support the transition. We believe long-term value for farmers is essential. If farmers see value, they will continue cultivating rice. But we must also ensure access to water, education and collaboration,” said Saran during a panel at the Asia Pacific Agri-Tech Innovation Summit held in Singapore last November.
Saran highlighted benefits such as reduced water use, lower production costs, higher yields and safer rice for both farmers and consumers. However, he also points to challenges.
“One of the biggest challenges is conflict among farmers, especially around water management under low-carbon practices. This cannot be solved by one company alone. It requires multi-stakeholder coordination. Access to investment and finance is also critical. Without it, sustainable farming cannot be delivered at scale.”
Looking ahead, the company aims to reach up to 100,000 farmers by 2030 and is exploring low-carbon rice projects as its next frontier.
“One of our biggest achievements over the past 10 years has been developing organic rice and bringing Cambodian organic rice to global markets. Our next mission is low-carbon rice. Amru aims to work with 100,000 farmers by 2030. Today we work with 20,000 farmers, and we want to scale further through three projects focused on low-carbon rice,”
In Vietnam, there has been a major focus for low-carbon rice with its One Million Hectares of High-Quality, Low-Emission Rice initiative. The programme was implemented across the Mekong River Delta and aims to sustainable, high-quality rice production and reduce GHGs.
Beyond environmental goals, the initiative aims to enhance the competitiveness of Vietnamese rice on the global stage.
“The one-million-hectare programme for high-quality, low-emission rice is a very sound direction. Its objective is not only to increase yields, but also to improve grain quality, reduce environmental impacts and meet the requirements of demanding markets. When production follows green, controlled processes, Vietnamese rice can more easily meet international standards,” said Le Thanh Tung, vice president of the Vietnam Rice Sector Association (VIETRISA).
By producing low-carbon rice, farmers have the potential to generate carbon credits as an additional revenue stream, alongside rice sales. However, whether low-carbon rice can command a meaningful market remains an open question, said Saran.
“Low-carbon rice is still challenging at the moment because we do not yet know how much farmers will receive. We also do not yet know the market, not only for carbon credits but also for low-carbon rice itself. We do not know who will buy the rice.
“On the ground, as implementers, we hear many different opinions from many people. Our role is to bring everyone together around one goal and one objective so the community can implement this together.”
Saran said private sector players must help build demand for low-carbon rice, including through branding.
“For now, we are already paying farmers and investing, even though we do not yet know where the rice will be sold.”
Pinto believes that the willingness of consumers to pay more for sustainable rice is limited. While people are generally supportive of a green economy, rice is such a fundamental staple that they are not inclined to pay extra for it. Instead, the transition must be driven by benefits for farmers, with practices that lower costs, reduce inputs, and enable them to produce more efficiently.
“It’s not about willingness to pay by the consumer. People are very keen on driving the green economy, there’s no doubt about that, but for something so fundamental, they don’t really want to pay more for it. The way this system will endure is that the benefits to farmers are the things that will drive it.”
Efforts to make rice farming more climate-smart point to a viable path forward for a crop that feeds billions. Yet translating potential into impact will demand coordinated investment, stronger science and widespread farmer engagement, backed by policy frameworks that support scale. In an era of accelerating climate risk and growing food insecurity, rethinking rice production is not simply a sustainability ambition, but an urgent necessity.
