Rice in the Present Day

It’s hard to give a figure for the number of varieties of rice now growing. The International Rice Research Institute (IRRI), just outside Manila in the Philippines, has collected a bank of rice genetic materials that now has about eighty-three thousand rice cultivars. Most of these are wild strains or established cultivated rices; some are newly developed by plant scientists. However, in any given year most of the world’s cultivated rice comes from a small number of varieties. Large-scale modernized rice agriculture brings with it pressures for standardization that many people fear will result in a loss of genetic diversity.