Climate Changers
Rice joins the club
A Filipino farmer is seen inspecting his rice field in Tiaong town, Quezon province, southeast of Manila.
ASIAN rice farmers typically do not fly around the world on holidays or own big-engine cars but scientists say they have an important role to play in helping cut the world's output of greenhouse gases. "If you step through a rice field, there is a lot of gas bubbling out and the large bulk of that is methane," said Reiner Wassmann, a biologist specialising in climate change at the International Rice Research Institute. While carbon dioxide is the most famous of the gases that cause global warming, methane is at least 20 times more effective at trapping heat in the earth's atmosphere. In an interview with AFP from the institute's headquarters in Los Banos, a farming area on the Philippines' main island of Luzon, Wassmann explained that methane was responsible for one fifth of all greenhouse gas emissions. About 10 percent of the methane comes from rice farming, while other sources include the flatulence of cows and decomposing landfill garbage dumps. Wassmann said it was essential that rice farmers in Asia and the rest of the world did their bit to tackle climate change, but lumping them in with more obvious, fossil-burning culprits of climate change was wrong. "Culprit gives an emotional tone to it that is not necessary," he said, describing some calls by green groups for the billions of people who rely on rice as their staple to eat less of it as being too extreme. "I have heard suggestions like that but I don't think that makes sense. The key is on the production side, not on the consumption side," he said. Offering some hope, Wassmann said reducing greenhouse gas emissions from rice fields did not necessarily require a sacrifice, rather the implementing of smarter and more efficient farming strategies. The first step is for farmers to use less water, because the methane is created when submerged organic material decomposes. Wassmann said this was a logical path to follow regardless of the climate change issue because water would only become more scarce in an increasingly populated world. Using less water can be done through draining the rice fields regularly during the growing season. source: AFP
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