IRRI Pioneer Interviews--Challenges for IRRI: Ronnie Coffman
Channel: International Rice Research Institute
Date: 2009-06-29

Ronnie Coffman, IRRI plant breeder, 1971-81; currently chair, Department of Plant Breeding & Genetics, and director of International Programs, Cornell University, discusses IRRI's challenges.

This week [30 January 2007], I believe there's a major meeting in Europe that will give the latest projections on global warming and the rise of sea level. That could prove to be the greatest challenge for the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI; http://irri.org), for plant breeding, and for rice science in general because, as you know, the majority of rice is found in the large low-lying river deltas of Asia. The Ganges, the Brahmaputra, the Irrawaddy, the Mekong, all those big deltas are, in some cases, only a few inches above sea level. 

So, right now, the minimum prediction for sea-level rise, I was reading, is a conservative projection of 38 inches by the middle of this century. This will obliterate places like Bangladesh, West Bengal, and the Mekong Delta.

This is huge. So, what will happen, slowly, or maybe not so slowly, is that brackish water will get pushed up the rivers and affect the growth of the rice. And you get less and less fresh water coming down because glaciers are melting in the Himalaya at the rate that people can't believe. So, you're going to get a scarcity of fresh water and then the rising sea level that pushes in the brackish water. That's going to push the cultivation of rice way back in a gradual, or maybe not so gradual, manner. So, salinity tolerance might offer some help. But I think the global warming and the resulting rise in sea level—and remember that 38 inches is the minimum prediction; others are predicting more and faster—that portends a real crisis in rice cultivation