page_title: Rice
section_title: Oceania
hierarchical_section_title: Rice / Regional history / Oceania
context_page_description: Rice is the seed of the grass species Oryza glaberrima or Oryza sativa. As a cereal grain, it is the most widely consumed staple food for a large part of the world's human population, especially in Asia and Africa. It is the agricultural commodity with the third-highest worldwide production, after sugarcane and maize.
  Since sizable portions of sugarcane and maize crops are used for purposes other than human consumption, rice is the most important grain with regard to human nutrition and caloric intake, providing more than one-fifth of the calories consumed worldwide by humans. There are many varieties of rice and culinary preferences tend to vary regionally.
  Rice, a monocot, is normally grown as an annual plant, although in tropical areas it can survive as a perennial and can produce a ratoon crop for up to 30 years. Rice cultivation is well-suited to countries and regions with low labor costs and high rainfall, as it is labor-intensive to cultivate and requires ample water. However, rice can be grown practically anywhere, even on a steep hill or mountain area with the use of water-controlling terrace systems.
context_section_description: Rice was one of the earliest crops planted in Australia by British settlers, who had experience with rice plantations in the Americas and India.
  Although attempts to grow rice in the well-watered north of Australia have been made for many years, they have consistently failed because of inherent iron and manganese toxicities in the soils and destruction by pests.
  In the 1920s, it was seen as a possible irrigation crop on soils within the Murray–Darling basin that were too heavy for the cultivation of fruit and too infertile for wheat.
  Because irrigation water, despite the extremely low runoff of temperate Australia, was (and remains) very cheap, the growing of rice was taken up by agricultural groups over the following decades. Californian varieties of rice were found suitable for the climate in the Riverina, and the first mill opened at Leeton in 1951.
  Even before this Australia's rice production greatly exceeded local needs, and rice exports to Japan have become a major source of foreign currency. Above-average rainfall from the 1950s to the middle 1990s encouraged the expansion of the Riverina rice industry, but its prodigious water use in a practically waterless region began to attract the attention of environmental scientists. These became severely concerned with declining flow in the Snowy River and the lower Murray River.
  Although rice growing in Australia is highly profitable due to the cheapness of land, several recent years of severe drought have led many to call for its elimination because of its effects on extremely fragile aquatic ecosystems. The Australian rice industry is somewhat opportunistic, with the area planted varying significantly from season to season depending on water allocations in the Murray and Murrumbidgee irrigation regions.
  Australian Aboriginal people have harvested native rice varieties for thousands of years, and there are ongoing efforts to grow commercial quantities of these species.
caption: Monthly value (A$ millions) of rice imports to Australia since 1988