文档介绍：Agriculture, Biosecurity, Nutrition
and Consumer Protection Department
Food and anization
of the United Nations
Rice faces the future

Urbanization, diminishing land and water resources, climate changes,
and uncertainties over domestic support and trade pose new challenges
to world rice production
At the height of the International Year of Rice in
2004, FAO rice specialist Nguu Van Nguyen
received an email from a colleague in Liberia.
Attached was a photograph of a roadside
billboard near the capital, Monrovia,
emblazoned with the IYR logo and its catchy
slogan: Rice is life. It wasn't the logo that caught
Nguyen's eye (as a member of IYR'anizing
secretariat, he had had seen it literally thousands
of times) but what was printed underneath: "Yet
all is not well in the world of rice". Nguyen
recalls: "I thought: Ah! There they have really got
the message."
In declaring IYR 2004, the UN General
Assembly gave long overdue recognition to the
world's main staple food, and its place at the
heart of Asia's cultural heritage. But it also aimed diversification of rice-based production systems
at focussing attention on the future of rice: as a into more lucrative sub-sectors. "In the future,
food, as a ponent of the agricultural there will undoubtedly be fewer resources for
sector, and as a major building-block of global rice pro