image: the brown plant hopper
Experts say that during the food surpluses of recent decades, governments and development agencies lost focus on the importance of helping poor countries improve their agriculture.
The budgets of institutions that delivered the world from famine in the 1970s, including the rice institute, have stagnated or fallen, even as the problems they were trying to solve became harder.
“People felt that the world food crisis was solved, that food security was no longer an issue, and it really fell off the agenda,” said Robert Zeigler, the director general of the International Rice Research Institute in the Philippines.
The brown plant hopper, an insect no bigger than a gnat, is multiplying by the billions and chewing through rice paddies in East Asia, threatening the diets of many poor people. The damage to rice crops, occurring at a time of scarcity and high prices, could have been prevented. Researchers at the institute here say that they know how to create rice varieties resistant to the insects but that budget cuts have prevented them from doing so.
The institute is the world’s main repository of rice seeds as well as genetic and other information about rice, the crop that feeds nearly half the world’s people. But at the International Rice Research Institute, greenhouses have peeling paint and holes in their screens and walls. Hallways are dotted with empty offices. In the 1980s, the institute employed five entomologists, or insect experts, overseeing a staff of 200. Now it has one entomologist with a staff of eight.
