Title:
'Green Super Rice' About Two Years Away for Asia,
Africa
Description: This is
a VOA Special English Agriculture Report.
See text below
Text:
Scientists have worked for twelve years to develop
what they call Green Super Rice. They say several
varieties should be available to farmers about two
years from now in parts of Asia and Africa.The
"green" in Green Super Rice means environmentally
friendly. Researchers say it will produce at least
as much grain as other rice plants but with fewer
inputs. "Super" means the rice is designed to better
resist droughts, floods, salty water, insects and
disease.The developers of Green Super Rice did not
use genetic engineering. Instead, they mated
hundreds of varieties of rice. That way they avoided
the costs as well as the problems connected with
getting permission to plant genetically engineered
crops.The project involves the world's largest rice
collection, the International Rice Research
Institute in the Philippines. It also involves the
Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences. And it
includes farmers in eight countries in Asia and
eight in Africa. Modern rice plants produce two to
three times more grain than was possible before the
nineteen sixties. But they also require large
amounts of water, chemical fertilizers and
pesticides. In the nineteen sixties, the
International Rice Research Institute developed
"miracle rice" for Asia. Scientists created
high-yielding crops that produced bigger harvests in
what became known as the Green Revolution. It
prevented widespread hunger. But critics say modern
rice plants require too much water and too much use
of chemicals that can hurt the environment. And
farmers may be too poor to buy chemical fertilizers
and pesticides.Anna McClung heads a rice-breeding
center for the United States Agriculture Department.
She says combining many different genes into one
plant without genetic engineering requires a lot of
plant breeding. Ms. McClung praises the researchers
working on Green Super Rice.Another rice researcher,
Jan Leach at Colorado State University, says
scientists can find valuable qualities hidden in the
rice genome. A genome contains all of the genetic
information about an organism.She says many of the
qualities are present. But they are not turned on
until they are in the right genetic background, or
sometimes in the right environment. Researchers on
the Green Super Rice project continue to combine
desirable traits into new varieties to help farmers
produce more with less. For VOA Special English I'm
Alex Villarreal.
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Hi. I
personally reviewed this video and found it appropriate for
the news section of English Global Group. This
is a Voice of America video which covers an interesting
topic in Special English. I would appreciate some feedback from both
students and teachers about this video. You can comment in
the window below using any of a number of different services
including Facebook, Yahoo, AOL, and Hotmail.
