ABSTRACT
For three out of five people in the world, rice is the staple food: the main source of calories, the main means of keeping alive (all too often only just alive). The vast majority of the world's rice-eaters live in monsoon Asia, in the countries that lie in an arc from Pakistan on the west, through South and South-East Asia to China and Japan. Within South Asia, rice is the basic foodstuff of Bangladesh and Sri Lanka and of a majority of the vast population of India; and it is not unimportant in Pakistan. All of these South Asian countries suffer in varying degrees, and nowhere more ominously than in Bangladesh, from rapid rates of population increase, from pressure of man on land, and from extreme poverty and hunger among the less privileged strata of society; and hardly anywhere in the world is it of greater urgency to improve crop yields by modernising technology and to spread the resulting benefits, in food and income, to the poor.
