MALNUTRITION: Food Prices to Stay High Amid Underinvestment, Climate Change, IFAD Says

Sungwoo Park - Jul 24, 2011

Global food prices will remain high as underinvestment in agriculture over decades has left supplies unable to meet demand, according to a United Nations agency.

“We are just depleting our stocks and now we have this high population growth,” Kanayo F Nwanze, president of the International Fund for Agricultural Development, said in an interview. “Prices won’t come down overnight. They are going to stay high for some time to come.”
Global food costs tracked by the United Nations increased in June for the 10th time in the past 12 months, staying near a record on higher rice, sugar and dairy prices, while meat reached an all-time high. Aid to agriculture dropped to 4.3 percent of total assistance in 2008 from 18 percent in 1979, according to IFAD data.
“Food price crisis, food price hikes or food price volatility is not just a simple consequence of shortage of food because of weather conditions and climate change,” Nwanze said in an interview on July 22 in Seoul. “A primary cause is we’ve disinvested in agriculture over decades.”
Nwanze has urged the global community for more investments in rural development to help meet growing food demand led by emerging economies including China, India and Brazil. The 165- member nation agency works to combat rural poverty and hunger by providing low-interest loans and grants to developing countries.
Rice, the staple food for about half of the global population, has surged 65 percent in the past year on the Chicago Board of Trade. Corn, used in food and livestock-feed, has jumped 78 percent.

World Population
The United Nations has said that by 2050, food production must increase by 70 percent to feed an estimated world population of 9 billion people, up from almost 7 billion this year.
“The middle class is growing, their demand for better food is growing and they want more meat, which takes more grains,” Nwanze said. “Who is going to feed us in 2020?”
World grain stocks will probably slide for a second year in the 12 months through June 2012, dropping to a four-year low, as corn consumption outpaces production and dry weather hurts wheat prospects, the International Grains Council forecast in April.
“Climate change will compound the whole issue of food security,” Nwanze said. “The world is yet to understand implications of the impact of climate change,” he said. “We are not investing enough money.”

To contact the reporter on this story: Sungwoo Park in Seoul at spark47@bloomberg.net.
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Richard Dobson at rdobson4@bloomberg.net
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-07-25/food-prices-to-stay-high-amid-underinvestment-climate-change-ifad-says.html

POVERTY: Smart family planning improves women's health and cuts poverty

Lester Brown, 14 April 2011
Smart family planning improves women's health and cuts poverty
The costs to society of not filling the family planning gap may be greater than we can afford


  China Newsphoto/Reuters
A woman in rural China inspects a condom. Slowing world population growth means ensuring that women who want to plan their families have access to family planning services. This will help to cut poverty.
When it comes to population growth, the United Nations has three primary projections. The medium projection, the one most commonly used, has world population reaching 9.2 billion by 2050. The high one reaches 10.5 billion. The low projection, which assumes that the world will quickly move below replacement-level fertility, has population peaking at 8 billion in 2042 and then declining.
If the goal is to eradicate poverty, hunger, and illiteracy, then we have little choice but to strive for the lower projection.
Slowing world population growth means ensuring that all women who want to plan their families have access to family planning information and services. Unfortunately, this is currently not the case for 215 million women, 59% of whom live in sub-Saharan Africa and the Indian subcontinent.
These women and their families represent roughly 1 billion of the earth's poorest people, for whom unintended pregnancies and unwanted births are an enormous burden.
Former US Agency for International Development (USAID) official J Joseph Speidel notes that "if you ask anthropologists who live and work with poor people at the village level … they often say that women live in fear of their next pregnancy. They just do not want to get pregnant."
The United Nations Population Fund and the Guttmacher Institute estimate that meeting the needs of these 215 million women who lack reproductive healthcare and effective contraception could each year prevent 53 million unwanted pregnancies, 24 million induced abortions, and 1.6 million infant deaths.
Along with the provision of additional condoms needed to prevent HIV and other sexually transmitted infections, a universal family planning and reproductive health programme would cost an additional $21bn in funding from industrial and developing countries.
Shifting to smaller families brings generous economic dividends. In Bangladesh, for example, analysts concluded that $62 spent by the government to prevent an unwanted birth saved $615 in expenditures on other social services. For donor countries, ensuring that men and women everywhere have access to the services they need would yield strong social returns in improved education and healthcare.
Slowing population growth brings with it what economists call the demographic bonus. When countries move quickly to smaller families, growth in the number of young dependents – those who need nurturing and educating – declines relative to the number of working adults.
At the individual level, removing the financial burden of large families allows more people to escape from poverty. At the national level, the demographic bonus causes savings and investment to climb, productivity to surge and economic growth to accelerate.
Japan, which cut its population growth in half between 1951 and 1958, was one of the first countries to benefit from the demographic bonus. South Korea and Taiwan followed, and more recently China, Thailand and Vietnam have been helped by earlier sharp reductions in birth rates.
Although this effect lasts for only a few decades, it is usually enough to launch a country into the modern era. Indeed, except for a few oil-rich countries, no developing country has successfully modernised without slowing population growth.
Though many developing countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America were successful in quickly reducing their fertility within a generation or so after public health and medical gains lowered their mortality rates, many others did not follow this path and have been caught in the demographic trap – including Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Iraq, Nigeria, Pakistan and Yemen. (Large families are a greater financial burden on both parents and governments, and more impoverished people and societies tend to produce larger families. Thus they become "trapped" in a cycle of poverty and high fertility.)
Countries that do not succeed in reducing fertility early on face the compounding of 3% growth per year or 20-fold per century. Such rapid population growth can easily strain limited land and water resources. With large "youth bulges" outrunning job creation, the growing number of unemployed young men increases the risk of conflict. This also raises the odds of becoming a failing state.
Put simply, the costs to society of not filling the family planning gap may be greater than we can afford.
The good news is that governments can help couples reduce family size very quickly when they commit to doing so. My colleague Janet Larsen writes that in just one decade Iran dropped its near-record population growth rate to one of the lowest in the developing world.
When Ayatollah Khomeini assumed leadership in Iran in 1979 and launched the Islamic revolution, he immediately dismantled the well-established family planning programmes and instead advocated large families. At war with Iraq between 1980 and 1988, Khomeini wanted to increase the ranks of soldiers for Islam. His goal was an army of 20 million.
Fertility levels climbed in response to his pleas, pushing Iran's annual population growth to a peak of 4.2% in the early 1980s, a level approaching the biological maximum. As this enormous growth began to burden the economy and the environment, the country's leaders realised that overcrowding, environmental degradation and unemployment were undermining Iran's future.
In 1989, the government did an about-face and restored its family planning programme. In May 1993, a national family planning law was passed. The resources of several government ministries, including education, culture and health, were mobilised to encourage smaller families.
Iran Broadcasting was given responsibility for raising awareness of population issues and of the availability of family planning services. Television was used to disseminate information on family planning throughout the country, taking advantage of the 70% of rural households with TV sets. Religious leaders were directly involved in what amounted to a crusade for smaller families.
Some 15,000 "health houses" or clinics were established to provide rural populations with health and family planning services. Iran introduced a full panoply of contraceptive measures, including the option of vasectomy – a first among Muslim countries. All forms of birth control, including the pill and sterilisation, were free of charge. Iran even became the only country to require couples to take a course on modern contraception before receiving a marriage license.
In addition to the direct healthcare interventions, Iran also launched a broad-based effort to raise female literacy, boosting it from 25% in 1970 to more than 70% in 2000. Female school enrolment increased from 60% to 90%. Women and girls with more schooling are likely to have fewer children, making their education a smart investment.
As a result of this initiative, family size in Iran dropped from seven children to fewer than three. From 1987 to 1994, Iran cut its population growth rate by half, an impressive achievement.
The bad news is that in July 2010, the Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, declared the country's family planning programme ungodly and announced a new pronatalist policy. The government would pay couples to have children, depositing money in each child's bank account until age 18. The effect of this new programme on Iran's population growth remains to be seen.
Nevertheless, Iran's history shows how a full-scale mobilisation of society that incorporates public outreach, access to family planning resources, and gender equality in education, can accelerate the shift to smaller families.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/global-development/2011/apr/14/smart-family-planning-reduces-poverty

MALNUTRITION: PAKISTAN: Population growth rate adds to problems

 Photo: Jason Tanner/Save The Children:
Big families means more mouths to feed

ISLAMABAD, 18 January 2011 (IRIN) - Pakistan’s problems with militancy, a fragile economy and natural disasters such as the 2010 floods have often been discussed, but an even greater threat may be posed by the sheer numbers of people in the country.
According to official figures, the projected population for 2015 is 191 million, up from the current figure of 170 million, making it the sixth most populous nation on earth. By 2050 it is expected to climb into fourth place.
This is bad news for a country that has struggled to provide its people with adequate food, health care or education. Malnutrition rates are high and are linked to 50 percent of infant and child deaths; there is one doctor for every 1,183 people; and the literacy rate of 57 percent is among the lowest in South Asia.
“There is now increasing evidence that investments, among others, in education, health, including reproductive health, women's empowerment and slower population growth contribute towards poverty reduction. In general, it has also been found that where there is rapid population growth and high fertility rates, poverty incidence is also highest,” Rabbi Royan, the UN Population Fund (UNFPA) representative in Pakistan, told IRIN.
“More people, of course, means a further drain on resources,” Sikander Lodhi, an economic analyst, told IRIN. “Resources are already stretched to the limit,” he said.
The same principle holds true within individual households. “Allah [God] has given us eight children. We are fortunate,” said Rafiq Muhammad, 50, a labourer who earns around Rs 5,000 (US$59) a month. His wife, Parveen Bibi, told IRIN: “It is very hard to feed everyone. We do not even get one proper meal a day.”
“People believe large families mean more earning hands; but they do not realize they also mean more eating mouths,” said Rehana Nazeer, a service delivery manager at the Lahore-based Family Planning Association of Pakistan. She told IRIN the “closed, conservative nature of society” and also problems in tending to the health needs of women in rural areas on hormone-based contraception had led to difficulties in promoting birth control.
“If a woman develops a bleeding problem, she cannot get to a doctor on her own. Her husband or other man in the family must take a day off work to take her,” Nazeer said.
According to the Demographic Health Survey of Pakistan, conducted in 2006-07 by the Ministry of Population Welfare, while 96 percent of women who have ever been married are aware of at least one family planning method, fewer than half have ever used one, and less than 30 percent of married women currently use a contraceptive. The survey also shows 25 percent of married couples would like to use contraception but are not doing so, mainly because they lack access to advice or contraceptives.

Difficult to change attitudes
“Many women would like to practice birth control, but their husbands dislike the idea,” Farhat Bibi, a lady health worker, told IRIN. Run by the government’s National Programme for Family Planning and Primary Health Care, the lady health workers’ scheme was started in 1994 to reach out to rural communities and cater to the needs of women and children in particular.
“We offer advice on contraception, but some women are too scared of their husbands to even consider these methods,” she said. The belief that God determined family size, and in some cases that women on the pill may be tempted to have sex outside marriage, confident they would not become pregnant, were key factors in this attitude, Farhat said.
These factors explain why Pakistan has struggled to promote family size. Though the fertility rate has declined gradually over the last 15 years, according to the Demographic Survey, the fertility rate of 4.1 children per woman means the population continues to grow, with an increased strain placed on dwindling resources, including water.
“The high number of pregnancies also means women in particular, and children, suffer more health problems and this further drains resources,” said Samina Iqbal, a doctor who told IRIN: “I always advise my female patients to stick to one or two children, but they face acute family pressure to have more.”

http://www.irinnews.org/report.aspx?ReportID=91656

POVERTY: In poverty-struck Yemen, al-Qaida a low priority

Dec 22, 2010 : SANAA, Yemen (AP)
A doctor would have recognized the signs of chronic malnutrition immediately in the 7-month-old girl — the swollen stomach, the constant cough. Her mother, though, had only traditional healers to turn to in her Yemeni mountain village, and they told her to stop breastfeeding.
Her milk had spoiled, they said. Their solution: stuff the baby's nose with ghee.
When that didn't work, the young mother, Sayeda al-Wadei, made the arduous 60-mile journey through the mountains to the closest hospital with facilities to treat her daughter, in the capital Sanaa.
More than 50 percent of Yemen's children are malnourished, rivaling war zones like Sudan's Darfur and parts of sub-Saharan Africa. That's just one of many worrying statistics in Yemen.
Nearly half the population lives below the poverty line of $2 a day and doesn't have access to proper sanitation. Less than a tenth of the roads are paved. Water is running out. Tens of thousands have been displaced from their homes by conflict, flooding into cities. The government is riddled with corruption, has little control outside the capital, and its main source of income — oil — could run dry in a decade.
As a result, al-Qaida is far down on a long list of worries for most Yemenis, even as the United States presses the government to step up its fight against the terror network's affiliate here.
Donor nations are meeting in February in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia to gather millions of dollars for development in Yemen. Aid groups, economists and officials are scurrying to develop poverty reduction and economic restructuring plans for this nation of 23 million.
The United States has already dedicated $150 million in development money, alongside its counterterrorism aid to fight al-Qaida, which is to grow to from $150 million to $250 million over the next year. Other donor countries have given millions more, acknowledging that the terror network cannot be uprooted unless Yemen is pulled out of poverty.
"The neighboring countries and Europeans and U.S. have a lot at stake, not only in Yemen, but in the Middle East. I don't think anyone wants to see Yemen failing," said Benson Ateng, the World Bank's Yemen country manager.
Some aid workers fear that the government, which clings to power through patronage, will direct aid to allied tribes while leaving others out in the cold, fueling resentment. A focus by donors on steering aid to areas with a known al-Qaida presence, not necessarily the poorest zones, may also backfire.
"Donors are focusing on development as a tool to address security issues, and not as an end in itself," said Ashley Clements, Oxfam representative in Sanaa. "There is a risk that the tendency will increase over the years. Focusing on one issue alone will be to the detriment of the well-being of Yemen's people."
Malnutrition typifies how overlapping problems lead to crisis. Much of Yemen's agriculture — and 30 percent of its water — has turned to cultivating qat, the mildly stimulating leaf that Yemenis addictively chew, leaving the country a net food importer with little cash to pay for it. At the same time, health infrastructure and education is lacking, the rate of breastfeeding for children under six months is only 10 percent.
Moreover, the rise in malnutrition was able to pass largely unnoticed because the weak government was not keeping valid statistics and had no commitment or ability to head it off.
"There is no single other country in the world where we ever have seen such high levels of malnutrition," said Greet Cappelaera, Yemen country director of UNICEF.
At the Sanaa hospital, al-Wadei's daughter Maram has recovered after treatment. But another of her four children — a 2 1/2-year-old daughter — can barely stand, another malnutrition symptom, and the family can't afford to treat her.
"I don't want kids anymore," mourns al-Wadei. "I don't even want myself."
Yemeni officials say their resources are strained by security challenges, including a northern rebellion, a southern separatist movement and al-Qaida.
"If there is no security and stability, there will be no development, no poverty alleviation and no investment," said Hesham Sharaf, deputy minister of planning and international cooperation.
Oil revenues make up at least three-quarters of the government budget, but oil production is steadily declining. Yemen could become a net importer in the next five years and its oil reserves could run out completely by 2021, according to IMF and World Bank estimates.
What development there is in Yemen is a patchwork, depending on where the government has thrown its limited cash. Oil money has fueled a consumption boom among a small slice of the population. In Sanaa, new hotels and restaurants have arisen, along with shopping complexes boasting Baskin Robbins branches and Porsche and BMW dealerships. Large video billboards advertise new housing projects.
But just beyond the capital's edge, rural Yemen immediately emerges, with little infrastructure. Donkey carts replace SUVs, and government authority largely vanishes, replaced by highly independent local tribes.
In Wadi Dhaher, a village just 10 kilometers (6 miles) outside Sanaa, floods have left mud houses partially demolished and deserted. Muddy roads lead to the village's qat plantations, which consumes most of the village water.
For water, Wadi Dhaher relies on a local well dug 400 meters (yards) deep to search for disappearing ground water, despite a national law limiting wells to 60 meters (yards) to prevent overconsumption.
Its residents belong to the Hashed tribe, which is nominally pro-government but brooks little interference from authorities.
"We are self-sufficient here," said Abdullah Muhsen, a 27-year-old who operates the village bath. "Our authority is the (tribal) sheik. Even the president needs his approval."
In a country with the seventh highest population growth in the world — 2.9 percent a year — the tens of thousands of Yemenis entering the work force each year find few opportunities. Many pour into Sanaa for jobs, straining the infrastructure.
Mourad Hamoud dropped out of high school in the southern town of Taiz and moved to Sanaa, hoping for a government job. But he found such jobs go mainly to northerners, so he opened a barber shop. "I couldn't keep up with studying and working," he said. "If things were right, I wouldn't have to leave studying to work."
Mohammed Abdel-Malik Mutawakel, a Sanaa University political science professor, said the danger is that Yemen's youth find "the economy is closed to them."
"So they will only think of a political struggle," he said. "If that also is closed. they will fight then, either through al-Qaida, the southerners, or any other way."
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5iQ6hw5wspWi_HY_V7APhNnca4yqQ?docId=7db7afc8f64940d7a7bb1b2abba20345

POVERTY: PHILIPPINES: Family planning "urgently needed"

  Photo: Ana Santos/IRIN:  A 16-year-old sits beside her newborn baby. This is her second child.

2 December 2010 (IRIN) - Population and sustainable development experts warn that the Philippine population could reach levels that will prevent the country from ever breaking free from a cycle of poverty.
"We need to lower birth rates to 2.2 percent, which is just the sustainable replacement rate," Malcolm Potts from the Bixby Center for Population, Health and Sustainability, told IRIN, warning that at current fertility rates of 3.03 percent, the Philippine population of 94 million could reach 150 million in just 10 years.
Citing Department of Health studies indicating that women in the poorest quintile have 5.9 children while those in the richest quintile have 1.9 children, Potts said, "It's very simple; poor people cannot separate sex from child-bearing. We must give the poor access to family planning and contraception to give them choices."
The Guttmacher Institute, a US-based reproductive health think-tank, released a study in 2009 showing that 35 percent of poor Filipino women aged 15-49 accounted for 53 percent of the unmet need for contraception.
Highest unemployment rate
The Philippines has the highest unemployment rate in the Southeast Asian region at 8 percent compared with Indonesia at 7.9 percent, Vietnam at 4.6 percent, Malaysia at 3.7 percent and Thailand at 1.5 percent.
According to the World Bank, poverty incidence rose from 30 percent in 2003 to 32.9 percent in 2006.
"Having fewer children will allow the poor to invest more in education and health for their children to improve their lives when they grow up," Ernesto Pernia, a professor at the University of the Philippines School of Economics said, citing the correlation between family size and poverty incidence.
Urgent need for legislation
There is no national legislation on the standardization of budgets for family planning and reproductive healthcare services for the poor.
The Reproductive Health Bill aims to address this by providing a full range of contraceptive options, including the pill and condoms, as well as natural birth-control methods.
However, the bill is staunchly opposed by the influential Catholic Church that only approves of natural family planning methods requiring periodic abstinence.
The Bill has been wildly debated for the past 15 years.
"Natural family planning, also known as the rhythm method, has never played a role in fertility decline in any country, whether Catholic or not," Potts said.
Martha Campbell, president of Ventures Strategies for Health and Development, which studies reproductive healthcare strategies for developing countries said, "Other Catholic countries like Mexico and Brazil have already decided that the Vatican doesn't need to step into their reproductive lives. The Philippines is the only remaining country where the Catholic Church has a stranglehold on women's health."
"Population growth is a public welfare issue that affects the poorest of the poor. Other poverty containment efforts will never be sufficient until we can curb population growth," said Congresswoman Kaka Bag-ao of the Akbayan Citizen's Action Party, which is pushing for the passage of the Bill.
On 8 December, the UN Population Fund and the International Council on Management of Population Programmes (ICOMP) will hold a regional consultation on family planning in Bangkok.
The goal of the three-day meeting is to gain support from governments and civil societies to prioritize family planning programmes and increase investments in family planning to help achieve the Millennium Development Goals, and particularly, universal access to reproductive health.
http://www.irinnews.org/report.aspx?ReportID=91261

POVERTY: UN Habitat Report State of the World's Cities 2010/2011

The world's urban population now exceeds the world's rural population. What does this mean for the state of our cities, given the strain this global demographic shift is placing upon current urban infrastructure?
http://www.unhabitat.org/pmss/listItemDetails.aspx?publicationID=2917

MALNUTRITION: Biotech and breeding - glimpses of the agricultural future

JAKARTA, 9 July 2010 (IRIN) - Agricultural production in the developing world could be among the hardest-hit by climate change, but new research shows that food security can be improved by biotechnology and adapting traditional farming techniques, experts say. Global demand for food is expected to double by the year 2050, when the population will reach more than nine billion, according to the World Bank, posing a serious challenge to global food security. Mark Howden, an expert in climate change and agriculture at the Commonwealth Science and Industrial Research Organisation [http://www.csiro.au/] said scientists need to be creative to face this challenge. "To be able to feed this growing population, one thing we will need is an improvement in the study of genetics," he said at a recent climate change adaptation conference on Australia's Gold Coast. While the decades-old debate around genetic modification of food continues, many scientists believe biotechnology is part of the answer to the looming food security problem. They say it can help crops resist extreme weather [http://www.irinnews.org/Report.aspx?ReportId=87752] and the pests and bacteria expected to come with it. Sureshkumar Balasubramanian, a lecturer at the University of Queensland, said we should not be afraid of genetic modification. Balasubramanian recently discovered a new gene form that could potentially help farmers cultivate more crops in a shorter period. He discovered the ACD6 gene form while comparing the biological makeup of plants that grew at different rates in different parts of the world. "We found that some of the plants grew slower than others because they were developing this gene to fight pathogens," he told IRIN. "In a situation where pathogens are not a threat to crops, removing this gene will speed up crop growth. This could be beneficial in parts of the world that are experiencing shorter harvest periods because of changing weather patterns. "But genetic diversity is important. If I were to design an agricultural area, even if there's no pathogen threat, I would make sure around 10 percent of the plants had this gene. Just because there is no pathogen in an area now, doesn't mean there won't be tomorrow, because we don't know how the climate will change." Cyanide Biotechnology could also help counteract cyanide levels in crops that are expected to increase as the climate changes. An acute consumption of cyanide can cause konzo, a neuron condition that paralyses the legs. Small outbreaks of konzo usually occur in poorer African nations. Anna Burns, also from Monash University, found that cyanide levels in cassava increased during drought. Because cassava is drought-tolerant, it is widely consumed during dry periods, which is when konzo outbreaks occur. "I think genetic modification is only one option, and it would take a long time to implement in developing countries, where food security issues are most urgent," Burns said. "Traditional breeding programmes are more viable and can select for varieties with low-cyanogenic concentration." Part of the problem is that cassava in East Africa [http://www.irinnews.org/Report.aspx?ReportId=89401] is traditionally sun-dried or fermented, which creates cyanide. "Both agricultural and social factors need to be considered in adaptation to climate change. And prevention is better than a cure," Burns said. Growing rice differently In many parts of Asia, discussions on food security are centred around rice. According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, around two billion people in Asia rely on rice for 60-70 percent of their daily calorie intake. According to the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI), [http://www.irri.org/about/about.asp] genetically modified rice is already being used by rice breeders in many Asian countries to develop new rice varieties. However, as yet none are being grown commercially. Greenpeace insists that "because the [genetic modification] technology is very new and imprecise, the potential ill effects on public health and on the environment are still widely unknown". [http://www.greenpeace.org/seasia/en/campaigns/genetic-engineering] There is a very low level of acceptance of genetically modified food in Asia and elsewhere. "Often only conventional breeding processes are used, as many Asian and African countries do not accept genetically modified products, said Baboucarr Manneh, a molecular biologist and coordinator of the Africa Rice Centre's Abiotic Stresses Project in Benin, which is working on developing varieties of rice that will tolerate extreme heat and cold. Traditional farming methods are, nevertheless, being challenged as rain patterns become less predictable and water salinity increases with rising sea levels. Many Asian countries experiencing water shortages have implemented aerobic rice programmes, shifting from the traditional flooding method to a drier method. Aerobic rice is grown like upland crops, such as wheat. Some rice production has shifted from moist lowlands to dry highlands. Aerobic rice produces higher yields, 4-6 tons per hectare. Participatory testing in the Philippines since early this decade has seen more productive yields, some above six tons per hectare. Carmelita Alberto from IRRI said aerobic rice required around half the water needed for lowland rice. "The Philippines has used aerobic rice farming in irrigated areas where water is too scarce and it is too costly to keep paddy fields permanently flooded," she said. But Alberto warns that aerobic rice has its trade-offs. In her current research on aerobic rice and heat fluxes, she has found that lowland rice fields sequester more carbon from the atmosphere than aerobic rice fields, which have warmer microclimates. "At the same time, aerobic rice reduces methane emissions by 30 percent. Methane is very harmful to the atmosphere," Alberto said. "So you have to decide how to balance lowland and highland production. There is much more research needed, especially in tropical countries."