BANGKOK, Apr 23 (Tierramérica).- With Vietnams fertile Mekong delta threatened by rising sea levels and salt water ingress, the countrys future as a major rice exporter depends critically on research underway in the Philippines.
Scientists at the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) are working with Vietnamese counterparts in the town of Los Baños, 63 km southeast of Manila, to develop a new strain of rice that can withstand submergence for over two weeks and also resist salinity.
A flood-tolerant variety, dubbed scuba rice, which has the submergence (SUB 1) rice gene, already offers half the solution.
"IRRI is experimenting to find a rice variety to deal with both problems," says Bjorn Ole Sander, a scientist at the worlds leading non-governmental research center on rice. "Even if we have rice crops that are tolerant to floods they can die because of salinity."