Rice Bowl Of The Worls

Rice is hardwired in all 667 million Southeast Asians who live in this warm part of the world. For many here, it is food, livelihood, landscape and indeed, life itself.

- Sim Ee Waun

Ever since the early Chinese of the Yangtze River first moved from collecting wild rice to cultivating it 13,500 to 8,200 years ago, the love for the grain has spread across Southeast Asia—down to the riverine communities of the Pearl River delta, to the great Mekong and Irrawaddy, and later across to the Indian subcontinent where it was first cultivated in 3000 BC in the Indus Valley.

The great padi fields of Southeast Asia attest to this long tradition of rice. Historically, advances in rice farming technologies and securing rice supply drew people together and formed the foundations of kingdoms in these parts, such as the Khmer, Ayutthaya and Sukothai kingdoms. The padi fields of ancient Angkor boasted three or four harvests a year and fed its glorious kingdom, and fertile plains of the Chao Phraya, with its muang-fai method of irrigation, did the same for the Siamese and continues to do so. Further beyond, ancient fields such as the two-thousand year old Banaue rice terraces in Luzon, and Bali’s thousand-year-old Tegallalang and Campuhan terraces still yield life-giving rice today.

Little has changed our voracious appetite for rice. Today, the 11 Southeast Asian countries that make up ASEAN account for 25 percent of global rice production and 22 percent of global consumption, based on the figures by Asian Development Bank. Vietnam and Thailand are two of the world’s top three exporters of rice, accounting for 48 per cent of global exports, the third being India. It is apt we are called the rice bowl of the world.