rice + shine

For more than 3.5 billion people, it represents the difference between fullness and hunger. It provides more than 20 per cent of humanity’s calorie intake and 13 per cent of our protein. For the poorest 500 million people in Asia, those figures surpass 50 per cent. (Unsurprisingly, Asia consumes around 90 per cent of the 570 million tonnes of rice eaten each year; for many countries, this equates to more than 100 kilograms per person.) When rice crops fail, as they sometimes do, it can kill millions and bring governments to their knees. Yet it’s estimated that for every extra billion people on this planet, we’ll need an extra 100 million tonnes of rice a year. The question of where that surplus comes from could soon become one of our civilisation’s most pressing concerns.

So, how did we get to this point? How did an otherwise unremarkable grass become the