The futures and options markets for rice are, compared to wheat and maize, woefully undeveloped.
FORBES: Speculation Reduces Price Volatility, Not Increases It
And the rice price has been much more volatile than those of wheat or maize.
FORBES: Speculation Reduces Price Volatility, Not Increases It
For both wheat and maize, the results, published this week by Science, were negative.
No, rice is rarely used to make them but the two close substitutes, wheat and maize are.
Under the deal with America, deep cuts in tariffs will by made by 2004, to just 14.5% for several bulk commodities such as wheat and maize.
Farmers of a few select crops such as wheat or maize can avoid almost all risk using the government's overlapping system of subsidised insurance, loans and payments.
Norman Borlaug had got a Nobel in 1970 for developing the high yielding wheat at the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Centre in Mexico, and had been supported by the Rockefeller Foundation.
On one reckoning, in order to keep up with population growth farmers will have to grow more wheat and maize over the next 40 years than was grown in the previous 500.
Since then the country has restricted maize and wheat exports, leaving farmers with an estimated 4m tonnes of maize they can neither sell at home nor ship abroad.
It also has a small genome compared to other higher plants like maize or wheat.
The futures and options markets for rice are tiny as compared to maize or wheat.
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The speculative market for rice is much smaller than that for either maize or wheat.
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Yves Savidan and his colleagues at the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Centre are also studying apomixis.
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Consumption of wheat, rice and maize roughly tracks population growth but at a higher level, so demand for them will add about a billion tonnes to the 2 billion produced in 2005-07.
But according to this research, wheat will face a difficult future in the developing world, where higher prices for cotton, maize and soybeans have pushed wheat to marginal land, making it more vulnerable to stresses induced by climate change.
The new CIMMYT facilities include a gene bank that holds the genetic diversity of 130, 000 wheat and 28, 000 maize varieties worldwide.
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Favoured commodities such as corn (maize), wheat, soyabeans and cotton will receive a per-acre revenue guarantee of about 90% of the previous five years' returns.
But life has been very different for the more traditional farmers, exposed by the (fairly) free market to wheat imports from Argentina and maize from the United States.
They predict that the world's three biggest crops in terms of calories provided - maize, rice and wheat - will decrease in many developing countries.
Over the past few years, it has convened a series of meetings that brought together leading experts for each of the main food crops, such as wheat, rice, lentils and maize.
Wheat prices rose 25% last week to hit two-year highs as drought and fires have devastated crops in parts of Russia, and led to the government banning the export of grain including wheat, barley, rye and maize.
Rice was worst hit because only 4% of its global crop is traded across borders, compared with 13% for maize and 19% for wheat.
Globally, wheat yields are down 5.5% compared with what they would have been with no climate change, and maize yields are down 3.8%.
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