Rice

Rice, arguably the world's most important cereal grain, is a plant with a long and complicated genealogy. Although plant scientists divide the rice genus (Oryza) into four principal complexes comprised of about twenty-five species, only two species are important for human consumption and use: O. sativa and O. glaberrima. Of these two cultivated species of rice, O. sativa is by far the more widespread and significant.

Cultivation of O. sativa began in southern China or perhaps in parts of mainland Southeast Asia somewhere between 8,000 and 10,000 years ago. It spread gradually through much of Asia over the ensuing millennia, and was known in the Middle East, North Africa, and Mediterranean Europe by about 1000 b.c.e. Between about 700 and 1100 c.e. Arab traders—and those they conquered— embedded O. sativa much more deeply in the these areas, and also brought it to the savannah lands contiguous to the Sahara, to the coastal zones of East Africa, and to the island of Madagascar. O. glaberrima, native to West Africa, was once thought to be a subspecies or variety of O. sativa, but is now believed to be an independent species. It was first domesticated sometime between about 300 b.c.e. and 300 c.e. in the watersheds between the Senegal and middle Niger Rivers. Both O. sativa and O. glaberrima spread to the Americas as part of the so-called Columbian exchange, and in the New World—as in the Old World—O. sativa has always been dominant.

ROLE IN THE WORLD FOOD SYSTEM

Among the world's leading cereal grains, only two, wheat and maize, rival rice in importance. A strong case can be made, however, that of the three, rice is preeminent. Eaten by roughly half of the earth's population today, rice is the leading staple in the world, and rice farming constitutes the single largest use of land for food production. Indeed, roughly 9 percent of the earth's arable land surface (about 125 million hectares) is currently dedicated to rice production. Rice is today the greatest food source for the world's poor, and rice farming the single greatest source of employment for this same segment of the world's population. Total world production is currently more than 600 million tons of rough rice annually. Since rice provides between about 354 and 362 kilocalories per 100 grams, the cereal clearly accounts for a very substantial proportion of the total caloric intake of the entire world population.

From the above, it should be apparent that rice maintains a hugely prominent place in the world food system. But what about the place of rice in a literal sense? Where is most of it grown and where is most of it traded? Regarding the first question, despite the fact that rice can be (and is) grown extensively on every inhabited continent, the vast majority of the world's rice crop has always been grown in Asia. Although other staples such as wheat, sorghum, gram, and lentils play major roles in parts of Asia, considering the vast continent as a whole, rice dominates overwhelmingly. As many scholars have demonstrated over the years, it is, in fact, difficult to overstate the place of rice in the history and culture of East Asia, Southeast Asia, and South Asia. In most other parts of the world, the role of rice is more limited, but hardly insubstantial, and in a few places—the southeastern Mediterranean, northwestern Italy, West Africa, parts of the United States and Brazil—the role of rice has proved quite significant over time. Rice has been traded in substantial quantities for thousands of years, though it should be noted that rice has traditionally been consumed in situ or near to the site of its production to a far greater degree than has been the case with the world's other great staples, particularly wheat, a far higher percentage of which has been traded over long distances, at least in modern times.

Before analyzing trade patterns themselves, it is necessary to say a few words about the uses to which rice has traditionally been put. Here, too, there has been variation between East and West. In many parts of Asia, rice has long constituted not merely the principal dietary staple. For example, even today, Bangladeshis and Cambodians get over three-quarters of their daily calories from rice, Burmese 70 percent, Laotians 70 percent, and Vietnamese 65 percent (in the United States, by contrast, the figure is 3%). The profound economic and cultural hold of rice is apparent in myriad ways all over Asia, from Japan to the Punjab. The name of a recent book on the role of the cereal in Japan, Rice as Self, captures very well the prominent place of rice in much of the East.

In the West, the role of rice is far different. Although the cereal is grown in many places in the West, it is central to only a few areas. Its value, then, arises more from its versatility and multiplicity of usages rather than from its indispensability. Historically, rice served many ceremonial functions in the West—at weddings, for exam-ple—and the cereal had its place in Western pharmacopeia/material medica. It was at times treated as a luxury item, even as a so-called superior good, the demand for which rose with price. Moreover, as time passed, rice was also found to have many industrial usages—in starch- and paper-making, to name but two. Generally speaking, however, its primary role in the West was as a substitute for, or supplement or complement to, small grains such as wheat, barley, oats, and rye, or even pulses and potatoes. In times of scarcity, or when prices for preferable foodstuffs were high, Westerners increasingly seized upon rice as a viable option, particularly useful for providing commoners, lumpen groups—laborers, soldiers, sailors, inmates, orphans, the jobless—and animals with the bulk calories and complex carbohydrates needed for survival.

RICE TRADE THROUGH THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

Given the different roles of rice in Asia and the West, it is not surprising that until relatively recently the trade in rice differed in these areas, and in some ways continues to differ even today. In Asia vibrant long-distance trades existed on the Yangtze, along the coast of southeastern China, and around Bay of Bengal well before the early modern period, and these trades expanded dramatically throughout the Indian Ocean and South China Sea during what Anthony Reid has labeled the "Age of Commerce," that is, the period between about 1450 and 1680 c.e. The nature and direction of this trade tended to shift over time as some surplus areas became deficit areas—the Yangtze Delta, for example—and various and sundry trading "empires" rose and fell, but the trade in rice clearly constituted an important constituent part of the quantitatively significant and qualitatively sophisticated commercial world of South, Southeast, and East Asia during the early modern period.

During the same period, the much smaller rice trade in the West was dominated by suppliers in northwestern Italy, particularly suppliers located in the rice alluvial valleys of the upper Po River (in Piedmont and Lombardy). The center of demand in the West during this period was in northern Europe, particularly in the lands that later came to constitute Germany, although rice also traded in other areas, most notably, southern Europe, the Mediterranean basin, and West Africa. By the early eighteenth century c.e. rice complexes were established in the Americas as well—in South Carolina on the southeastern coast of North America and in northeastern Brazil—and these areas, particularly South Carolina (joined later in the century by neighboring Georgia), were soon exporting rice to Europe and elsewhere.

In the last decade of the eighteenth century the rice trade began to change in ways that ultimately differentiated it strikingly from previous patterns in this trade. For the first time, Asian rice—from Bengal in northeastern India—was systematically marketed in the West. Moreover, according to the famed British political economist David MacPherson, writing in 1795, rice was the first "necessary" sent in significant quantities to the West from Asia, all previous trade consisting of articles and products "rather of ornament and luxury than of use" (MacPherson 1805, 4: 362). Hence, the 1790s saw the first explicit expression of the process of world market integration in rice, and rice being transformed into, and treated as, a commodity. These two processes have continued and intensified in the 200-odd years since then.

Indeed, over the course of the "long nineteenth century," particularly the period between about 1850 and 1914, we see the gradual emergence of one integrated rice market worldwide rather than a number of regional and supraregional markets in Asia and the West. Markets began moving in concert over narrower and narrower bands, and by the time of the World War I price convergence, and thus the so-called law of one price, was well advanced. As is often the case, market integration in rice was promoted by a variety of factors, including, most notably: (a) a secular increase in demand for the cereal resulting from rising population and income, as well as from urbanization and industrialization, and (b) dramatic improvements in transportation and communications, which, in markedly cutting the time and monetary costs of transacting, made possible the efficient flow of rice from sources of supply to sources of demand anywhere in the world. Because the rice trade had become a commodity trade, price rather than quality considerations became paramount, and low-cost suppliers in South and particularly Southeast Asia increasingly came to dominate the world rice market. By the late nineteenth century Lower Burma (now part of Myanmar), Siam (Thailand), and Cochinchina (now part of Vietnam) had rendered all other supply areas marginal, and the dominance of supply sources in Southeast Asia has more or less continued ever since.

SINCE THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

To be sure, other suppliers over the years have reclaimed segments of the export market or claimed new export markets. Two East Asian suppliers, Taiwan and Chosen (Korea), provided imperial Japan with huge quantities of rice in the first four decades of the twentieth century. The United States, after reconstituting its domestic rice industry in Louisiana, Texas, Arkansas, and California in the face of Asian competition, reemerged as a major exporter in the 1920s, and it has remained a major exporter ever since. Italy and Spain have retained certain export markets over the years, and in recent decades—since the Green Revolution of the 1960s and 1970s—Pakistan has made great strides as an exporter. Australia, too, has become a significant exporter, and a number of other countries have become players in the world rice market as well, including Uruguay, Egypt, Guyana, and, quite recently (and somewhat surprisingly), both India and China.

Unlike the case with the export market, the rice import market is subject to considerable short-term fluctuation, depending upon the state of the harvest in given areas, exchange rates, tariff and non-tariff barriers, and prices of other grains. Throughout the twentieth century, however, Asian colonies and nations dominated the import trade in rice, although considerable quantities of rice have continued to flow into Europe and the Americas as well. In recent decades Africa and the Middle East have become large importers in their own rights.

The world rice market has grown substantially over the course of the last 200 years—total rice exports averaged almost 24 million tons of milled rice equivalents annually for the five years ending in 2000—and new products, categories, and niches appear at ever-increasing rates. Promising new research in biotechnology, particularly the development in 2000 of a genetically modified variety of rice ("Golden rice") with increased beta-carotene content, will likely lead to further changes in this market, as will rising income levels, changing consumer preferences, accelerated rates of urbanization in many exporting areas, and various and sundry environmental challenges, particularly those relating to diminishing water supplies.

SEE ALSO Agriculture; Bangladesh; Bengal; Brazil; Burma; Calcutta; Canton System; Charleston; China; Cuba; East India Company, Dutch; Egypt; Empire, British; Empire, Dutch; Empire, French; Empire, Japanese; Empire, Mughal; Empire, Ottoman; Empire, Qing; Empire, Spanish; Ethnic Groups, Cantonese; Ethnic Groups, Fujianese; Ethnic Groups, Gujarati; Guangzhou; Imperialism; India; Indonesia; Japan; Korea;Laborers, Coerced;Laborers, Contract;Madras;Melaka;Mexico;Nigeria;Pakistan;Shanghai;Singapore;Slavery and the African Slave Trade;United States;Vietnam.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Coclanis, Peter A. "Distant Thunder: The Creation of a World Market in Rice and the Transformations It Wrought." American Historical Review 98 (1993): 1050–1078.

Barker, Randolph, et al. The Rice Economy of Asia. 2 vols. Washington, DC: Resources for the Future, 1985.

Grist, D. H. Rice, 6th edition. London: Longmans, 1986.

Latham, A. J. H. Rice: The Primary Commodity. London and New York: Routledge, 1998.

Maclean, D. C., et al. Rice Almanac, 3rd edition. Los Baños, Philippines: International Rice Research Institute, 2002.

MacPherson, David. Annals of Commerce. London: Nichols and Son, 1805.

Owen, Norman G. "The Rice Industry of Mainland Southeast Asia, 1850–1914." Journal of the Siam Society 59 (1971): 75–143.

Wickizer, V. D., and Bennett, M. K. The Rice Economy of Monsoon Asia. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Food Research Institute, 1941.

Peter A. Coclanis