Sustainability signals rising

Rice buyers are starting to treat lower-emission growing methods and organic paperwork as part of the same sourcing test. (irri.org) (ecfr.gov) The International Rice Research Institute said on February 5 that ASEAN officials and rice-sector advisers met in Hanoi on January 21-23 to push wider use of low-emission rice practices across Southeast Asia. IRRI said the region produces nearly a quarter of the world’s rice. (irri.org) One of those practices, alternate wetting and drying, replaces continuous flooding with timed drying cycles. IRRI says it can cut water use by 30% and reduce methane emissions by 30% to 70% without lowering yields. (ghgmitigation.irri.org) Another, direct-seeded rice, skips transplanting and plants seed directly in the field. IRRI says that lowers labor needs, reduces water demand during crop establishment, and keeps soils aerobic for more of the season, which reduces methane emissions. (ghgmitigation.irri.org) Rice has become a climate target because IRRI says rice production generates about 8% of agriculture’s global greenhouse gas emissions. The institute’s methane-reduction project says the gains from direct seeding and alternate wetting and drying still vary by soil, climate, variety, and farm management. (irri.org) Organic demand is moving on a parallel track. IFOAM and FiBL said global sales of organic food reached 136.4 billion euros in 2023, while organic farmland rose 2.6% to 98.9 million hectares and the number of producers reached 4.3 million. (ifoam.bio) That growth is feeding stricter paperwork demands in export markets. The European Commission says organic trade into the European Union is governed by production, import, control, and enforcement rules under the bloc’s organic legislation that has been in force since January 2022. (ec.europa.eu) In the United States, certified organic operations must keep records that fully disclose activities and transactions from purchase through sale or transport, and those records must be traceable back to the last certified operation. Federal rules say the records must be kept for at least five years. (ecfr.gov) That is where the two trends meet: a rice shipment sold on climate or organic claims increasingly needs field practices that can be measured and documents that can be audited. IRRI’s workshop in Hanoi focused on the same missing pieces buyers ask for later — reliable data, measuring and reporting systems, and financing to scale adoption. (irri.org) The immediate change is not a single new rule. It is a tighter chain linking how rice is grown, how claims are certified, and how exporters prove both to regulators and buyers. (usda.gov)