Could ancient rice seeds help fight climate change?

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हाजार हाजार This is a song about rising water.

Rising waters and the devastation it's causing for people growing crops like rice. Paddy farmers have been growing this grain for centuries, maybe even millennia. It's become a central part of the Indian economy and the diet of billions of us who eat it. But climate change is causing a problem. In one corner of India, rising sea levels are making the soils salty. He's saying rice doesn't grow in saline water.

We can't use saline water till the rain flushes it clean. The salinity in the soil was so high that I couldn't grow anything the subsequent year. It's a scary problem given how dependent people are on rice in India and beyond. But farmers think they might have found a solution. She's saying when I cook indigenous tribes.

The aroma is so fragrant that everyone in the neighborhood knows that they see rice as being cooked because of just the aroma. And so our climate question is: how are Indian rice? Adapting to a saltier world. From the BBC World Service, I'm Greya Jackson. going through a little village now with um mud huts. There's cows wandering freely as they do in India. I think we've arrived. This is my BBC colleague from the People Fixing the Wild podcast, William Cramer.

Hello William, how are you? I I'm very good, thanks, Greg. How are you? Yeah, I'm not too bad. You're in the Sunderband today. Just tell our listeners where that is in case they've never heard of it. So it's a huge vast region that stretches from West Bengal in Right across Bangladesh. and it's actually a massive mangrove forest which is full of tigers and crocodiles but a lot of people live here too so we've got about four and a half million people on the Indian side.

and about 2.7 million on the Bangladeshi side. And it's sort of naturally a very wet area. It's a delta basically that is fed from three huge rivers. including the Ganges and actually I'm on a a smaller river right now as I'm talking to you I'm just seeing that it's late evening here and there's just still a little bit of pink in the sky.

And you can probably hear some bells from the boats and some chattering. Bells. It sounds like someone's like smacking a walk trying to get your attention saying it's dinner time. Come have something to eat. That actually that might be what they're doing, yeah. So it is very much rice is the staple here and right now it's harvest time and so the rice is very tall in the field.

and it looks absolutely spectacular. You know the tops of it are glowing sort of a gold colour and then you also see people harvesting in the field which is a sort of very kind of characteristic thing where you see them bending double and then standing up above the rice and then they disappear again below the level of the rice.

But you also see them walking up the road with great big sheaves of rice on their backs as well. So it's literally everywhere at the moment. Have you been harvesting it yourself? Have you been giving the locals a hand? I have, yes. he's saying be careful of your hands and your feet okay that way okay okay he's positioned my hand on the stalks Hey, one, two, three. Four. What did you w was I good? Good, good. Was I good? Oh, okay.

Well done William. Who's the female voice I just heard? So I'm travelling around this region with a local journalist called Naher who has knows the Sundabans like the back of her hand. We're very lucky that we have you. I do w wonder whether it's been a good harvest this year. Yeah, I think it has been a good harvest, but it it hasn't always been that way, uh which is Why I'm here really to talk about this a bit. So there have been some very poor harvests over the last decade, 15 years.

To the extent that actually a lot of people have moved away, it's three quarters of households now in the Sundabans have a family member living in another state to support them.

So why are the harvests becoming poor? Is there like a smoking gun that we can point to and blame? One of the reasons is and this is where the climate comes in. is that the soil around here is becoming gradually saltier.

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But then obviously we also have rising sea levels. And another thing that farmers here feel very, very deeply is the cyclones. So we think climate change makes cyclones more severe. four or five really bad cyclones in the Bay of Bengal over the last 10 or 15 years. And so you know when that happens all of this salty water from these tidal rivers just washes over all of the land and ruins the crops though.

Right, so there are lots of things going on here. As our world warms, the oceans are expanding, and it's causing the sea level to rise. The warmer waters are also driving more severe cyclones, which Flood the soil with even more salt water. The river flows are changing too. So it takes three to four years before that salinity dies down enough for farmers to plant the usual types of rice that they plant.

Gosh, okay, so I mean I was just thinking of it as one harvest, but actually we're talking about no multiple seasons here. Yeah. That must be a pretty desperate situation for many people who are ha trying to harvest the rice year on year and finding it's failing. It is. Yeah. Altyazı M.K. So this is a song that I recorded this morning in Kalitala Village and the lyrics go the destructive waters of Ayla destroyed the land. It destroyed everything around it.

That's actually one of many folk songs that I've already heard about Cyclone Isla which clearly traumatised a huge number of people in this region. And part of the reason for that is that farmers were using what they call high yield varieties of rice. So this goes back to the nineteen sixties I guess when uh the so called Green Revolution happened here in India.

And what that was, a sort of science led agricultural revolution where new kinds of crops were developed, you know, wheat, rice, other staples. Which were more plentiful. The idea was basically to feed the hungry and growing population. And I spoke to a farmer, Palach Mwandal, who was growing high yield varieties of rice. when the cyclone hit in 2009 and he told me what happened. कर दो कर दो कर दो कर दो कर दो Did you have to flee? Did you have to run away?

When the water reached his house, he had to a chair on top of a wooden table, climb on top of that along with the small children in the house and then help them hold on to whatever surfaces that they could to avoid the water. And when the water receded, the salt remained. Uh tell me about that. for your phone रिष्ट रिष्ट रिष्ट रिष्ट रिष्ट रिष्ट रिष्ट रिष्ट रिष्ट रिष्ट

We can't use saline water till the rain flushes it clean. The salinity in the soil was so high that I couldn't grow anything uh the subsequent year. Like Palash, do about it? That's all to come on the climate question from the BBC World Service. If journalism is the first draft of history, what happens if that draft is flawed?

In 1999, four Russian apartment buildings were bombed, hundreds killed. But even now, we still don't know for sure who did it. It's a mystery that sparked chilling theories. I'm Helena Merriman, and in a new BBC series, I'm talking to the reporters who first covered this story. What did they miss the first time? The History Bureau. Putin and the apartment bombs. Listen on bbc.com or wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm Greya Jackson. And this week we're asking how can farmers adapt to salty soils in places like the Sundarbans? Now we've been hearing about the issues growers face in this eastern corner of India, salty soils and cyclones. But farmers there have been taking matters into their own hands and experimenting with different varieties of traditional or so-called desi. Let's go back to our on-the-ground reporter, William. So, I mean this slightly blows my mind, but

There are actually a hundred thousand distinct varieties of rice that are native to India. A hundred thousand? Just in India? Yeah. Wow. Just in India, yeah. And these are sometimes called Desi Rice. The most famous of these varieties is basmati. But there are many and they're very different. You know, they're very varied. Some are long grain, some are short grain, they have different flavours, different textures.

different nutritional profile. So let's go back to Palash Mondal who's the farmer who was telling us about how he suffered after the Cyclone Isla. This is what he did next. We experimented a little bit and realised there were some seeds that were more durable and more robust when it came to tolerating salinity. Was there a particular variety that was like... А супер вареті по сел.

It is a good question. We realized through experimentation that these were actually the same seeds that my father and grandfather used to grow. Wow. So they were using those seeds for a reason, I guess. Your forefathers, you know, going back decades, hundreds of years. had obviously made the decision that these were the right seeds for this environment. When a few of us started and we found success, farm around us realised that they could also implement the same method.

So have they stuck with it or have some of them given up and gone back to high-yielding varieties? They're growing both. The high yielding just gets them more money, more profits. Unfortunately, the they don't get enough money for the Desi varieties. So they're still growing these high yielding varieties which they sort of sell.

Rydyn ni'n ymwneud â'r desi-rys yn ymwneud â'r cyklon sy'n ymwneud â'r cyklon sy'n ymwneud â'r cyflon sy'n ymwneud â'r cyflon sy'n ymwneud â'r cyflon sy'n ymwneud â'r cyflon sy'n ymwneud â'r cyflon sy'n ymwneud â'r cyflon sy'n. But he believes that the Desi rices do hold the answer.

And somebody who is quite well known and who really, really believes in this approach is Dr Debal Deb. Uh he's a very well known agrarian scientist. He's made it his life's work really to conserve these seeds but also advocate for their reintroduction. And I met him in his lab, the Batsuda Laboratory for Conservation in Kolkata. Each single species was created in the hands of farmers between 10,000 years and 8,000 years ago.

Rice is primarily you know a wetland crop. It requires water. Now there is some farmer where there is no rainfall and water is very scarce. But that's the only staple they have they have to eat. Therefore these farmers selected certain plants which they found is still growing and giving a good yield even in their drought conditions. Observing that particular plant among this population and then continuing that selection over generations, conscious selection, not accidental.

This is the variety, this is the genes which were selected by those farmers for a thousand years ago that created several varieties of drought-tolerant rice. Right, so farmers essentially took note of which rice plants grew well in drier conditions, then bred them together, and over time it created new varieties that could survive a drought.

The way he says it is that, you know, these rices came about from our forefathers, these ancient farmers, farmers from hundreds of years ago, who were scientists. It's just that we don't know who what their names were. What a poetic way of thinking about it. And it wasn't just drought our ancient scientists bred crops for. They also created salt-tolerant varieties too. Back to Debau.

In my own farm we have 16 varieties which are salt tolerant and out of these 60, 4 of them grow in seawater, not saline water. In seawater. Seawater. They're happily growing in seawater. Now, can you find any textbook showing that rice grows in seawater everywhere defined? It's a freshwater craft. Yeah. Okay.

So these are the amazing properties. But wait wait a second, what do they taste like? I mean they're they are they taste rice. They taste like okay Well some rice. Are they really salty? Well I cannot I cannot verbally explain the taste, no. Yeah. How can you how can you explain the taste of

Uh b difference between beef and pork. Yeah. Verbally, can you explain? Um one taste. One tastes like beef and one tastes Exactly Not convinced, William went to try some salt-tolerant Desi Rice himself, back in the kitchen of Palacia's sister in law, Gantcham. This is sweet. Which is uh specifically made Once um there is a harvest. Să vă mulțumim pentru vizionare!

she's saying when i cook indigenous rice the aroma is so fragrant that everyone in the neighborhood knows that they see rice is being cooked because of just the aroma So I'm just gonna try one of these. Mm. It's a little bit chewy and very, very sweet and filling. It's very nice, thank you. Growing these old varieties sounds so promising, doesn't it?

For years, scientists all over the world have been trying to breed or genetically modify rice to get a salt-tolerant variety, and at great expense too. So would this solution we've been hearing about in the Sunderbands work elsewhere?

Let's get an expert view. Hi everybody, my name is Rafael Gutoker and I'm a senior research leader at Royal Botanic Gardens Cube, primarily interested in how crops adapt to various different environments. Rafael, what was most interesting to me is that there were so many old varieties that seemed to grow in Salt water, but not just sort of saline conditions, actual sea water, which is wild to me. I had no idea that was possible. That is indeed extraordinary and

Um it will be really interesting to see scientific evidence behind that. I can't can't hide it. I I I think generally speaking And perhaps from less of a scientific perspective, it was very uplifting to hear the story in the Thunderbones. One is that there

local in farm experimentation. And I think this is really needed and should be supported because global centres, even regional centres, would not be able to always tailor their variety right for local conditions. So this local initiatives are are very needed and should be supported. Yeah, and I mean it seems to be really working for the farmers that William spoke to. You know, Palash talks about how actually he grows a lot of it and he's really supportive of it.

But he sort of indicates that not everyone is growing just this rice. They're growing a mix of rices, which suggests actually there are some problems, there are some trade-offs with these indigenous Desi rices. That's right. Yeah, it does make sense. And I can attest to first hand whenever I do field work in various countries this is always the same problem. It's the market.

Rafael told me that the whole global rice economy and the infrastructure that goes with it is based on a few high yield varieties. So if you have a variety that doesn't really match the criteria for the market, then you can't really sell them at high price. So it starts all the way from the fact that maybe the milling machine is not really well suited for this size of grains and so the problems just cascade down from there.

So there is certain appeal of having the monoculture in terms of economic gain. Everything is streamlined, you have the supply chain set up and so you can get better money for that product. But at the same time, you're really risking that any stress, environmental stress, will completely wipe out your whole field. How do we get the best of both worlds? A rice that is resistant to climate stresses But also is able to be sold in a market and eaten by someone like me, say.

Yeah, absolutely. I think generally speaking in Western countries there's been a trend of looking for interesting foods, some you know, unusual varieties. say purple rice gained quite a lot of attention because A it might be quite healthy for humans, it's very distinct and it's just like oh something new, something novel.

So there's really potential for such markets as like allied or like um special culinary purpose rice varieties. It's just very difficult to rearrange the local supply chain around it. So how viable is this sort of solution in other parts of the world using these old varieties that perhaps people's parents or grandparents used and replanting those.

So it is possible and it is happening pretty much everywhere. I work a lot in the Philippines and this certainly been the case where uh traditional varieties, especially colored rice, is gaining in popularity.

Thanks, Rafael. Let's go back to William. I want to know what the future looked like for Desi Rice in the Sunderband? Well what people are saying is that the Indian government isn't really on board with it. You know, that this is something that's kind of coming more from the ground.

And so, you know, if I'm honest, I don't think farmers are that optimistic about it. You know, they really believe in these rices, but I think they feel that unless they get more support and it gets more of a push, that it isn't going to happen. And I think there's another question here, Greya, which I think you know, different versions of this question I

played out across all of the kind of climate change frontiers around the world. But you know, how sustainable is rice growing in the Sundarbahns like long term? I mean I suppose the point that needs to be made is that rice doesn't really belong here, right? This is a mangrove ecosystem. But in the eighteenth century the British started to clear it when under colonial rule and they wanted to make the land more productive. So they encouraged the development of rice farming.

It just doesn't really go in this kind of environment with all of this seawater. You know, and I think Palash Mondal, the farmer that we spoke to earlier, he's aware of that and he is quite realistic about it. We have been observing that sea level has been rising. and more of the land is submerging inside the water. Embankments are there.

uh to keep out the seawater but there may be a time when it'll not be sufficient to keep the seawater away and prevent the Sundarbans from completely submerging. Our thanks to William Kramer. The production team this week was Diane Richardson, Octavia Woodward, Simon Watts, Tom Brignall, Neil Churchill, and myself, Grey Jackson. We'll see you next time. Bye. If journalism is the first draft of history, what happens if that draft is flawed?

In 1999, four Russian apartment buildings were bombed, hundreds killed. But even now, we still don't know for sure who did it. It's a mystery that sparked chilling theory. I'm Helena Merriman, and in a new BBC series, I'm talking to the reporters who first covered this story. What did they miss the first time? The History Bureau. Putin and the apartment bombs. Listen on bbc.com or wherever you get your podcasts.