How do you grow rice faster?

Wednesday 11th Jul 2018, 3.11pm

3 billion people depend on rice for survival & owing to predicted population increases, land that provided enough rice to feed 27 people in 2010 will need to support 43 by 2050. In this week’s podcast episode we ask: how do you grow rice faster? Currently over three billion people depend on rice for survival, and, owing to predicted population increases and a general trend towards urbanisation, land that provided enough rice to feed 27 people in 2010 will need to support 43 by 2050. In the hopes of meeting the food needs of billions of people around the world, scientists have taken a major step towards creating a ‘supercharged’ strain of rice! In this week’s Big Questions podcast we visited Jane Langdale, Professor of Plant Development at the University of Oxford, and is the current coordinator of the C4 Rice Project, to ask: How do you grow rice faster?