Sauer - 1993 - Historical geography of crop plants, a select rost

Monocots 211
heavily fertilized, This was the beginning of the so-called Green Revolution,
which came later to the rest of Asia and the West.
On the subtropical island of Taiwan, scientific rice breeding began in the
1930s and involved hybridization between tall native varieties and semi-dwarf
varieties from Japan and China. In tropical Asia, some early hybridization
experiments were conducted in the Dutch East Indies but without notable
success.
The major breakthrough in new hybrids for tropical Asia came after establishment
of the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) in the Philippines
in 1962. Desirable traits from a semi-dwarf Taiwanese variety and a tall
Indonesian variety were combined in a new high-yielding hybrid, the famous
IR8. In 1983, about 40% of the rice acreage of tropical Asia, including the
East Indies, was planted to IR8 and subsequently developed hybrids. Their
high yields permitted the grain supply to more or less keep up for two decades
with human population increase. However, similar yield increases are not
predicted for the future. The new rice varieties have done well only on the
better lands where water levels are tightly controlled and heavy nitrogen
fertilization is profitable. The IRRI and collaborating agencies are, of course,
attempting to breed varieties for more marginal lands, but results are expected
to be slower and more modest than those in the 1960s and are not expected
to keep up with projected increases in population. Thailand still had a suiplus
of rice for export during the 1980s, but tropical Asia as a whole is again a
rice importer with the U.S. a leading source.
Rice from Spain regularly went along as provisions for the early explorers
and colonists of the Americas, and some was promptly planted there, e.g., in
Hispaniola under Columbus and Puerto Rico under Ponce de Leon. It is
unlikely that these first introductions took hold. By the early 1600s, rice
cultivation for local use was reported in Cuba, Jamaica, and the non-Spanish
colony of Saint Christopher in the Lesser Antilles.
On the American mainland, rice was being grown under irrigation in the
Cauca Valley of Colombia by about 1575. By about 1600, Panama was
exporting rice to Peru every year. Rice was being planted soon after 1600 in
Peru, Venezuela, and Brazil. Early tropical American planting was usually in
coastal lowlands and worked by blacks. In the 1700s, Jesuit missions thrust
rice cul'|;ivation on the native Indians in the Orinoco and Amazon basins.
Meanwhile, O. sativa had been independently introduced in the late 1600s to
the British colonies in southeastern North America, perhaps initially from West
Africa. In Í699, a ship from Madagascar brought to Carolina a variety with
larger grain. The earliest North American records refer to upland rice planting,
but irrigated rice planting began on a small scale in the early 1700s, perhaps
using skills of slaves from Madagascar and Africa.
Before the Revolution, new varieties of upland rice were introduced to the
Carolinas from Cochin China and China. Jefferson had upland rice brought
from Egypt, and there have been innumerable subsequent introductions from
Asia and Africa.