Beyond the grain: a review of multifunctional roles of rice farming in Asia

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

Agriculture is multi-functional in character and provides a number of commodity and non-commodity outputs. Though multifunctionality of agriculture is recognized at the international level, it is yet to translate into policies at the national level. This is mainly due to the absence of comprehensive understanding of the non-commodity outputs associated with agriculture. The non-commodity outputs are in the form of hydrological, bio-diversity, emissions, socio-cultural, etc. Integrating the non-commodity outputs could potentially alter the cost-benefit ratios of agriculture investments and help sustain agriculture in the long run. Multi-functionality of agriculture is not only an efficient way of production (due to the jointness of products) but also helps addressing climate risks making it a policy objective itself. This paper aims to provide an in-depth understanding of multi-functionality and sets the basis for policy making and future research. This is a relatively new area of research that has potential to achieve sustainable agriculture development and also mitigate climate risks. The paper uses a systematic review of existing literature on multi-functionality of rice production systems with a focus on Asia. Availability of research studies are limited, as the research area is at a nascent stage and the review could identify about fifty studies that deal with joint products and multi-functionality after going through more than 100 studies accessed through search engines. Given the importance of rice crop in Asia, the review provides a comprehensive understanding of commodity (rice production and its by-products) as well as non-commodity outputs (hydrological, ecosystem services, socio-cultural, etc.) associated with rice production systems across the Asian countries. The systematic review clearly indicates that rice production systems provide number of non-commodity outputs. When valued in monitory terms by some studies, the non-commodity outputs outweigh commodity outputs in most countries. And the total value of the contribution of the rice systems is substantially higher than that of the value realized by the farmers, i.e., commodity outputs. Thus the contribution of rice-growing farmers in Asia to the national and global green economies is far greater than presently accounted for in the national accounts. Hence, these farming communities need to be compensated for their contribution and needs to be sustained given the social and ecological importance of the contribution.