Planting rice is getting fun again in Indonesia, as 'rice connoisseurs' rescue near-extinct varieties

For three months in 2006, Mdm Hilman visited one remote village after the other, providing free consultations to farmers who found themselves in a variety of legal woes and business disputes.

“As someone who loves cooking, I was like a kid in a candy store,” she told CNA about seeing dozens of rice varieties which many older Indonesians had forgotten about, let alone still preserve. Among the now rare rice are the blackish cempo ireng and the centuries-old merah putih rice with its distinctive half-white-half-red grain.

“The green revolution has a direct impact towards the disappearance of thousands of Indonesian rice varieties,” Indonesia’s Bogor Agricultural Institute biotechnology professor Dwi Andreas Santosa told CNA. And people like Mdm Hilman and Prof Santosa are hoping that this phenomenon could serve as a momentum to save these endangered rice varieties.

More importantly for scientists like Prof Santosa, the practice keeps the genetic diversity of the plant alive, but the green revolution brought an end to this practice. In the Indonesian part of Borneo, the professor discovered a rice variety which grows in swamps while on the northern tips of Sumatra, there are rice plants which are resilient towards salt water and grow on coastal areas.

Professor Dwi Andreas Santosa showing one of the 600 rice varieties he had collected over the years from farmers across Indonesia. At the same time, she has been busy attending trade shows, speaking at seminars and staging cooking classes to drum up interest towards these local rice varieties. There are even varieties which taste good on its own, like the chef’s personal favourite, menthik wangi.

“In the last five years, more and more Indonesians are becoming more aware of what they eat. They want to know what they are eating, where it is from and how it is grown,” she added.

Source: Holiday News (holidaynews.net)

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