MELBOURNE, Sept. 6 (Xinhua) -- A team of Australian researchers have partnered with an Indian research foundation in an effort to develop a variety of salt-tolerant rice, as part of a broader project to address food security.
A team from the University of Tasmania's School of Land and Food will work with the M S Swaminathan Research Foundation to develop the salt-tolerant rice.
Holger Meinke, head of the School of Land and Food, said that given rice production in Asia was increasingly impaired by seawater intrusion, the development of a durable variety of the grain was of utmost importance.
"Researchers from the University of Tasmania, supported by the Tasmanian Institute of Agriculture, will be using a variety of wild rice that is capable of growing in highly-saline coastal areas to identify and transfer traits that confer its remarkable salinity-stress tolerance," Meinke said in a press release on Tuesday.
"These traits will be transferred to traditional rice cultivars using a range of modern plant-breeding techniques to create a salt-tolerant rice variety which will be suitable for growing conditions in India and other saline environments around the world."
The three-year, 1.5 million U.S. dollar project would be funded by the Australia-India Strategic Research Fund which receives equal contributions from the Australian and Indian governments.
Sergey Shabala, the project leader from the University of Tasmania, said the project could have wide-reaching benefits for the agriculture industry.
"Rice is Australia's third largest cereal grain export, and the ninth largest agricultural export. The industry generates around 600 million U.S. dollars revenue per annum, with around 380 million U.S. dollars of this coming from value-added exports," Shabala said.
"The development of salinity-tolerant rice variety will help improve outcomes for Australian farmers who are affected by transient salinity.
"This is the first step towards developing agricultural systems that are highly salt-tolerant. The capabilities and technologies developed through this project have the potential to ultimately enhance the agricultural productivity for other major crops such as barley and wheat."
