Industry feels heat as methane spotlight turns to rice

Rice production is responsible for around 10% of global emissions of methane – a potent, short-lived greenhouse gas. It is, as UK brand Nice Rice claims in a new series of striking billboard adverts, “a dirty secret”. “It’s the reason I started Nice Rice but it still blows my mind,” founder Fergus O’Sullivan wrote on LinkedIn earlier this month.

The creative (and controversial) campaign is a bold and timely move – launched in the week that the COP29 climate talks were taking place in Azerbaijan, where methane regulation was one of the hottest topics. Nearly 160 countries have signed up to the global methane pledge, launched at COP26 by the EU and the US, to cut emissions of the gas by at least 30% by 2030 (compared to 2020). Few have got to grips with achieving that.

In fact, methane emissions are rising faster than any other greenhouse gas, Shefali Sharma, global project lead at Greenpeace in Germany, noted in a recent blog. “Our window of limiting planetary heating to 1.5°C is closing fast. Cutting methane, a powerful greenhouse gas 80 times stronger than carbon dioxide over a 20-year period, is key to opening that window and giving us a chance to save millions of lives and livelihoods from the worst impacts of climate change,” she added. 

Some governments have begun to make moves to curb emissions from energy (35% of global methane emissions) and waste (20%), two of the ‘big three’ emitters of methane. However, agriculture accounts for the largest share of global emissions of the gas (40%). Those burping cows and sheep are the culprits in chief, which is why much of the heat at COP29 and the previous few came from NGOs, scientists (and some businesses) calling for changes to western diets (including less, but better meat).

This doesn’t mean we should forget about rice – what some are calling the “silent source of methane” and second only to beef in terms of global greenhouse gas emissions (4.3GtCO2e and 2.1GtCO2e respectively). “Rice is a very important food source,” explains Ben Runkle, associate professor at the University of Arkansas, US, “so it’s important to keep yields high as we have population growth, while also managing its environmental footprint, and to support producers in this process”.

But how? Surprisingly, the answers are well-known and relatively straightforward. “We have reduced emissions and water use and are using fewer chemicals – and yields have increased,” explains Jean-Philippe Laborde, MD at Tilda, the UK rice business owned by Spain-based Ebro Foods. “There is definitely a higher net revenue and we can demonstrate this to farmers.”

Billions of people (some estimates are 20% of global calorie intake) and millions of farmers rely on rice. Asia is the world’s rice basket, producing 90%, but the world’s rice bowl is cracking, noted The Economist in 2023. “Global rice demand – in Africa as well as Asia – is soaring,” the newspaper warned. “Yet yields are stagnating. The land, water and labour that rice production requires are becoming scarcer. Rising temperatures are withering crops; more frequent floods are destroying them.” Think patchy monsoon rains and the droughts evident in India of late; floods in Pakistan; and the rising sea levels affecting the Mekong Delta in Vietnam’s ‘rice bowl’.

And rice is not just a victim of climate change. The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) estimated agricultural emissions at 146 million tonnes in 2018 but more recent estimates, which developed a new model for calculating emissions from rice cultivation, found that the figure is probably closer to 156 million tonnes. “Global food consumption alone could add nearly 1°C to warming by 2100,” wrote Columbia University’s Catherine Ivanovich and colleagues in a paper for Nature climate Change last year. “Seventy five per cent of this warming is driven by foods that are high sources of methane (ruminant meat, dairy and rice).”

The problem can be traced to the paddy fields that support most of the world’s rice production. “Rice is a thirsty, sub-aquatic plant,” Laborde explains. Traditional rice farming uses between 3,000 and 5,000 litres of water per kilo of crop, so it’s usually grown in permanently-flooded fields. These are the perfect anaerobic conditions in soils for methane-producing bacteria to thrive, creating rice’s ‘dirty secret’.

“These are the bubbles you see in the paddies,” explains Nice Rice’s O’Sullivan, who remains “staggered” by the scale of rice production and the environmental impacts of this “good food”. His inspiration for starting the company last year followed a fruitless search for a more sustainable product. “I couldn’t,” he tells Just Food. None of the major brands were even talking about the emissions problem, which “really annoyed me”, O’Sullivan adds.

They are starting to now. Rice accounts for 66% of Mars’ unsustainable water usage and 4% of greenhouse gas emissions in agriculture. The company is using less rice for its pet foods like Royal Canin “when not essential […] because science showed that rice had a bigger impact on carbon emissions than other cereals in most parts of the world”, reads its latest sustainability report. Rice grown in the US for example has an impact twice as high as wheat and almost three times higher than corn, according to the World Food Life Cycle database.

Click on the website for Mars’ Ben’s Original and you are met with big (green) type about its commitment to ensuring the production of more sustainable rice. Some 99% of the brand’s farmers are currently “working towards” the Sustainable Rice Platform (SRP) standard, which boasts of a nearly 50% cut in methane and a 10% to 20% boost in farmer net incomes. “There’s limited awareness of how a sustainable rice sector can help governments, businesses and the international community achieve the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development,” explains the SRP website. “We’re making sustainable rice a centerpiece for action.”

Mars was one of the founding members of the SRP, which has grown into global multi‐stakeholder alliance complete with a verification label. One of the key techniques for producing ‘better’ rice is known as AWD, or alternate wetting and drying. Mars is one of the companies helping farmers introduce the practice. AWD “involves periodically draining the water from the fields” explains Inge Jacobs, global sustainable sourcing lead at Mars Food, “which reduces both methane emissions and water usage without harming the rice yields”.

Tilda’s recently-published 2023-2024 impact report also highlights the impact this approach has had since testing began in 2021. “In a traditional, continuously flooded, rice production system, farmers would usually carry out 20-25 flooding cycles per growing season. However, those in our AWD project typically carry out at least five fewer drying cycles.” This has produced some impressive savings, Laborde says, following an analysis of farms in its Indian basmati supply chain through assessors at UK group Cool Farm.

“In 2022 we started a very small experiment with only 50 farmers, where we wanted to compare traditional practices against alternate wetting and drying. We can now say that we can reduce the CO2e by 36% and the methane by 45% by applying the AWD technique. Now we have 1,270 farmers with us, where we work in partnership with them and where we apply this AWD technique, and that represents 30% of our needs,” he adds.

The plan, unsurprisingly, is to roll this out towards all its farmers, not least because of the yield benefits to producers too. The “really challenging part” was engagement with farmers, Laborde admits. Communicating with hundreds of smallholders to capture their hearts and minds is tough, so it helped that this was a fairly simple new approach – “there is no rocket science here” – and that Tilda could prove the profit boost available to suppliers.

Science and technology will have a part to play in the future of rice production. At the University of Arkansas, Runkle is running a three-year project to better understand the methane-reducing potential of AWD. Recent research he has been involved with, published in the journal Agriculture, Ecosystems, Environment, showed reductions of up to 80% are possible in some cases; the new work is looking at how well it may perform in different farm and soil conditions. "We know from the past research that the soils of rice fields are very important in determining the greenhouse gas emissions that come off of those fields. What we don’t have a really strong handle on is how much," Runkle explains. "Rice can grow well in clay soil. What we’re trying to target is quantifying clay content of soil as the kind of master variable that will help us control methane emissions." 

Back at COP29 in Azerbaijan there were the usual ‘theatrics’ relating to climate finance for farmers (who had again been “failed” according to some reports). With Donald Trump preparing to enter the White House again, the expectations of progress have been dimmed (dramatically).

Maybe the potential to transform rice production to the benefit of farmers, the planet and consumers, as some of these brands claim, could offer some much-needed optimism? 

Nice Rice’s adverts claim a 49% reduction in emissions but marketing experts have been quick to point out that these may well fall foul of advertising rules. Brands have been battered by NGOs criticising them for over-egging their progress towards net-zero (as well as nature restoration, regenerative farming, water use and biodiversity loss). Regulations have been tightened to prevent ambiguous claims. “People need to make accurate claims that don’t mislead consumers,” O’Sullivan says but doing that in a way that people will react with is “challenging”, he admits. The wording of one of the adverts has already been changed for social media following feedback. O’Sullivan says that to the best of his knowledge Nice Rice is “the only rice brand on the planet that has primary data from 100% of the farms we source from”. 

What the big brands think of him “raising awareness” of a problem that they were working on behind the scenes remains moot. There is hesitancy when Laborde is asked about this. “We need to be mindful about how we communicate all this,” he says. “We can’t blame farmers for polluting because any agricultural activity on the planet, whether this is rice or wheat or corn, has a carbon footprint.”

Up front in Tilda’s impact report is a Q&A with Laborde and his first response is also telling: “Scientifically measuring, reporting and verifying outcomes is crucial for sustainability – without it, everything we claim is theoretical.” He expands on this in a call with Just Food: “Studies that we’ve done [show] almost two thirds of consumers are very keen to understand how their lifestyle can impact the environment but, at the same time, they don’t really know what the choices they make mean in terms of sustainability. It’s our responsibility as a brand to be transparent, to make sure that we don’t mislead [and] to give them the detail if they want to understand our sustainability journey.” He adds it is about sharing but just as much it’s about “proving”.

The proof, as they say, is in the (rice) pudding, which brings us to another cloud of controversy hanging over COP29 (and rice production) carbon credits. The carbon-credit market was supposed to have helped revolutionise rice farming, with producers able to sell credits for the emissions they saved through new practices like AWD. However, some of the projects have been selling more carbon than they’ve said in yet another scandal in this space. “There are consequences for failing to follow the rules and requirements in place,” said Farhan Ahmed, chief programme management officer at Verra in August as he announced the rejection of as many as 37 low-emission rice cultivation projects located in China following a quality control review.

The investigation began following a Climate Home report revealing oil giant Shell’s role in rice farming schemes and the risk they were generating “worthless offsets”. Major food brands have also been worried into dropping their use of carbon offsets or claiming carbon neutrality (a term some countries are planning to ban). Verra, the US-based registry that sets standards for the voluntary carbon market, has been at the centre of the storm that has hit the area in recent years. “This action should send a signal that inclusion in the Verra Registry is a sign of integrity and quality,” Ahmed added.

The damage done by dubious offset projects could be deep and lasting – not least because this is a “more systemic problem” with carbon markets today, according to Gilles Dufrasne, an expert at Carbon Market Watch, an NGO. Integrity is key, which is why food brands are turning to tech companies to help them sell carbon offsets from sustainable rice production or validate them for carbon insets against their Scope 3 emissions targets. 

“The carbon market has been maturing and, like any market, there are waves of refinement and adoption, explains Vassily Carantino, chief executive officer at Carbon Farm. “You have the first set of methodologies with a lot of holes in them and then people find the holes [and there’s] fraud.” That upsets the whole apple cart; finance towards farmers that are truly reducing emissions ebbs away and trust in the claims being made dries up.

But there is hope that things are improving. Carbon Farm, which works with the likes of Mars, Danone, Bayer and Ebro, last year raised €2.5m ($2.6m) in a seed round to help decarbonise rice farming through satellite-verified carbon credits. Its technology can assess “big regions” using satellite data that brings independence to the MRV (measuring, reporting and verification) process, offering brands confidence if they make claims, says Carantino.

Bayer has a target to bring direct-seeded rice (DSR) to one million hectares in India by 2030 as part of its regenerative agriculture programme. This, the company says, will cut water use by 40%, greenhouse gas emissions by up to 45% and reduce farmers’ dependence on scarce and costly manual labour by up to 50%. 

Carbon Farm isn’t the only start-up using satellites, either. Mitti Labs raised $3m this year and has launched five projects across 30,000 hectares in India, working with Ebro and the Syngenta Foundation to train farmers in AWD and DSR. Tracking improvements in one-hectare plots spread across a giant country is not easy, which is where satellite imagery, AI and field data comes in. It’s not perfect, the company said recently, but it gets close enough without measuring every single field. 

“Investing in climate isn’t straight forward,” said the Lightspeed Venture Partners team, one of those investing in Mitti. “Moreover, climate credits have had a chequered past.” And yet it adds: “The demand for verified carbon credits is skyrocketing.”

By 2030, the expected demand is 1.5Gt, while the current supply is only around 0.25Gt, representing a $5bn opportunity in rice in Asia alone, “and we haven’t even started taking into account the methane markets”, Lightspeed notes.

The prices of verified credits are already rising, adds Carbon Farm’s Carantino, spurred by investigations into the old rules and new rules emerging which is “a good sign”, he adds. We could do with more of those.