Premium rice entrepreneurs in China harness tech, crowdfunding to grow a safer, tastier grain

You would expect China to be the best grower of rice in the world. The Chinese have been cultivating the starchy seed for more than 8,000 years and the grain – the country’s most important staple – is imbued with cultural signi­ficance. But the people of the world’s largest nation of rice eaters – pickier in recent times given their new-found prosperity – are often let down by their own produce.

Ask any foodie to name the world’s great rice varieties and they are likely to answer with Thai jasmine, Indian basmati, Italian carnaroli and Japanese short-grain rice – varieties that instantly evoke images and flavours of the countries they are associated with. How about a grain from the land of fried rice? Most people would struggle to name one.

China produces more rice than any other country, even though its farms lack the scale and tech­nology to yield, per hectare, as much as those in Japan, South Korea, the United States and Australia.

It has many kinds of rice, too, beyond the basic classi­fications of long-grain indica, short-grain japonica and glutinous. The country’s formidable agri­cultural research capacity has made it the world leader in producing hardy, blight-resistant hybrid strains, most notably those that agronomist Yuan Longping pioneered in the aftermath of the Great Famine (1958-61). The celebrated scientist continues to experiment today, at the age of 88. But many varieties of the grass classed as Oryza sativa in China are grown for yield, not flavour.

In any case, little is exported because Beijing maintains the world’s largest stockpile (nearly 70 per cent of global stock), for national security reasons, and domestic farmers are guaranteed generous prices, to remove incen­tives for selling rice abroad. That stance has recently been relaxed because domestic stock­piles are becoming too large. Still, even in Hong Kong or Macau you cannot find much rice from China . Hong Kong has long favoured Thai jasmine, with its distinctive fragrance.

China’s dubious food-safety record has not helped the reputation of its rice. Vast tracts of farmland and waterways are polluted by heavy metals, which bring periodic official warnings about excessive cadmium and arsenic in paddy fields. Add in the reaction to unethical business practices by sellers, such as the disguising of old rice by polishing dull grains with paraffin wax, and the overuse of bleach and other chemicals in processing, and it is now fashionable for Chinese households to install expen­sive, miniature rice mills in their kitchens.