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US Study on Origin of Rice Sparks Sino-India Row
Straits Times Indonesia | May 05, 2011

A worker winnowing rice at a market yard at Bavla, west of the western Indian city of Ahmedabad. A row has flared between Chinese and Indian experts after a study by US genome researchers found that the first rice was grown in China’s Yangtze River valley about 10,000 years ago. (Reuters Photo) A worker winnowing rice at a market yard at Bavla, west of the western Indian city of Ahmedabad. A row has flared between Chinese and Indian experts after a study by US genome researchers found that the first rice was grown in China’s Yangtze River valley about 10,000 years ago. (Reuters Photo)
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Hong Kong. A row has flared between Chinese and Indian experts after a study by US genome researchers found that the first rice was grown in China’s Yangtze River valley about 10,000 years ago.

While Chinese researchers embraced the study and called it the “final judgment”, their Indian counterparts insisted that previous studies had provided stronger evidence that rice originated in India, Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post reported yesterday.

“We have been debating it with our Indian colleagues for decades,” said Professor Ding Yanfeng of Nanjing Agricultural University. “It’s good to have some unbiased opinions from the US.”

“Indica and japonica are scientifically incorrect,” Ding said of the names of the two main subspecies of Asian rice, suggesting that they be re-named to reflect their Chinese origin.

Using modern computer algorithms, new modeling techniques and a pool of more than 600 gene fragments from various wild and domestic rice species, the US research team concluded that wild rice was domesticated at one place, not several.

And that place was China, not India.

The team involved a dozen researchers from New York University, Stanford University, Washington University and Purdue University.

Their paper was published online by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America on Monday.

But Dr T.K. Adhya, director of the Central Rice Research Institute in Cuttack, India, said it was too early to rule out Indian roots for rice.

Some previous studies, such as one led by Professor Susan McCouch of Cornell University in 2007, suggested that rice was domesticated in the warm and humid plains at the southern foot of Himalayas, Adhya said.