As a child, Dong Van Canh watched while the rice fields of Vietnam’s Mekong Delta were set alight to make way for the next crop, blackening the sky and flooding the air with potent greenhouse gases.
Rice — Asia’s principal staple — is to blame for around 10 percent of global emissions of methane, a gas that over two decades traps about 80 times as much heat as carbon dioxide.
Usually associated with cows burping, high levels of methane are also generated by bacteria that grow in flooded rice paddies and thrive if leftover straw rots in the fields after harvest.
The message from scientists is: rice cannot be ignored in the battle to cut emissions.— AFP
