O=C=OAfter 9,000 years of cultivation, rice has reached its thermal limit
#Rice fueled many of the earliest civilizations and remains a virtually indispensable source of #food in the modern world. Today, half of all humans get 20% of their calories from rice, and more than a billion people are reliant on the production and distribution of rice for their livelihoods.
That might be about to change. Scientists warn that over the next 50 years, #GlobalWarming caused by the #emission of #GreenhouseGases will accelerate to a pace that is 5,000 times faster than rice, and many other #crop species, have ever had to contend with at any time during their evolutionary history.
https://phys.org/news/2026-04-years-cultivation-rice-thermal-limit.html
After 9,000 years of cultivation, rice has reached its thermal limit
Rice has historically been a heat-loving plant. In fact, the wild ancestor of cultivated rice once grew primarily on the sweltering, rain-swept Malay and Indochina peninsulas as well as the islands of Southeast Asia. It wasn't until Earth's climate warmed after the last ice age that wild rice substantially spread into central China and South Asia, where it was independently domesticated by humans in two events that arguably rank among the most important in the history of our species.