IRRI Annual Report 1994-1995 I IRRI 1994-1995 Water A Looming Crisis

Thirty-five years ago, the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations, in cooperation with the Govemment of the Philippines, set in motion an unprecedented global experiment. Together they established a research center to unite within a developing country the talents of international and national scientists to raise the yield of the world's most important food crop, rice. Rice was the staple food for 90% of the world's poor people, and the goal was to avert what was widely seen as an imminent threat of mass starvation among them. That research center, of course, was IRRI. A statement of its first director, Robert F. Chandler, Jr., in IRR's first annual report (1961-62), exemplifies the visionary spirit that animated the Institute from the beginning. Dr. Chandler wrote that it should be possible to produce a rice plant with the characteristics needed for the necessary increased yield within five years. Only four years later, IRRI had done just that, with IR8. The new variety, followed by many others, triggered the Green Revolution, which led to a doubling of rice production throughout Asia and saved hundreds of millions of lives