When the Rice Congress of the Americas gathered in late April for its second annual meeting in Porto Alegre, Brazil, high on the list of agenda items was this question: Can biotechnology prevent a worldwide rice crisis from becoming an outright disaster?

The question isn’t new. A decade ago, the United Nations warned that urbanization in China, India, Indonesia, Vietnam, and Thailand would replace rice paddies with concrete, even as the populations of those countries would be booming. If widespread hunger, and possibly even famine, were to be averted, agricultural biotechnology would have to find ways to grow more rice, the prime food source for almost half the world, on fewer acres. Duncan Macintosh, an official at the Philippines-based International Rice Research Institute (IRRI), puts it this way: “The tools of modern biotechnology—including genetic modification—have a very important role to play in increasing rice yields in Asia.”

That bleak future presaged by the U.N. looms closer, even as rice production in 2008 is poised to reach an all-time high. In the past year, Cyclone Nargis in Myanmar, a persistent drought in Australia, a freezing winter in China, and climbing energy costs have caused rice prices to soar. In April, rice hit a record high on the Chicago Board of Trade, federal agents in the Philippines arrested rice hoarders, and angry, hungry protesters took to the streets in Haiti and the Ivory Coast. The World Bank warned that 33 countries face social unrest because of high food prices. The work of agricultural bio-scientists studying rice has never been so critical.

Fortunately, a lot of the work is already underway. Pamela Ronald, chair of the Plant Genomics Department at the University of California, Davis, and colleagues identified a gene that allows rice to tolerate being underwater for long stretches. Rice is capable of withstanding submersion, but in low-lying regions like the Ganges Delta, frequent floods can kill the plants and wreak havoc. Ronald’s team introduced the gene, known as Sub1A, into a type of rice that grows well in South Asia. In a few months, Ronald will travel to flood-prone Bangladesh, where several test paddies have been planted with the genetically modified rice. “Yields have increased by five to six times,” she says of the special paddies in Bangladesh.

There’s another benefit to Ronald’s rice: Keeping plants underwater longer can also reduce the quantity of pesticides and herbicides farmers need to put on their plants.

While farmers in some parts of the world struggle with too much water, others confront the opposite problem. Andy Pereira, a professor of plant genetics at the Virginia Bioinformatics Institute, is working on helping rice farmers cope with drought. Collaborating with an international team of scientists, Pereira has developed a type of rice that uses less water than standard rice plants.

Pereira and his collaborators identified a mutant gene in Arabidopsis, a relative of mustard and cabbage, that allows the plant to weather droughts without withering. The scientists put the gene into rice to see if it would confer the same trait to the grain. It did. Pereira says that the gene is patented, and private companies have expressed interest in acquiring the intellectual property. However, large companies like Bayer CropScience would most likely introduce the gene into bigger, commodity crops such as corn and cotton rather than rice, according to Pereira.

Soy, maize, cotton, and rapeseed, crops amenable to cultivation on a massive scale, account for most of the world’s genetically modified plants; GM rice has been planted only on an experimental or small-scale basis. What’s more, the cost of testing for environmental safety can make developing a new genetic version of a less profitable crop like rice not worth the investment. Governments and non-profits will have to pool resources to bring biotech advances to rice growers, the vast majority of which are small-scale farmers. To that end, Pereira is collaborating with the International Rice Research Institute to test the gene in different types of rice over the next four years

Still, there is good reason to invest in understanding the rice genome. Richard McCombie, a genetics professor at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory who has studied the sequence of the rice genome for years, says that advances in understanding genetic variation in rice will help corn and wheat farmers as well. “Rice is the lab rat of grains,” he explains.

In the end, the lab will only be part of the solution to growing more rice on fewer acres, says Ronald. She’s optimistic that an unlikely partnership between organic farming and biotechnology will help feed a hungry planet beset with climate change. “I think we are going to see a lot of advances in the next few years,” she says.