International Rice Research Institute

Hello! We are the International Rice Research Institute, but most people call us by our shorter name, IRRI. Have you ever eaten a bowl of rice? For more than half the people in the world, rice is the most important food they eat every day. Our job is to study this amazing plant. We are a team made up of scientists and many other helpers. Together, we look for new and better ways to help farmers grow rice. Our main goal is to make sure there is enough healthy food for everyone, and we believe that helping rice grow strong is a great way to do that.

Our story begins a long time ago, in the year 1960. Two very large groups that wanted to help the world, the Ford Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation, had an important idea. They worked with the government of the Philippines, an island country in Asia, to create us. They chose to build our main research center in the Philippines because rice is such a vital food for the people who live there. From the very beginning, our mission was clear: we wanted to use science to help solve the problem of hunger so that fewer people would have to worry about where their next meal was coming from.

Soon after we started, our scientists got to work on a very big project. In the 1960s, they developed a special new kind of rice that we named IR8. This rice was different from the older types that farmers grew. It was shorter and stronger, but the most amazing thing was how much grain it produced. It grew so much more rice in the same amount of space! People were so happy and amazed that they started calling it 'miracle rice.' This new rice helped feed millions of families all across Asia. IR8 became a very important part of a worldwide effort called the Green Revolution, which was a time when scientists found new ways to grow more food for the world's growing number of people.

Creating new kinds of rice is only one part of our job. We also have a very important duty to protect all the rice varieties that already exist. To do this, we run something called the International Rice Genebank. You can think of it as a huge library, but instead of books, it is filled with seeds! Inside, we safely store tiny packets of seeds from more than 130,000 different kinds of rice that have been collected from all over the world. This is so important because it keeps all these rice types safe from dangers like floods, very dry weather called droughts, or plant diseases. By keeping a copy of each seed, we make sure that these special plants are not lost forever.

Today, our work continues, because there are always new challenges to solve. We are busy developing new types of rice that can survive in difficult conditions. For example, we are creating rice that can still grow even if a field gets flooded with too much water, and other kinds that can grow when there is not enough rain. We also work on making rice even healthier by adding more vitamins and nutrients to it. Our mission has stayed the same since we began. We use the science of rice to help build a better future for people and for our planet.