Typhoon wiped out third of Philippines' rice crop: UN

Seed Daily via AFP: Typhoon Haiyan wiped out one-third of the Philippines' rice-growing areas, the UN food agency said Tuesday, calling for "urgent assistance" to farmers who need to sow new seeds. "Regions most severely affected by the typhoon account for one-third of the total rice production in the country," the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation said in a statement.

"Hundreds of thousands of farmers in the Philippines whose crops were destroyed by Typhoon Haiyan need urgent assistance to sow new seeds before the end of the current planting season," it said.

The main-season harvest of the staple grain was well under way in the central Philippines when the typhoon hit, also "badly disrupting" ongoing planting for the secondary season, the FAO said.

The Rome-based agency added: "There is concern that many storage facilities may have been destroyed, along with their contents."...

A rice terrace in Banau, in the Philippines, before the 2013 typhoon, shot by CEphoto, Uwe Aranas, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license