New Rice Varieties

[Anchor Lead]

Farmers are growing restless with the continued fall of rice consumption in the country. In some hopeful news, the Rural Development Administration has developed new specialized rice varieties to a positive reaction from farming households.

[Pkg]

Rice is being harvested on this golden field. But it's no typical rice. These are specialized rice varieties called Anda and Dasan developed by the Rural Development Administration last year. They contain less protein and more starch which makes it ideal for brewing liquor. Processing companies plan to expand the output of such specialized breeds of rice with the aim to produce traditional liquors that can compete with the domestic rice wine Makgeolli as well as foreign drinks such as cognac.

[Soundbite] Park Jun-seong(Production Chief at Processing Firm) : "We tried using a rice variety more fit for processing and saw better quality and rice yield rates. So we'll expand the contracted output this time around."

This firm makes bread not with flour but with rice. They use Samgwang Rice which was specially developed for allergy-free purposes. Thanks to word of mouth, sales of its bread jumped more than three fold in just one year. Another company has raked in sales of 150 million dollars last year by processing germinated brown rice. Due to growing demand of this type of brown rice, the Rural Development Administration has expanded its production site by four times in the past five years.

[Soundbite] Oh Se-gwan(Rural Development Administration) : "Specialty rice is different from regular rice in their added attributes and goods processed from them also taste different."

In 2015, specialized, functional rice varieties accounted for about nine percent of the nation's regular rice market. The Rural Development Administration will increase contracted rice production linked with processing firms with the goal to raise the consumption of specialty rice, currently in the nine percent range, to over 15 percent by