One of the most widely eaten food crop in the world, rice provides nourishment to more than half the world’s population. Being a staple food, it is cultivated during winters and summers, both. Being grown in 4000 varieties every year, it supplied more than one fifth of the calories that are consumed by humans.
Rice is one of the most grown cash crops in developing countries and is also the oldest of the cereal crops that humans cultivated. The first form of rice was grown in China about 5000 years ago and since it was a major food supplement, it got commercially cultivated as a cash crop in half the world.