Behind the brand: IBIS Rice
The Rice Association describes its annual National Rice Week campaign (9-15 September) as an opportunity to ‘Rice Up Your Life’. Back for a sixth year, the campaign celebrates all types of rice and the diversity of dishes which can be created from this convenient store cupboard ingredient.
A food staple of 3.5 billion people around the world, more than half of the world relies on rice for daily sustenance, the majority of which is produced in China and India.
But in Cambodia, a nation responsible for 5.93 million metric tonnes of rice in 2023, a unique conservation project by IBIS Rice is ensuring that the production of this essential grain feeds not only humans but the natural world too — specifically the giant ibis, now categorized by the Wildlife Conservation Society as ‘critically endangered’, with fewer than 200 birds thought to remain in the wild.
Al Overton, UK advisor to IBIS Rice, shares what he believes is so special about the brand’s everyday White, Brown and Semi-Milled Long Grain Rice, and it all begins with how the company honours Cambodia’s agricultural traditions and its elegant national flower.
“The Cambodian farmers that IBIS works with grow a specific regional variety of long grain jasmine rice called phka rumduol. Phka means flower and rumduol is the national flower of Cambodia. So it is a very Cambodia-specific variety … that has been used for centuries because it works very well with the local soil and the climate — seasonal flooding and then relatively prolonged dry spells. Our farmers plant once a year, in season with the monsoon. There’s obviously a strong sense of national pride around this particular variety of rice. Farmers have been using it for generations. It is a very Cambodian crop.”
Jasmine, he notes, is a more fragrant rice than the basmati or long grain US rice we’re perhaps more familiar with in the UK. Contrary to popular misconception, the taste of jasmine rice bears no similarities to the floral notes of jasmine tea. The grain grows with certain naturally occurring chemicals which emit a sweet, aromatic fragrance, making the phka rumduol variety a ‘particularly delicious’ crop, as evidenced at the International Rice Forum where it is the five-time winner of the Best Rice in the World award.
Conserving communities
From the beginning of the brand’s work in the rice fields of Cambodia, several things were key: farmer welfare and healthy local communities; forest protection and wildlife conservation; and of course, organic crops.
“IBIS is about engaging with farming communities and making them the stewards and guardians of their land. So it started with getting land security for Cambodian farmers (because Cambodia has a troubled history), engaging with government and actually giving farmers proper legal rights to their land.
“Organic becomes part of the framework when we bring new farmers on board the programme. Because IBIS is grown seasonally with once-a-year flooding, organic is the best way to farm it. It doesn’t need a huge amount of pesticide use or fertilizer use like a three-crop-a-year, artificially irrigated paddy field would need — there are much better natural ways to build fertility into the soil and control pests.”
Routinely opting for brown rice as his grain of choice, Overton points to the many health benefits it offers: “Brown rice is incredibly nutritious, and is brilliant from a GI and sugar perspective because the fibre slows down the sugar release. Brown rice is well known to have anti-cholesterol properties, heart health properties, gut health properties. It’s got a lot of plant fibres in it, reducing inflammation in the gut. If you think brown rice isn’t for you, IBIS is the softest brown rice you will find, and we do a Semi-Milled — the experience of it is like white rice but you get some of those bran benefits as well. It’s a bit like ‘half and half’ in terms of bread.”
By Rosie Greenaway, editor