Rice is the staple food of around three billion people, and the main challenge facing rice producers is how to raise yields of the water-dependent crop as 70 percent of the world’s food-growing areas face more drought, said the International Rice Research Institute in its latest quarterly magazine.

Genetic modification may be the only viable way to produce sufficient quantities of rice in the future as drought, climate change and dwindling acreage impact yields, experts said in the new report.

However, according to Gurdev Khush, a University of California professor who was a former senior IRRI scientist, “the environment for accepting genetically modified crops is not as good as it should be.”

Read more on the new report here.