With his only son in high school and showing no interest in getting his feet muddy, Sabater, a fourth generation rice farmer, is considering selling his plot to developers.

"I will sell soon," he told AFP as he paused from his back-breaking work to gaze out over his three-hectare (7.4-acre) lot.

"Farming is such a tough and laborious job. In three months I will harvest, but it's only enough for us, while a few remaining sacks will be sold.

"I'm among the last hold-outs here. In 10 years' time you won't find any farms around here."

Many of his fellow farmers cashed in years ago, selling to developers eager to meet the growing demands of middle-class Filipinos wanting to buy homes away from the overcrowded, polluted and congested metropolis.

In the distance, a mechanical digger works on what will soon become a cement pavement for a housing estate.

The story is much the same around major urban centres throughout the Philippines as once-rich farmland gives way to the developers, adding further pressure to a staple cereal crop consumed by half the world's population.

In the Philippines as in other Asian rice-growing countries, demand is now outstripping supply amid soaring prices, climate change and loss of agricultural land to developers and more profitable biofuel crops.

Francisco de Guzman, like Sabater, was born into a rice farming family.

"Imus, like many other suburbs near Manila, used to be flat," he said.

"There were no buildings or malls, just over 1,000 hectares of land planted to rice. That was a sight. Everywhere you looked, there were farmers and fields of rice," he said.

Now the collective farm has been reduced to only a few hectares, and yields around 100 sacks of rice a year which must be shared with another farmer.

"I am left with just a few sacks by harvest time. It's not enough. I am struggling to send my youngest son to high school and another to university," he added.

-- Rice prices double in 10 years as farmers head to cities --

Unlike Sabater, however, de Guzman has a bigger problem -- he does not own his own land, which makes his future even more uncertain.

Throughout Asia the picture is similar as the rural drift to urban centres increases with the prospect of higher paying jobs, especially for the young.

At the same time the demand for rice, the world's second most important cereal after wheat, continues to rise.

According to Sushil Pandey, an economist with the Philippine-based International Rice Research Institute (IRRI), the price of rice has more than doubled over the past six years.

He said rising competition for land, labour and water as well as the recent growth of biofuels production had "curtailed the option of expanding the area planted to rice".

Writing in "Rice Today" magazine, he cited the loss of nearly three million hectares (more than seven million acres) of rice land in China in the past decade, as well as storms in Bangladesh that wiped out last year's crop, as evidence of the rising pressure on global rice supplies.

"The problem is likely to be compounded by increased production risks arising from global warming by adversely affecting rice yield and by increasing the frequency of events such as drought and flood," he wrote.

"Slow-growing supply, low stocks and supply shocks at a time of surging demand for feed, food and fuel have led to drastic price increases, and these high prices do not appear likely to fall soon," said Joachim von Braun, head of the Washington-based think tank International Food Policy Research Institute.

Von Braun said that between 2000 and 2006, "world demand for cereals increased by eight percent while cereal prices more than doubled".

He cited data from the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation that showed rice prices soaring to around 270 dollars a ton by July 2007 from about 160 dollars a ton in January 2000.

During the same period wheat prices rose from about 105 dollars a ton to about 340 dollars a ton.

In the Philippines, rice prices surged 7.5 percent from a year earlier in January, along with oil-driven rises in other commodities that make up the consumer price index. Overall, inflation rose by 4.9 percent for the month, the highest year-on-year rise in 15 months.

The FAO says despite record world cereal output of 2.1 billion tonnes in 2007, international prices "remained high and volatile" due to sustained demand -- including the additional pressure for supply from the relatively new biofuels industry -- as well as historically low stocks and insufficient production increases.

In an annual report it estimated Asia's 2007 rice output at a record 585.4 million tonnes, or slightly more than the previous year's 581.7 million-tonne harvest.

Pandey said a second Green Revolution to reverse the rising trend in rice prices and to keep prices low was needed now, similar to how the first Green Revolution was needed in the 1970s to avoid famine and mass starvation.

He said global rice demand was expected to rise by 50 million tonnes over the next seven years as Asia's population expands and as rice becomes an "increasingly important food crop" in Africa.

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