The task of producing the additional rice to meet the expected demands of the year 2025 poses a major challenge. The danger is that stability in rice production is linked to social and political stability of the countries in the Asia-Pacific Region (Hossain, 1996). The scope of area expansion in some countries is offset by the reduction in rice lands in major rice producing countries. So far irrigated rice which occupies about 57 percent of the area and produces 76 percent of total rice has helped double the rice production. It will be easier to produce the necessary increases in productivity under irrigated conditions than under rainfed or other ecosystems. The question turns more problematic when we think that production increases have to be realized annually using less land, less people, less water and less pesticides. There are additional difficulties of putting more area under modern varieties and using more fertilizers for closing the yield gap, or bringing in additional area under rice or under irrigation. The irrigated rice area would be hard to increase as the problems of soil salinity, high cost of development, water scarcity, alternative and competing uses of water, environmental concerns of the emission of green house gases like methane (rice fields contribute 20 percent) and nitrous oxide (fertilizer contributes 19 percent). The difficulties are further amplified when potential consequences of increased cropping intensity are taken into account. Estimates of the Inter Centre Review instituted by the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) indicate that about 70 percent of additional production will have to come from the irrigated rice ecosystem and almost 21 percent from rainfed lowland. To achieve this, it was estimated that the yield ceiling of irrigated rice in Asia, for example, would need to be increased from its late 1980s level of about 10 tonnes/ha to around 13 tonnes/ha in 2030. Simultaneously the yield gap would have to be reduced from 48 to 35 percent to produce average yields of about 8.5 tonnes/ha or about double the current level. One of the several ways GATT will affect research will be through funding and comparative resource allocation. With the movement from subsistence to a market-oriented economy, rainfed rice production may bring additional changes in many countries which depend on this ecosystem heavily and have no resources to convert rainfed to irrigated systems