Egyptian government agreed to increase the area allocated for rice cultivation by 100,000 feddans only this season, bringing the total area of rice cultivation to 820,000 feddans, Abdel Latif Khaled, head of irritation sector in the ministry of irritation and water resources. Khaled said that the new areas will be cultivated as experimental fields using high productivity seeds, noting that they will be irrigated by agricultural drainage water. It comes following a recent ministerial decision to reduce the area cultivated by rice from 1.1 million feddans last year to only 724,200 feddans.