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In the rice chapter from Much Depends on Dinner Margaret Visser reports:

Many scientists are now saying that hybrid rice, grown uniformly on millions of hectares, presents too great a risk from pest hordes; a wide variety of rice-types should be grown in order to keep depredations down. The rice farmers of Thailand, for instance, have grown modern hybrids only in the dry season on 10 per cent of their planted land; hundreds of traditional varieties were raised in the rainy season on most of the fields. As a result Thailand has suffered no major epidemics during the past twenty years, and has also managed to maintain its position as part of what is called "the rice-bowl of Asia."