Rice is the principal food of nearly half of humankind and more than 90% of it is grown in developing countries, where problems of food security are more acute. From being a poor cousin to maize, wheat, and tomato for genetic knowledge, as recently as the 1980s, rice has become a model plant and reference genome for molecular genetic research. During the last few decades, major progress has been made in increasing rice productivity. World rice production has more than doubled, from 257 million tons in 1966 to 600 million tons in 2006. This has mainly been achieved by applying principles of Mendelian genetics and conventional plant breeding methods. The current world population of 6.5 billion is likely to reach to 8.0 billion by 2030. To meet the growing food need and overcome malnutrition, rice varieties with higher yield potential, multiple resistance to stresses, and improved nutritional quality are needed. Recent advances in genetics featured in this symposium offer new opportunities to achieve these objectives. The Fifth International Rice Genetics Symposium (IRGS-V) continues in the series of symposia held at IRRI every fi ve years. The fi rst, held in 1985, led to the birth of the Rice Genetics Cooperative (RGC). The RGC took the lead in organizing these symposia and greatly enhanced international collaboration. In the same year, the Rockefeller Foundation established its International Program on Rice Biotechnology, which has played a major role in advancing frontiers of knowledge on cellular and molecular genetics of rice, international collaboration, and human resource development. In the second symposium, a unifi ed system of numbering rice chromosomes and linkage groups was adopted. The orientation of classical and molecular maps was a strong point of the third symposium. In the fourth symposium, progress on international efforts on sequencing the rice genome and developing novel genetic resources for structural and functional genomics were among the many highlights.