Above: The National Mosque in Jakarta can hold 120,000 souls for Friday prayers. Arab traders brought Islam to the region a thousand years ago. Now 86 percent of Indonesia’s 240 million citizens are Muslim, mostly Sunni.

Today we present seven images by John Stanmeyer from the June 2009 issue of National Geographic Magazine.

Above: Skilled fingers separate good seed from bad at the International Rice Research Institute in Los Baños, Philippines. “Miracle rice” varieties developed here in the 1960s doubled yields in Asia. Further growth has stalled since the mid-1990s, as investment in agriculture has declined. “Governments thought we’d won the war on food security,” says IRRI Director General Robert Zeigler. “So they put money elsewhere.”

Cover: ©2009 National Geographic