ISIS Report 06/10/05
Less is More for Nepali Rice
A low input rice system has more than doubled yield in Nepal.
Rhea Gala
The sources for this
article are posted on ISIS members’ website. Details here
For the past three years a dozen farmers in Morang District near the Nepali-Indian
border 300 miles south of the capital Kathmandu have been testing
a new cultivation method for rice. Using only a fraction of the normal amount
of local mansuli variety rice
seed and far less water than usual, their yield has more than doubled. The
method does not need the fields to be flooded, as is traditionally the case,
and chemical fertilisers and pesticides are not required.
Success arises from the
mode of cultivation where the seedlings are transplanted from the nursery
beds when they are only two weeks old instead of six; and the field is drained
instead of flooded. Seedlings are spaced farther apart and produce many more
shoots than when planted conventionally, causing the harvest to more than
double. A normal paddy field needs 50 kilogrammes of seed per hectare, yet
this method uses less than ten kilogrammes.
This is the latest success for this type of low input rice cultivation which
is called the ‘System of Rice Intensification (SRI) and has already given marvellous
yields in many countries.(see “Fantastic rice yields: Fact or fallacy?”, “Top
Indian rice geneticist rebuts SRI critics”’, and “Does SRI work?” SiS27)
Farmers reaped bumper harvests
Farmer Dan Bahadur Rajbansi was transplanting his rice seedlings this
year using the system of rice intensification as many others delayed while
awaiting a late monsoon. Ananta Ram Majhi, another of Morang district’s rice
farmers, admits he was sceptical. “Initially, I thought to myself, if this
is such a great idea why didn’t my ancestors think of it? But I decided to
take the chance and this is my third year using the new method.” Majhi, who
used to harvest five tonnes per hectare and is now getting at least twice
as much, has achieved this yield with only one-third of the seed he used before,
and with less water.
Local agriculture officer Rajendra Uprety first read about the technique on
the Internet and decided to try it. “Since 2002, we’ve achieved double and triple
harvests on test plots. It's just amazing.” He said.
News of the bumper harvests have spread quickly from Morang where about 100
farmers are now using the new method. Uprety, who brings farmers from other
districts on inspection visits, laughs, “Actually, it has been more difficult
convincing the agronomists and officials than the farmers”.
Scientists remain sceptical
International scientists and agriculture research institutes have been
hard to convince too. Henri de Laulanié, a French Jesuit priest working in
Madagascar, devised the new method back in 1983, but it was
only after Norman Uphoff of the International Institute for Food, Agriculture
and Development at Cornell University in the US started pushing the idea in
1997 that it was taken seriously.
Nevertheless SRI has been
tried and tested by many thousands of farmers in about 20 countries, from
Cuba to China. Tens of thousands of farmers have adopted the
method in the few years since researchers introduced it to Cambodia in 2001.
And there, as in India, Laos, and Sri Lanka, farmers are reporting that SRI
means bigger harvests and better incomes, for fewer seeds and less water.
But critics maintain that
the scientific evidence for such claims is lacking because most field trial
results have not been recorded in detail and published in peer-reviewed journals.
When researchers at the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) and colleagues
tested SRI in field trials in China, they found no difference
in yield between SRI and conventionally-grown rice. Their study, published
in Field Crops Research in March
2004, concluded that: "SRI has no major role in improving rice production
generally".
IRRI prefers high input agriculture
But perhaps IRRI has no interest in low input farmer friendly agriculture.
IRRI is the world’s leading international rice research and training centre
and describes itself as an “autonomous,
nonprofit institution”
that is “focused on improving the well-being of present and future generations
of rice farmers and consumers, particularly those with low incomes.” It is
also part of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research
(CGIAR) an association of public and private donor agencies that funds 16
international research centres.
Both IRRI and CGIAR have
come under criticism for supporting a corporate agenda, for example by breeding high yielding rice varieties,
that have caused the loss of over 100,000 local varieties, and that rely heavily
on chemical inputs and frequent irrigation. Indigenous varieties capable
of giving a higher yield were deliberately excluded from these programmes.
IRRI’s annual reports from 1963-1982 show grants from
a whole array of US and European chemical corporations including Monsanto,
Shell Chemical, Union Carbide Asia, Bayer Philippines, Eli Lily, OccidentalChemical,
Ciba Geigy (later part of Novartis Seeds which is now part of Syngenta),
Chevron Chemical, Upjohn, Hoechst, and Cyanamid Far East.
While farmer dependency on expensive
external inputs has increased hugely, yields from Green Revolution cultivation are
in wide decline or are stagnating. Since 1990, the focus at IRRI has been
on developing GM rice, another technology aimed at making profit for agribusiness
at the expense of people and the environment.
At CGIAR’s Annual General Meeting in 2002 near the IRRI in the Philippines,
farmers protested calling for both institutions to be dismantled. The protesters
issued a statement saying “We believe that a genuine, farmer-centred research
institution should develop technologies that shall liberate farmers from dependence
on any agro-chemical TNC, promote sustainable agriculture, conserve the environment,
and protect the health of farmers.”
Trainers spread the word
For Rajendra Uprety in Nepal, the results of SRI speak for themselves.
He points out that the technique’s success depends on skilful farming, good
timing, and careful planting and drainage. Since planting on flooded paddy
fields helped to control weeds, the drier SRI fields need weeding several
times during the growing season. But the benefits far outweigh these obstacles,
he says, adding that the main challenge is training.
He has turned local farmers, like Kishore Luitel, now
total converts, into trainers. A few years ago, farmer Rajbansi thought Luitel
had gone mad for adopting the new technique. But earlier this year, Luitel
was in Rajbansi’s field teaching him how to plant his seedlings the new way,
with the tiny two-week-old seedlings individually placed 20 centimetres apart
in the sticky mud and not 10 centimetres apart in the slushy mud as was usual.
Luitel points to his own
field where rice now grows in thick tufts with more than 80 shoots from one
seed. “Using the old method, you plant three or four seedlings in one spot
and you only get about ten shoots per seed,” he says.
For Uprety and Luitel, seeing is believing. They are
convinced that no part of Nepal need be short of food anymore if SRI is promoted
nationally. Every year, Nepal needs to produce more than 90 000 tonnes of
rice seeds. The SRI advocates say the method would save 80 000 tonnes and
harvests nationwide could be doubled.
Uprety sums it up: “Sometimes the best solutions are the simplest ones.”
The continuing spread of SRI and other appropriate farming technologies in
Africa and Asia via the internet, and by word of mouth gives hope to many communities
in the Third World. However, improvements to local economies could have happened
years ago if research institutes such as IRRI and the CGIAR had really had the
well being of present and future generations of farmers at heart.
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