Responding to rice shortages in South-East Asia
A group of rice specialists from eleven countries reaches out to farmers to close the yield gap. Two senior lecturers in tropical agriculture of the Swiss College of Agriculture SHL just concluded an external review of this work.
Rice is the staple food for 2.7 billion people in Asia and production has more than doubled in the last 40 years. But this is not enough. Substantial production increases are needed in the future, with less land, less water and doing less damage to the environment.
This is exactly the goal of the Irrigated Rice Research Consortium, which – supported by SDC (Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation) - brings together the leading rice researchers and extension specialists from eleven rice countries in SE-Asia and the International Rice Research Institute.
Jointly, they develop approaches for sustainably increasing rice productivity – often decision support tools for small farmers. For instance, farmers connect with a simple cell phone to a computer program that helps them to schedule fertilization for each field, thus tapping into 20 years of intensive research. They learn and discover insect ecology in «Farmer Field Schools» to save on pesticides. Or they use a plastic tube in their rice field to monitor below surface water level when saving irrigation water.
«Almost one million rice farmers are already using technologies developed by the Consortium so far, each increasing his or her income by several hundred dollars», says Urs Scheidegger, one of the reviewers and head of SHL’s Master studies division.
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