Dhaka,
Bangladesh
July 28, 2004
International Rice Research
Institute
News about Rice and People
Imagine
this: 2,000 poor rice farmers, whose average farm income is
around S$100 per year, suddenly take on the role of agricultural
scientist. Over the course of 2 years -- 4 seasons -- they prove
that insecticides are a complete waste of time and money, and
that they can significantly reduce the amount of nitrogen
fertilizer they use. They save, on average, $17 per year. It
might not sound like much to some, but it's a 17% pay rise for
people who struggle to provide sufficient food for themselves
and their families, and enough to help put children through
school or buy grain to tide rice-deficit farm families over to
the next harvest.
Sound
unlikely? Well, it's just happened in Bangladesh. In the last 2
years, the Livelihood Improvement Through Ecology (LITE)
project, led by the International
Rice Research Institute (IRRI), has trained 2,000 farmers to
perform experiments in their own fields which demonstrate that
insecticide can be eliminated and nitrogen fertilizer (urea)
applications reduced without lowering yields. Four thousand more
farmers are currently in training.
What's more,
if LITE continues as it has started, in less than a decade, most
of Bangladesh's 11.8 million rice farmers -- almost a 12th of
the country's population of 141 million, according to the
Bangladesh Rice Research Institute, a key project partner --
will have eliminated insecticides and optimized their fertilizer
use.
LITE -- part
of the IRRI-led project Poverty Elimination Through Rice
Research Assistance, funded for Bangladesh by the United
Kingdom's Department for International Development -- set out to
discover the exact cause of an assumed drop in rice yield when
farmers stop spraying insecticide. The ultimate aim, explains
LITE principal investigator and IRRI senior entomologist Gary C.
Jahn, was to identify safe alternatives to insecticides.
"To my
surprise," reported Dr. Jahn, "when people stopped spraying,
yields didn't drop -- and this was across 600 fields in two
different districts over 4 seasons. I'm convinced that the vast
majority of insecticides that rice farmers use are a complete
waste of time and money.
"We quickly
realized the most important thing to focus on was scaling LITE
up," he explained. "We've already trained 2,000 farmers. We've
reduced insecticide use among participating farmers by 99%, and
by 90% among nonparticipating farmers in the same villages. Even
in the control villages, where no farmers conducted the
experiments, insecticide use dropped from 80% to 55% -- much of
this because of casual contact with participating farmers."
So how did
the farmers take on their scientist role? Lead farmers -- local
farmers who happened to be relatively successful -- were taught
how to conduct a simple experiment by partitioning their fields
into quadrants receiving different management strategies: with
and without spraying, and with and without using a leaf color
chart (used to optimize urea applications). Other participating
farmers bisected their fields -- spraying one half but not the
other.
The results
have made real differences. Take 35-year-old Joinal Ahmad.
Before joining LITE, Ahmad grew rice on a little over half a
hectare in his village of Tatoipara, annually eking out a farm
income of 2,800 Bangladeshi taka, or $48. He and his wife of 18
years struggled to look after their two toddler sons and put
their two older daughters through school. Now, with the money he
has saved, Ahmad has been able to buy extra land and boost his
planted area to almost two-thirds of a hectare. He has cut his
exposure to health- and environment-threatening chemicals, and
has almost doubled his annual farm income to 4,800 taka.
"I can grow
rice at lower cost because I use less urea and no insecticide,"
Ahmad explains. "With the money I save, I help my family and pay
for my children's education."
There a
number of reasons why spraying is ineffective. Insecticides
often kill the natural enemies of rice pests more effectively
than the pests themselves and many supposed insect pests don't
attack the parts of the plant that affect grain production, or
the grain itself. Compounding this, many farmers use poor
equipment to apply out-of-date or inappropriate insecticides at
the wrong time. According to Nazira Qureshi Kamal, head of
BRRI's Entomology Division and LITE's in-country coordinator,
the mere presence of insects on the crop can panic farmers into
spraying.
The method
used to expand the scale of LITE from a few hundred farmers to
several thousand -- and potentially millions -- is known as
success case replication (SCR). After being trained to perform
the LITE experiments themselves, lead farmers then train other
farmers in their own village, as well as successful farmers from
surrounding villages, who become the next lead farmers. The new
lead farmers do the same, and the process repeats. The number of
trained farmers grows exponentially each rice season -- like
recipients of a chain letter, but this time good things actually
happen.
Jan Orsini,
an IRRI consultant to LITE on SCR and a former United Nations
rural development officer, says that in terms of cost-benefit
LITE is extremely successful, bringing $4 farm income for every
dollar spent -- well above the threshold used by the World Bank
and other funding agencies to define a worthwhile project. And
this is for the first year alone, without factoring in
subsequent years' savings. "This will only get better with
time," enthuses Orsini. "The longer that farmers use the LITE
regime, the more they will save. After 5 years, say, the ratio
will be 1:20, which is truly exceptional."
Dr. Jahn is
confident that the farmers will adhere to LITE practices
because, first, they saw the results of their own experiments in
their own fields and, second, LITE goes straight to the bottom
line. "Where farmer field schools rely on the farmers learning
and understanding ecology," he explains, "LITE relies on
understanding your wallet, which is almost innate."
The
International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) is the world's
leading rice research and training center. Based in the
Philippines and with offices in 10 other Asian countries, it is
an autonomous, nonprofit institution focused on improving the
well-being of present and future generations of rice farmers and
consumers, particularly those with low incomes, while preserving
natural resources. IRRI is one of 15 centers funded through the
Consultative Group on
International Agricultural Research (CGIAR), an association
of public and private donor agencies.
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