MALNUTRITION: MADAGASCAR: The “less is more” philosophy of rice production

TALATA, 31 January 2012 (IRIN)

 Photo: Guy Oliver/IRIN
A family prepares a rice field for planting in the Madagascan capital of Antananarivo

Ernest Rakotoarivony, 45, was teased by some members of the Talata community, a small town 30km north of Madagascar’s capital Antananarivo, after breaking with traditional rice cultivation methods and employing a technique taught to him by a Jesuit priest.
A decade ago the Dutch priest, Ed Mulderink, promised him that adopting the System of Rice Intensification (SRI) would substantially increase his rice yield, but warned it would also be more labour intensive.
“When you replant the rice, you have very small plants, and they need to be planted individually in rows [with SRI]. The others [traditional rice farmers] just take bunches of plants, beat the roots against their feet to get the soil off, and replant them. It takes them one hour to replant their field, while it takes me two days. People don’t want to use that much time,” Rakotoarivony told IRIN.
Other farmers were skeptical of the “less is more” approach to rice production. “They think that the more plants they put in the field, the more rice they’ll have. But the opposite is true. Even if they just used some parts of the method, like controlling the water, or not beating the plant roots, it would help,” he said.
“There were people who laughed at me, until they saw the harvest,” said Rakotoarivony, who was approached by the priest when he was earning his living as a bread vendor. “The priest asked me to work with him, using SRI. So we worked on my family land together, and we managed to double the yield, just as he had promised.”
During the lean season Rakotoarivony produces vegetables and now has enough cash to buy seed and fertilizer every three years. Although some of his family have adopted SRI, relatively few others in the area have, despite the best efforts of the priest preaching the benefits of the practice.
Rice is the staple for Madagascar’s 20 million people, and the average annual consumption is about 102kg per person; about 75 percent of the population lives below the poverty line.
Production has declined from 4.7 million tons in 2010 to 4.3 million in 2011 and prices have doubled in two years to about US$1 per kilogram. In the 1970s Madagascar was a rice exporter but has since become a rice importer, a consequence of outdated farming methods and poor infrastructure, but farmers still produce 80 percent of the country’s national rice requirement.

Development of SRI
The SRI method was developed in the 1980s by the French Jesuit priest Henri de Laulanié, who challenged accepted norms of rice production. Traditional farmers flood their rice fields and plant bunches of mature rice plants, while SRI farmers transplant young seedlings with greater spacing on soil that is moist but not flooded. Proponents of SRI claim this system uses 25-50 percent less water, requires 80-90 percent fewer seeds, and can sometimes double or even triple the yields.
SRI has been promoted locally by NGO Tefy Saina (Change you Mentality, established by De Laulanié) and internationally, through the Cornell International Institute for Food, Agriculture and Development (CIIFAD).
“The method has really taken off in Asia and is now practised in more than 30 countries. However, it has not been adopted on a wide scale in Africa or in Madagascar itself,” Winifred Fitzgerald, adviser to the Better U Foundation, told IRIN.
The Better U Foundation, funded by the Canadian actor Jim Carrey, has assisted in SRI’s implementation and dissemination at grassroots, institutional and policy levels.
However, there remains conjecture as to whether SRI methods are outpacing traditional methods. A 2005 report by Cornell University entitled Does the System of Rice Intensification Outperform Conventional Best Management? A Synopsis of the Empirical Record, says: “Aside from one set of experiments in Madagascar where SRI more than doubled rice productivity with respect to Best Management Practices, we found no evidence of a systematic or even occasional yield advantage of this magnitude elsewhere.”
In Asian countries, these researchers found, there could even be a negative impact when the system is used, the report said.
“This is a method that was discovered in the field, not in a laboratory. Some want to promote other systems. But I think that there is no competition. Some places are better for SRI than others,” said Better U adviser Rames Abhukara.
A recent progress report of the Better U Foundation cites the results of an evaluation with its partner, Catholic Relief Service (CRS) - an international faith-based NGO working in the Vakinankaratra highland region of Madagascar. In a sample of 120 households out of 600 beneficiary families, the average yields with SRI were 3.28 tons per hectare, compared to 2.87 tons per hectare prior to the project’s implementation. The regional average of rice production is two tons per hectare.
The study showed that families’ food stocks lasted on average 54 days longer as a result of their increased harvest, and helped to decrease vulnerability during the lean season.

Resistance to change
“For some farmers, they don’t see why they should change the way their fathers and grandfathers grew rice. To minimize risk, they may start practising SRI in one corner of the rice field,” Fitzgerald explained. “Others are interested in the method, but do not know how to start or have received insufficient training, so partners are working to address these gaps.”
For some farmers, they don’t see why they should change the way their fathers and grandfathers grew rice
“We don’t tell them to do this. We tell them: If you think it’s useful, we can help you with it,” Abhukara added.
At the institutional level, the Better U Foundation helped to create an association known as the Groupement SRI de Madagascar (GSRI).
GSRI has 267 members, including local and international NGOs, research institutes and private sector entities. In June 2011, the Ministry of Agriculture included SRI in its national strategy for rice development for the first time.
“We were also quite pleased that the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, Olivier De Schutter, in his preliminary conclusions cited SRI as an important agro-ecological method that could contribute to the country’s food security,” Fitzgerald said.
Apart from increased productivity for farmers, the method has environmental benefits, its proponents claim. With increased yields and improved incomes, there is less pressure for farmers to cut down forests for agriculture purposes. SRI also contributes to a reduction in greenhouse gases, especially methane, because the rice fields are not continuously flooded as in traditional rice cultivation.
“Just producing more rice is not enough. For an effective SRI dissemination strategy, you have to consider the whole rice chain, such as farmers’ access to micro-finance as well as the storage, transportation and marketing of rice,” Abhukara said.

http://www.irinnews.org/report.aspx?reportID=94764

POVERTY: Ghana: US to assist smallholders’ farmers to escape poverty

11th June 2011
Over 860,000 vulnerable women, children and family members, mostly smallholder farmers, would be assisted over the next five years to improve upon their agriculture production to help fight hunger and poverty.
The programme is under the new US government intervention in agriculture to enhance food security in Northern Ghana.
The programme, which is led by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) leverages the strengths of multilateral institutions, civil society and the private sector to assist 18 million vulnerable women, children and family members.
It would also reach over 324,000 children, improving their nutrition and preventing stunting and child mortality.
The Project known as “Feed the Future” is a 3.5 billion dollar US government’s global hunger and food security initiative, commitment to support country-driven approaches to address the root causes of poverty, hunger and under nutrition.
These is contained in a “Ghana fact sheet” on the “Feed the future” initiative issued by the US embassy in Ghana during the visit of the US Ambassador, Donald Teitelbaum, to Tamale on Thursday, to interact with some of the partners implementing the programme, under the Ghana Agriculture Development and Value Chain Enhancement Program (ADVANCE).
The partners are: Stabic Bank, Ghana Nuts, Karma farms, USAID, Tamale Implement Factory Ltd, and Ghana Grains Council.
The key objective of “feed the future” is to improve the livelihood and nutritional status of households in northern Ghana through: increasing the competitiveness of major food value chains, strengthening the resilience of vulnerable communities and households and improving the nutritional status, especially of women and children.
The document noted that Ghana showed an impressive growth and a record poverty reduction over the past twenty years, which made it an African success story with GDP growing from four percent to eight percent annually over the past decade.
This growth, which is expected to continue in the coming years, puts Ghana on track to reach the first Millennium Development Goal of cutting poverty by half by 2015.
According to the document, Ghana also achieved an overall reduction in poverty rate, from 52 percent to 28 percent over the past ten years, but noted that, despite these progress, the northern part of the country still had poverty rates nearly twice that of the south.
“There is risk that poverty in the north will remain high and the income gap between the north and the south will further widen.
While Ghana has exhibited significant progress in agriculture, it still has a trade deficit of 70 percent in rice and 15 percent in maize, its top two staple crops.
The Consumption of both crops is predicted to grow, with the rise in incomes and high urban growth rate”, the document noted.
http://www.ghananewsagency.org/details/Economics/US-to-assist-smallholders-farmers-to-escape-poverty/?ci=3&ai=29832

POVERTY: CAMBODIA: When elephants and humans clash

  Photo: Contributor/IRIN:  Living peacefully with elephants is possible, says Sereivathana Tuy

KOH KONG, 15 December 2010 (IRIN) - Sokha Seang, a 33-year-old rice farmer, recalls the night last spring when a herd of elephants trampled over his property.
"They were hungry. I was angry, but I understand why they did it," he said. The pachyderms ate most of his food stock.
In Cambodia, poor farmers like Seang cannot afford to lose crops; a third of the population lives below the national poverty line of US$0.75 a day, according to government statistics.
They kill marauding elephants with guns, sharp bamboo sticks, or by leaving out poisoned food. Sometimes, the elephants retaliate by running over people.
This time, Seang set aside his instinct to fight back, with the help of NGOs. "We need to live with them peacefully," said Seang, whose remote village of Prey Proseth lies in the southwest province of Koh Kong.

Protecting livelihoods, preserving wildlife
Conflicts between elephants and farmers are common across Asia, one factor that has caused the animal population to dwindle and farmers to lose their livelihoods.
Experts such as Sereivathana Tuy, 40, are encouraging farmers to find ways to live peacefully with the elephants. Tuy is a Cambodia-based elephant specialist at Flora and Fauna International, a wildlife non-profit organization based in Cambridge, UK.
He teaches farmers to alternate crops such as cucumbers and white radishes, which can be harvested several times a year. This gives elephants fewer chances to eat them.
Villagers have also learned to ward off elephants by planting chilli peppers around their land, rather than maiming them with weapons, as elephants dislike the smell, Tuy said.
For Tuy, both sides can preserve their ways of life. The villagers keep their harvest while the elephant population can also be conserved, he told IRIN in Koh Kong.
In Cambodia, fewer than 500 elephants are thought to roam in the wild today. In 1995, there were an estimated 2,000 wild elephants.
Building trust
The clash between elephants and humans became a problem after the communist Khmer Rouge regime was ousted in 1979. In the next two decades, under-regulated development caused deforestation, forcing elephants to search for food and water on farmlands outside their traditional forests.
Some Cambodians sought expensive elephant tails, tusks and the tips of their trunks - body parts that were believed to bring power - and displayed them in their houses to show their status.
These practices led to widespread poaching, says Tuy.
As a park ranger in Cambodia in the 1990s, Tuy developed a community-based model for ending human-elephant conflicts that revolves around building trust with farmers.
Tuy's method begins with hiring teachers who teach children about elephants in four schools in remote areas. The children then pass the knowledge on to their parents, who are supposed to discuss it with the other villagers.
Before 2005, elephant killings were often reported to the police, who would arrest the perpetrators, then jail or fine them more than $2,000. Under Cambodian laws, poachers or elephant killers may also be jailed for 10 years.
Angry villagers said they knew of no other option to protect their land.
The situation might be improving, however. Tuy estimates there have been between five and 10 elephant attacks on humans since 2003, and only one death since 2005 - a sign that farmers are using safer methods to drive away the elephants.
Many methods are backed by empirical evidence. One study last year found that "community-based crop-guarding methods" - the sort of collective guarding using traditional tools that Tuy teaches to villagers - warded off elephants in about 90 percent of attempted raids around Way Kambas National Park, on the island of Sumatra, Indonesia.
"It ties in with a growing realization that a lot of the top-down methods haven't worked especially well," Simon Hedges, Asian elephant coordinator at the New York-based Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), told IRIN from London.
"It's not really realistic for all communities across... Africa and Asia to expect that the government is going to deal with elephants for them," he added.
http://www.irinnews.org/report.aspx?ReportID=91373