Rice wars.

• Author: Ho, Mae-Wan
• Position: System of Rice Intensification

Rice feeds more than half the world's population, but yields of the crop have been leveling out, and 400 million are said to endure chronic hunger in rice-producing areas of Asia, Africa and South America. According to the United Nations, demand for rice is expected to rise by a further 38% within 30 years. "Rice is on the front line in the fight against world hunger and poverty," said Jacques Diouf, director-general of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization.

Many farmers all over Asia have already identified low-input, sustainable solutions to the problem.

One simple method that boosts rice yields at much lower cost to farmers originated outside Asia. The System of Rice Intensification (SRI), developed in the late 1980s in Madagascar, has since been spreading to other parts of Africa and to Asia. In Madagascar itself, some 100,000 farmers have converted to it. And more than 20 other countries, from Bangladesh to Thailand, have either adopted SRI, or field tested it, or expressed firm interest. In Cambodia, SRI was unheard of in 2000, but by 2003, nearly 10,000 farmers had converted to it, and that figure may reach 50,000 this year.

Advocates of SRI routinely report yields up to twice or more those achieved by conventional agriculture. However, eminent agronomists are dismissing those claims as "poor record keeping and unscientific thinking," and results of new field trials, published in March 2004 in the journal Field Crop Research, appear to support this view.

History of SRI

SRI was developed nearly 20 years ago by Father Henri de Laulanie, a Jesuit priest who worked with farming communities in Madagascar from 1961 until his death in 1995. In conventional rice growing, the plants spend most of the season partially submerged in water. During a 1983 drought, many farmers could not flood their paddy fields, and de Laulanie noticed that the rice plants, in particular their roots, showed unusually vigorous growth.

From this and other observations, de Laulanie developed the SRI practice: rice seedlings are transplanted quickly when young, spaced widely apart, and most importantly, the rice fields are kept moist but not flooded. In addition, he emphasized using organic compost over chemical fertilizers, so that poor and rich farmers alike could practice SRI.

Norman Uphoff, a political scientist and director of the International Institute for Food, Agriculture and Development at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, stepped into the picture in 1993. He was part of a team trying to find alternatives to the damaging types of slash and burn agriculture that was destroying Madagascar's...