Rice is the most staple food in Asia. The Asian rice sector supports 140 million farmers who cultivate rice on 145 million hectares of harvested area, employs 300 million people in the rice value chain activities, and it is an important staple food for 60% of the Asian population. The mean size of one hectare per farm is too small to support a family of 5-6 members. Further continuous fragmentation of rice farms after each generation poses serious challenges to the viability of rice farming in Asia. Given the mounting pressures to quit rice farming, smallholder farmers continue to persist, especially in South and East Asia, despite fast developing economy and increasing urbanization. There is also a growing agrarian crisis in most developing countries of Asia due to a long neglect of rural areas where most of the smallholders live and farm. They suffer from poverty, malnutrition, dispossession of land assets, and death. We need an urgent and a comprehensive solution to tackle this rural degradation and agrarian crisis.
Precision farming and resource-conserving technologies are now available and new ones are being developed to tackle the technical constraints of rice-based farming systems. Farmers must be empowered and faclitated to better adopt the currently available technologies -- the Best Management Practices for lowland rice farming in Asia.
Climate change remediation by individual farmers: Farmers must make every family farm a climate-smart farm, one which is equipped with the knowledge and technologies essential to manage and mitigate the expected adverse impacts of Climate Change on agriculture. Achieving the triple objectives – adaptation, mitigation and food security – is increasingly being called “climate-smart agriculture.” In climate smart farms, farmers should use stress (flood, drought, pests and diseases) tolerant or resistant rice varieties with appropriate production technologies that reduce such stresses. In addition, farmers need to improve cropland management practices and restore organic matter into the soil. Increasing soil organic matter content in farms not only increases carbon sequestration – a climate mitigation function, but also enhances soil quality, water-holding capacity, nutrient use efficiency, and finally higher crop yields. Alternative wetting and drying (AWD) irrigation method thus has the potential to reduce the global warming impact of irrigated rice farming by one-third, relative to the continuously flooded rice system.
Governemnt actions needed to contain climate change: Important actions, ones which must be taken by national or local governments, include building irrigation-drainage facilities for farmers to cope with changing rainfall patterns. There must be an adequate supply of good quality seeds and other farm inputs at the right price. Governments should assist in the building of rural processing facilities and improve farmers’ access to key markets. Government support for affordable rural education and healthcare and renewable energy infrastructure is imperative.
Finally, favorable policy and institutional support are critical for:
- Identifying climate-related risks and stresses along the entire value chain
- Breeding rice varieties that are more tolerant of climate-related abiotic stress (drought, flood, cold, & high temperature) and also have increased resistance to biotic stressors (insect pests and diseases)
- Deployment of scientific findings and technologies to make farming practices much more efficient at using natural resources of soil, water, and energy, while optimizing necessary external inputs, including fertilizers and pesticides
- Equipping and empowering smallholder farmers to adopt ecologically sound conservation agriculture practices. These will include improving soil health and fertility, a better management of water and energy resources, enhancing biodiversity both on-farm and off-farm, implementing appropriate farm mechanization, and using agroforestry systems whenever feasible
- Enhancing the adoption of smallholder crop-animal production systems as a means to improve cash flow, family nutrition and health, and resilience against abrupt changes in weather and or markets.
Addressing the socio-economic and policy constraints is the most difficult for all. Rural reconstruction is the key to improving rural livelihoods and reducing rural to urban migration. What we need is to develop smart villages rather than smart cities by improving rural living conditions through better and affordable healthcare and education facilities, better rural infrastructure for farm production, processing and storage, as well as good roads and efficient transport to well-functioning markets.
Given the persistence of smallholders in Asia, the governments should enable such farmers to make a decent living out of their farms. We need to explore some smart ways to increase the effective farm size through consolidation of small holdings without farmers losing their title to their lands. Some examples of increasing effective farm size include a kind of “village farming” in China, “small farmers, large farm” in Vietnam, and professionally managed groups of small holders in Indonesia. Farmers in such large virtual farms should have decent access to good quality water resources, favorable land tenure system, favorable weather, appropriate technologies, training and technical support, credit, insurance, and adequate rural infrastructure (health, education, roads, transport, and processing and storage facilities). Such well-supported large virtual farms will adopt precision farming methods to produce adequate quantities of good quality produce for efficient marketing at attractive price.
Over all, we need appropriate policy and institutional support systems in place – ones which will allow farmers to make intensification of rice farming sustainable, profitable, regenerative, and supportive of the land and water resource bases, and of the environment. A comprehensive understanding of scientific, technical, environmental, economical, and societal issues - including re-education of farmers and stabilization of the human population – is a prerequisite to effectively implementing eco-efficient farming practices. There is, however, no assurance that all the necessary prerequisites will be met, yet the food and nutrition security of billions of human beings depends on success in implementing a truly sustainable agricultural ecosystem(s) for growing rice across Asia.
Д-р. Vethaiya BALASUBRAMANIAN