This document features the Asia-Pacific rice-based livelihood systems. It is the first of five compilations that describe new inter-disciplinary strategies wherewith to combat hunger and poverty in rural Asia-Pacific. The four companion documents respectively feature Biotechnology, biosecurity, and biodiversity; World trade and an enabling policy environment; Livestock intensification; and Disasters preparedness and management.
The Asian ricelands have an annual harvest area of about 135 million hectares, and are tended by nearly 300 million persons. They support 3 billion rice consumers: one-half of the world's population, and about two-thirds of its hungry and poor. For most of those consumers, rice supplies at least one-third of their dietary energy, and in some rice-growing countries three-fourths. The ricelands are a unique and recognizable entity, and have sufficient commonality that successful practices can be widely replicated. During the past four decades they have helped lessen hunger and poverty, and sustain livelihoods. Nonetheless, within them there still persists much hunger and poverty.
The three dominant food-security cereals - rice, wheat, and maize - have very similar global productions of about 600 million tonnes per year. Within those global totals, the Asia-Pacific region produces nine-tenths of the rice, compared to one-third of the global wheat, and one-fourth of the maize (mostly for livestock feed). In dietary terms, as also in social, economic, and ecological terms, the contributions of the non-rice crops and of livestock are in the major rice-growing countries dwarfed by those of rice.
There are responsible forecasts for the substantially increasing requirements for rice during 2003-2015-2030, and responsible expectations that widespread adoption of current and emerging best-practice production procedures can meet those requirements, and can do so with a diminishing demand on biophysical and human resources. The resources thus spared from food-security rice production shall allow diversification of rice-based farming systems and of income-generating enterprises.
Other extensive food-and-livelihoods systems in East and South Asia are the upland and the highland mixed farming systems. They, like the rice systems, are home to many poor persons, and contribute to those persons' food security; appropriate programmes are needed for these upland systems. However, and without gainsaying the needs of other Asian farming systems, this document addresses only the rice-based farming systems, with their rice and non-rice crops, their livestock and fish, and their value-adding employment-creating enterprises, and their unique submerged-soil ecological regimes and biodiversity, and their environmental challenges for water (for which many competing demands) and for the safe and efficient use of agro-chemicals.
In combination, the preceding Asian and global considerations illustrate the extent to which global food security (particularly of poor persons) is determined by the rice security of Asia, and by the products of its rice-based systems. Systems that are so large and so pro-poor as the rice systems have major potential to impact - favourably or adversely - on the world's food security and on its politico-economic stability.
This document thus reviews the role of the rice-based systems in sustaining human livelihood and food security. It identifies a vision, goals, and livelihood-oriented activities in rice-system production and products utilization and in institutional support. Noting that progress towards Year-2015 food-security and poverty-alleviation targets has been less than required, it suggests that part of the cause is the substantial decline in global assistance to developing-world agriculture during 1989-99, and that part of the remedy is to increase and sustain investments in physical and human resources for developing-world agriculture - particularly for rice-based agriculture. The document's purpose is to engender within an influential readership a heightened awareness of the key features, global importance, and pressing needs of these vital systems, and to suggest that those needs might best be addressed through multi-stakeholder, multi-disciplinary endeavours.
For the rice-family livelihoods, there are many constraints and challenges to the lessening of hunger and poverty and to the improvement of lifestyles - particularly for children and adolescents. Encouragingly, recent economic growth forecasts permit optimism that there shall in most rice-growing countries be increased national resources wherewith to combat rice-system hunger and poverty. There is also growing commitment that globalization of trade can and must be made to work for the hungry and poor. Helpfully, in addressing the constraints and challenges, the ricelands' human, economic, institutional, technological and biophysical resources are now substantially stronger than in recent decades. Notably, the ongoing expansion of education and extension shall ensure that the future rice-system families shall be better prepared than their predecessors to take advantage of more complex technologies, concepts, and systems, and to recognize pertinent opportunities. To avail of these opportunities, there must be appropriate policies for smallholder agriculture, for agricultural trade (national and globalized), for price supports and damaging subsidies, for resource management, and for enabling rural women to attain equitable access to income generating resources.
This document therefore proposes livelihoods-oriented interventions to assist riceland families to use their existing strengths to escape from hunger and vulnerability. It recognizes that investment in women is crucial in achieving food security and poverty reduction. It suggests that intervention strategies should be based on current best practices. Strategies recognize also that although irrigated rice systems shall contribute most of the increased food production to ensure food security, high priority is now accorded to the non-irrigated ricelands in expectation of substantially lessened poverty per unit investment. In many ricelands there shall be opportunities to use the Rice-Check Package in combination with Yield-Gap Methodology, and to avail of crop-livestock synergies, and to support women-operated quality seed production enterprises. Additionally, rice-system crops and livestock each provide within-community value-adding and employment-creation opportunities, particularly for women. Rice, and its by-products, and native chicken and hybrid duck and dairy cattle products, all offer income generating options. For some ricelands, sequestration of carbon and production of bio-fuel crops for electricity generation may be viable Agenda-21 and Kyoto-Protocol options.
This document thus proposes 33 candidate rice-community interventions, characterized as technological, or as socio-economic, or as institutional, policy and infrastructural - all to be implemented integratively. However, integrated development demands attention to education, health care, infrastructures and micro-finance. Interventions should thus be implemented holistically through a multi-stakeholder, multi-disciplinary coalition that includes the riceland communities, civil society organizations, national ministry components, UN agencies including FAO, and others. The candidate interventions are presented as "a menu" from which choices would be made by member governments, thereby ensuring congruence with their national food-security/poverty-alleviation programmes, and with the specific needs of their targeted riceland communities.
There will similarly be enquiry among prospective donors and stakeholder partners in this proposed endeavour. The document thus specifies the outputs that would be expected from the candidate interventions. FAO would be a participant in much of this intervention and its monitoring, and would help catalyse the contributions of the many stakeholders - including UN agency stakeholders. Indeed, collaborative action by several UN agencies would permit that interventions could be undertaken within the mandates of the UN Development Group and within the multi-UN Agency Network on Rural Development and Food Security.
Notwithstanding many challenges to the improvement of rice-systems livelihoods - particularly for the poorest of the poor and for hungry children - we might plead that the required investments are not immense. Such investment can help poor families to make their own way out of hunger and poverty. FAO is well positioned to initiate and support the required multi-agency endeavours. Such endeavours can help provide to disadvantaged children and adolescents a better quality of life than that experienced by their parents. Investments made now might well obviate the need for a later and more-costly crisis management.
This publication derives from analyses undertaken by the authors at the Asia-Pacific Regional Office of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. The authors thank the many technical colleagues from that office for helpful comments and discussion.
Terence Woodhead
R.B. Singh
