Food for All - Agri-culture: Reconnecting People, Land and Nature - page 92

The benefits were dramatically shown during the 1998 drought.
According to the government, there was only enough water for the
irrigation of 18 per cent of the rice area. But farmers persuaded the
irrigation department to let this water through on the grounds that they
would carefully irrigate the whole area. Through cooperation and careful
management, they achieved a better than average harvest, earning the
country US$20 million in foreign exchange. 22 Throughout Sri Lanka,
33,000 water users' associations have now been formed - a dramatic
increase in local social organization that has improved farmers' own
capacities for problem-solving and cooperation, and for using nature more
efficiently and effectively in order to produce more food.
Zero-Pesticide Farming
Modern farmers have come to depend upon a great variety of insecticides,
herbicides and fungicides to control the pests, weeds and diseases that
threaten crop and animal productivity. These pesticides are now big
business, with global sales exceeding US$31 billion in 1998. Each year,
farmers apply 5 billion kilogrammes of pesticides' active ingredients to
their farms. Nine-tenths of this market is now controlled by just eight
companies. Yet, it is only in the past century, less than 1 per cent of
agriculture's history, that such dependence has emerged. 23 Today, however,
many farmers in this agricultural sustainability revolution are finding
alternative methods for pest, disease and weed control. In some crops, it
may mean the end of pesticides altogether, as cheaper and more environ-
mentally benign practices are found to be perfectly effective.
Though integrated pest management dates back to the 1950s, a
significant paradigm-shifting moment occurred in the early 1980s when
Peter Kenmore and his colleagues in South-East Asia counter-intuitively
found that pest attack on rice was directly proportional to the amount
of pesticides used. In other words, more pesticides meant more pests.
The reason was simple - pesticides were killing the natural enemies of
insect pests, such as spiders and beetles. When these invertebrates are
eliminated from agroecosystems, then pests are able to expand rapidly
in numbers. This led, in 1986, to the banning by the Indonesian govern-
ment of 57 types of pesticides for use on rice, combined with the
launching of a national system of farmer field schools to teach farmers
the benefits of biodiversity in fields. One million farmers have now
attended about 50,000 field schools, the largest number in any Asian
country. The outcomes in terms of human and social development have