Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
grown—China, India, Indonesia, Vietnam, and Cambodia—now support SRI meth-
ods based on their own evaluations. National rice programs are becoming somewhat
delinked from international scientific advice, since they rely increasingly on their own
expertise and experience.
•
China
. The Sichuan Provincial Department of Agriculture (PDA) started popular-
izing SRI in 2004, with 1,133 hectares (ha) in that year. By 2010 the area on which
SRI methods were used reached 301,000 ha, totaling 941,068 ha over seven years.
The additional production, which the PDA attributed to farmers' use of most if not
all of the SRI methods during this period, was 1.66 million tons of paddy rice. Its
total value was over $300 million, produced with less 24 percent less water (Zheng
et al. 2011). Similar gains have been achieved in Zhejiang province, where rice sci-
entists at the China National Rice Research Institute (CNRRI) worked closely with
the Zhejiang PDA and with farmers. According to a senior CNRRI scientist, SRI is
becoming the main cultivation system in southern China (IRIN 2012).
•
Indonesia.
The president of this country has strongly endorsed SRI (
http://ciifad.
www.srivideo.zoomshare.com/
), but only part of the Ministry of Agriculture has
welcomed SRI, its Land and Water Resources Management Directorate. The Food
Crops Directorate has continued to emphasize varietal improvement and fertilizer
use for raising rice production. However, the Ministry has announced a target of
1.5 million hectares of SRI use by 2015 (IRIN 2012). SRI is also supported by the
Irrigation Department (PU) and various NGOs, universities, and the private sector
(Sato and Uphoff 2007).
•
India.
NGOs, universities, and other parts of civil society have given leadership on
SRI extension here, assisted by the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), the Sir
Dorabji Tata Trust, and the National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development
(NABARD). The government's Directorate of Rice Development has been support-
ive, along with its National Food Security Mission, and rice scientists of the Indian
Council for Agricultural Research are now also agreed on SRI merits. The prime
minister and head of the Planning Commission have endorsed SRI, particularly for
its water-saving potentials. The Bihar State government set a target of 1.4 million
hectares of SRI extension in 2012, while the state of Tamil Nadu reports over 1 mil-
lion farmers using SRI methods on 850,000 hectares; other state governments are
similarly gearing up to spread the new methods.
•
Vietnam.
When the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development endorsed
SRI as a “technical advance” in 2007, there were fewer than 10,000 farmers using
SRI methods. Four years later, the Ministry reported that this number had risen
to over 1 million, with a tripling in just three years' time (
http://qdnd.vn/qdndsite/
•
Cambodia.
SRI got started here with twenty-eight farmers in 2000. By 2006 the gov-
ernment had decided to include SRI in its national development plan for agriculture,
and the SRI Secretariat in the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries now
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