The three foregoing sections of this document have introduced and quantified - by region and by rice-growing country - the several requirements, opportunities, and constraints that shall determine the extent to which Asia's rice-based livelihood-support systems shall be able during 2002 - 2015 - 2030 to lessen hunger and rural poverty. Drawing upon those foregoing sections, this present section addresses strategic aspects - of remoteness, water availability, crop nutrition, yield gaps, natural resources, and human wellbeing. These aspects are those that can help guide national governments in formulating prospective interventions to improve food security and rural livelihood. And can help particularly to formulate interventions that could be implemented effectively in partnership with FAO and with other agencies, and with the intended riceland beneficiaries. Interventions might be associated, particularly, with the FAO-assisted Special Programme for Food Security and with the supportive FAO initiative for Priority Areas for Inter-disciplinary Actions.
Within and among countries, remoteness from conurbations and markets correlates with poverty (UK/DFID 2000 Figure 5.2, quoting Galup and Sachs; refer also ADB 2000a Footnote 13, and Dixon et al 2001). IFAD (2001 Box 5.1) suggests that persons who are remote from markets suffer a lack of understanding of market mechanisms in addition to suffering lower incomes and lesser access to consumer goods and to opportunities for assets accumulation.
In rice-growing countries, remote areas are often the areas with less-productive soils. They are likely also to have below-average endowments of other natural resources and of human and social resources - including health and education services. Such areas include many of the rainfed-lowland and rainfed-upland and rainfed-floodprone/swampland (as distinct from the irrigated-lowland) rice-farming systems. The alleviation and eradication of poverty in remote rice-growing areas is thus beset with difficulty.
Additionally, there is evidence from China (FAO 1998b Annex 3) that "there is persistent poverty among 50 million persons dwelling in remote, upland areas". Similarly, if the 1995-1998 farm-household-poverty percentages indicated above (from Singh 2001a) are real and not artefactual, they also may indicate that in India too there is a substantial and persistent population of remote, upland-dwelling poor.
[FAO's Medium Term Plan (2000a) is mindful of this concern for persistent poverty, and correspondingly includes specific and expanding activities on agriculture's contribution to poverty alleviation and to rural development in remote areas.]
To combat poverty in these remote rural upland areas, improvement of infrastructure and services, including financial services, is a pre-requisite (ADB 2000a, World Bank 2001a). There is need also (Dixon et al 2001) to provide specific programmes of farming-systems supports - but within integrative programmes of technological and social interventions. IFPRI (2000b) suggests that these upland farming systems might realistically comprise upland-rice-based agroforestry systems of higher than current productivity. FAO (1999b) explains that there are proven (SARM) systems that are both resource-conserving and economically productive. Similarly, ADB (2001b) affirms its priority support to SARM-type activities, with their incidental contribution to the dependability of irrigation supply to the downstream ricelands and hence to food security and livelihoods. Such programmes shall have high cost per beneficiary, but such cost may be counted as part of the cost of lessening rural-urban migration and of sustainable management of natural resources and heritage - and of lessening hunger and poverty.
[In which context, it is pertinent to note IFAD's (2001 Table 2.8 and text) discourse on the mismatch between aid provision and poverty incidence, and to recall UK/DFID's (2000 Figure 7.3, quoting World Bank) listing of the 1998 flows of development aid per poor person: US$ 950/person for the Middle East and North Africa, US$ 30/person for East Asia, and only US$ 10/person for South Asia.]
The rainfed areas in developing countries, including rice-growing countries, are forecast (IFPRI 1998a) to be one of the sources of the increases in feed grains and oil seeds that shall be needed to support the 2002-2020 expansion in the livestock sectors. Resources - including infrastructural resources - shall be needed in those rainfed areas to facilitate these increases in feeds supplies, and also to facilitate increases in food production and in enterprises. IFPRI (1999b), in relation to India, but perhaps more-widely applicable, and IFAD (2001) opine that for infrastructural investments, the marginal rates of return are often higher for rainfed than for irrigated agriculture. IFPRI (1999b) further opines that provision of infrastructures in rainfed ecozones brings twin benefits - of increased production and decreased rural poverty.
Connectedly, and in relation to the interactions of agricultural production and rural-employment/income generation, FAO's (1998a) analyses for India and Malaysia, and ADB's analyses (2001a Chapter II Box 3, quoting various sources) for Bangladesh, Indonesia, Pakistan and Thailand, each demonstrate that a 1.0 percent increase in agricultural-output value results in a 0.5 - 1.0 percent increase in the outputs of the associated non-farm sector. This "multiplier effect" operates both in irrigated and in rainfed ecozones - provided that the human-population densities and the infrastructures are sufficient.
We here anticipate later sections of this document to suggest that for the Asian ricelands there shall be need for interventions, including policy interventions, for both the rainfed and the irrigated systems. Interventions in rainfed ecozones shall expect to lessen rural poverty and rural-urban migration. Interventions in irrigated ecozones shall help produce much of the increases in food supplies that shall be needed to ensure food security and adequate nutrition - both for the rural hungry and also for the urban hungry.
Increases in irrigation-water-distribution/allocation efficiency and in field-level water productivity and in economic efficiency of water use, and in irrigation's interactive contributions to fertilizer-use efficiency, are thus necessary and indeed feasible (ADB 2001c, IFAD 2001). Chapter 3.4.2 introduced the technical concepts of (irrigation-)water efficiency and productivity. IFAD (2001 Box 4.10) describes how the concept of economic efficiency of water use quantifies the added value of applied irrigation.
Recalling that water productivity quantifies the amount of produce generated per unit of water (including rainfall) received in the farmer's field, it is apparent that such productivity is influenced strongly by many factors other than the farmer's water management. Thus, factors such as a higher-yielding cultivar, increase in fertilizer application and/or efficiency, improvement in pest control, and a more-favourable-than-average solar irradiance regime, can each increase the production per unit of received water without any change in field-level water management. Quantification of the effect of improved field-level water management thus needs to be accomplished through analyses of single-factor productivities.
It is here pertinent to report that some irrigation systems - as in parts of India and Pakistan - were conceived and designed to satisfy part only of the rice-season crop-water requirement. They are essentially "protective systems" that provide, particularly in water-short years, an equitable distribution of such water as is available (FAO 1997a: Molden and Makin). Increasingly such systems are being augmented by farmer-owned tubewells.
Opportunities and methodologies do exist (Guerra et al 1998, FAO 2000a and 2000c) to improve both water-distribution/allocation efficiency and field-level water productivity by rice and non-rice crops. Such improvements provide opportunity to expand the land area serviced by an irrigation facility. An appropriate monitoring of water-productivity can be achieved in terms of crop production per volume of applied water: (t of produce)/(m3 of water) - analogous to t/(ha of land); or, as (kg of produce)/(kg of water) - analogous to (kg of grain)/(kg of fertilizer).
These measures of efficiency can be applied (Molden 1997) for an individual field, crop, and season. Adapting from Guerra et al (1998, citing various sources) we here indicate that field-level water productivity for irrigated rice in Malaysia and the Philippines ranges from 0.03 to 0.05 kg grain/100 kg water (rainfall plus irrigation). FAO (2000c) correspondingly indicates an aggregate value, for irrigated and rainfed-lowland rice, of about 0.03 kg grain/100 kg water. These values may be compared with 2 000 kg grain/100 kg fertilizer-N.
More strategically, this methodology (Molden 1997) for measuring efficiency can be applied also for an entire irrigation system, or for a complete river basin incorporating multiple irrigation systems. When applied to a single irrigation system, the methodology may be used for an individual crop and season, or for a whole farming year and its various crops. It can thereby capture the effects of water re-use - when water that has percolated through fields higher in the system is used in lower-elevation fields, or when drainage water collected from lower fields is pumped ("re-cycled") back to the conveyance canals at higher elevation.
Correspondingly, for a river basin, the methodology can quantify the benefit - as a water input to a downstream irrigation system - of water draining from an upstream system. However, FAO 2000c cautions that the required operational data may not be available. Nonetheless, at basin and system scale, the methodology can help determine any increase in total irrigated area that results from improvements in system or in on-farm management.
Irrigation facilities for rice-sequence cropping usually comprise a river-diversion structure, or sometimes a cross-valley dam, that facilitates the gravity-induced water flow along lined or unlined canals to bunded fields for which the aggregate area may be as little as 100 ha or as large as 100 000 ha or more. In some ecozones, powered lifting of river water and of groundwater, via deep or shallow tubewells, services a large fraction of the irrigated-rice area: about one-half in China and in India, and about five-sixths in Bangladesh (FAO 2000c).
Encouragingly, IFAD (2001) reports - also for Bangladesh - that poor landless persons have been able to purchase small-capacity low-lift tubewell pumps and, through labour-intensive endeavour, to use them to deliver and sell water to smallholders. In turn, these smallholders - in consequence of their more-intensive usage of high-yielding cultivars - derive greater benefit from irrigation applications than do large-scale farmers.
For tubewells, there is in Bangladesh - and perhaps in other rice ecozones - sufficient groundwater to allow intensification of current networks. Conversely, excessive abstractions have in some ecozones lowered groundwater levels to such extent (FAO 2000d reports 1.3 m/ann lowering in north-western India and in China) that pumping costs have increased considerably. And in other ecozones, as in Indonesia, some existing tubewells can no longer access the groundwater supply, and programmes of replacement and rehabilitation are needed. Thus, IWMI (2001) reports that an India consortium of NGOs assists villagers to site, construct, and maintain low-cost water-impoundment structures from which impounded water percolates to recharge underlying aquifers.
Other detrimental results of inappropriate irrigation (IFPRI 1995c; IRRI 1997; FAO 2000d) include water-logging (6 Mha in India) and soil salinization (1 Mha in Pakistan) and nitrate and pesticide pollution of groundwater.
[Pertinently, there may for some irrigation systems and their river basins be proposals that water-distribution/allocation efficiency should be increased by lining with impervious materials the major water-distributing canals so as to lessen water seepage and percolation. However, such percolated water may have been contributing to the aquifers and ground-water that are accessed by downstream tubewells. And the farmers dependent upon those tubewells may be poorer than the farmers receiving gravity-flow water through the irrigation system. In terms of regional poverty alleviation, it shall therefore be appropriate to conduct technical/economic analyses to determine who and how many shall be the gainers and the losers from canal-lining programmes.]
For both the rice, whether transplanted or direct-seeded, into puddled or non-puddled soil, and for the non-rice crops, the irrigation water is usually applied by inundation/submergence, or by furrow-flooding to non-rice crops, within the bunded field. The puddling process, including its preparatory land-soaking/softening, for the first (post-dry-season) rice requires much water - most of which flows through soil fissures to recharge the local groundwater. This water flow may be lessened, by perhaps one-third, by a shallow tillage at the conclusion of the previous season's cropping. Conversely, it may be increased appreciably if, at the onset of the rice season, resource-poor farmers perforce make non-productive applications of water while awaiting the availability, for puddling operations, of draught animals and hand-tractors or/and of labour.
Dry seeding of rice into non-puddled soil - analogous to barley or wheat seeding in temperate agriculture, or to upland-rice seeding - is possible; but resultant plant populations and grain yields are usually inferior to those from puddling/transplanting procedures. However, this dry-seeding technology, with corresponding weed-management methodology and herbicides, and perhaps with early-vigour and herbicide-resistant rice cultivars, may expect to become more effective by 2020. Dry seeding into non-puddled bunded fields may by 2030 be especially effective if "aerobic-rice" cultivars have then achieved yield potential comparable to the current new-plant-type and hybrid cultivars.
Dry seeding could thus permit appreciable savings of water at field level - and perhaps also at irrigation-system and river-basin level - notwith-standing that the beneficial effects of percolated-water re-use might be diminished. In Texas (USA) research, a dry-seeded rice crop yielded substantially less than a crop wet-seeded into puddled soil. Conversely, in a water-short year in Malaysia, extensive dry seeding saved sufficient water at irrigation-system level that farmers were enabled to achieve some rice yield, against an expectation of zero yield if water for rice-puddling/transplanting had been awaited.
Wet seeding of rice - in which pre-germinated rice seeds are sown into/onto wet puddled soil is - because of rising labour costs and an availability of appropriate herbicides - increasingly practised in some rice ecozones. Farmers adopting this methodology generally shorten the duration of their pre-puddling land soaking, such that the number of days during which soil-submergence water is retained in the field is decreased by about one-fourth (Malaysia and Philippines experience). There is a corresponding decrease in rice-season water requirement: FAO (2000c) reports a one-fifth to one-fourth water saving, and also a very considerable rice-establishment labour saving, in China. For both dry-seeding and wet-seeding procedures, there are stringent requirements for land levelling - for which laser-assisted methodologies are available; there is need also for effective drainage and rigorous weed control: the latter likely to met by increased applications of herbicides rather than by labour-intensive hand-weeding.
[This oft-recurring concern for agricultural-labour shortage at a time when pro-poor strategies are equally frequently expressing anxiety for rural unemployment and urging labour-absorbing strategies is a conundrum - and perhaps also a pro-poor opportunity. IFAD (2001) expresses strongly the views that "the rural poor are especially dependent on their labour power... that subsidies to labour-displacing tractors cannot normally be justified... and that the use of rural labour has social advantages, and its use is not a farm cost that researchers should strive to minimize." Thus, prominent among the benefits of any pro-poor programme must be the generation of rural employment - employment that is sufficiently remunerative, cost-effective, and drudgery-free as to counter the demand, originating from experiences of brief peak-period labour shortage, for worker-displacing technologies. With modern farming systems - and 100 years after Henry Ford - there must be labour-friendly ways to spread labour demand. Similarly, as Dixon et al (2001) suggest: there is need for research to improve productivity of labour - not only of land; and as (FAO 1999b) opines in relation to natural-resource management: taxes on labour should be repealed and replaced by taxes on natural resources.]
At the micro-scale, "rainwater-harvesting" impoundments when located at higher elevation within individual farms - either rainfed, or at less-reliably-supplied locations within an irrigation system - provide a valuable and efficient water supplementation to lower-elevation fields during water-short periods. For aggregations of non-irrigated smallholdings, Indian and possibly other studies have quantified the benefits of a reasonably-assured supply of perhaps one-fifth of the crop-season water needs. Consequently, there is in India a national "watershed" programme of small-scale impoundments, often supplemented by stream-water diversion, to provide some degree of water security and hence food security to poorer communities.
For such impoundments, in India or elsewhere, the dependability of water inflow is determined by the water flow from the upstream watersheds. There is thus strong need for effective land, water, and vegetative-cover management within the upland forests and on the agroforested lands.
[Rainwater harvesting, and forestry and agroforestry, feature respectively in the activities ongoing in the Asia-Pacific Groups of the FAO (2000a) Land and Water Development Division and of the Forestry Department.]
Correspondingly, the World Bank (Plusquellec, in FAO 1997a, re Sri Lanka and southern China) and IRRI-IFAD (2000: Varma, re eastern India) describe the down-catchment progression - in catchments with or without major engineered irrigation schemes - of main reservoir, intermediate-size reservoirs, and community and on-farm ponds. The ponds serve not only as a source of water for crops, but also as necessary bathing and drinking pools for large livestock.
In rainfed systems, upland or lowland, there is often opportunity - though at a cost, which may be accounted as a cost of poverty alleviation - of using diesel- or electricity-powered pumps to transfer pond or reservoir water to higher-elevation fields. In some rice-growing uplands, there may be small areas of spring-supplied irrigation for terraced rice (Dixon et al 2001, re the Highland Mixed Farming Systems). And there may in some ecozones be opportunity to construct within-farm along-contour interceptor plots to accumulate and retain rainfall-runoff water: such retained water subsequently replenishes the root-zone-soil moisture for downslope crops (IRRI-IFAD 2000: Singh and Singh).
After irrigated rice is established, whether by transplanting or direct seeding, and provided the farmers have confidence in the reliability of their irrigation supply and of their herbicides and molluscicides, then without risk of rice-yield loss the farmers can decrease the water losses to seepage and percolation by forsaking, either for the whole season, or from panicle initiation onward, the continual retention of water above the soil surface, and instead maintain their soils at moisture-saturation without any overlying water, and thereby save one-half or one-third of their seasonal water use. Similarly, the Chinese procedures of "intermittent flooding" can save almost one-half of the post-establishment water requirement (IWMI 2000c, FAO 2000c).
A greater control of the rice-phase soil-water regime facilitates also a more-efficient management of rice nutrition - including the ensurance of sufficient moisture to allow P-uptake, and the lessening of N-losses by leaching and by the greenhouse-gas-producing processes of nitrification and denitrification. Moreover, for the succeeding non-rice crop, a less-wet soil at rice harvest permits a more-prompt establishment - especially beneficial in rice-wheat systems.
For various post-rice non-rice crops, designs for any new river-diversion systems, and for modernization of existing rice-irrigation systems, might expect to incorporate features that facilitate the adoption of water-efficient technologies such as drip, spray, or sprinkler irrigation (using deficit irrigation - IWMI 2000c- as appropriate), and would include options to supply plant nutrients within the irrigation water.
In areas now or prospectively subject to salinization, designs would expect to facilitate also the conjunctive use of sweet and brackish waters. Correspondingly, for both rice and non-rice crops, there could by 2015 (or 2030) be adaptation within Asia of the water-efficient centre-pivot irrigation facilities that are used successfully in Brazil for rice-soybean sequences - though IFAD (2001) cautions that centre-pivot systems may be labour-displacive.
As reasoned in FAO (2000c), economic forces shall require the adoption of these various water-efficient technologies; and though the current generation of farmers understandably has misgivings about the difficulties of managing complex systems, during future decades the succeeding better-educated computer-literate generation shall be expected to confront and overcome these difficulties.
The modernization of an existing irrigation system comprises a complex of undertakings (FAO 1997a, 1999g). It encompasses much more than the restoration of the system to its original state ("rehabilitation"). It is a "transformation" process of technical and managerial upgrading and of associated institutional reforms that creates a system superior to that originally constructed. It is likely to incorporate corrections and improvements to the original design, particularly in relation to drainage shortcomings and to operational practicalities, and to have flexibility to respond to future changes in the clients' needs.
The process is expected to engender in the system managers a sense of service and accountability to those clients (FAO 1997a: Burt). And for those clients, there are consequential requirements for changes in agricultural practices and in procedures of costs recovery. These several aspects of irrigation-system modernization are featured in the FAO-facilitated Special Programme for Food Security.
Overall, the modernization process is conceived as an integration of actions "to strengthen hard-ware, soft-ware, and human-ware" (FAO 1999g). The process thus has a justified emphasis on training for the various participants and stake-holders. However, there are worrisome shortages of experts and consultants able to provide the required integrated training, including its required emphasis on non-steady flow, and able to raise awareness of the many technologies that are already available to meet irrigation-system short-comings provided that correct diagnosis and prescription are made. There may also be need (FAO 1997a) for strengthening the available library of design/procedural guidelines and manuals. To help strengthen the corps and capabilities of experts and consultants and to provide reference materials, FAO has helped design a specific Training Programme for Irrigation Modernization (FAO 1999g: Burt).
The economic returns to irrigation-system modernization can indeed be substantial - notwith-standing that returns to the original investment in the system may have been disappointing. Moreover, for a system that is in need of rehabilitation, the additional cost of modernization is relatively small. However, some existing systems may not be amenable to modernization (FAO 1997a: Ooi, Facon). Programmes of irrigation modernization must therefore be conceived within a national strategy, for which Wolter and Burt (in FAO 1997a) suggest a procedural model. Crucially, the World Bank (1994, quoted by Guerra et al 1998) cautions that modernization will be ineffective unless accompanied by accountability, by strengthened system-management capability, and by the incentive of allocating to system maintenance the water-use revenues.
Those programmes of maintenance may for many long-established irrigation systems be inadequate to sustain water-distribution/allocation efficiency: irrigation agencies often lack the budgets to finance such maintenance, and the farmers lack the incentives to undertake the work. The outcome is usually that irrigation supply, particularly at lower elevations, is unreliable - with the unfortunate consequence that farmers at all elevations adopt inefficient and inequitable water-allocation procedures as a protective measure.
However, there are some irrigation systems within which well-organized and well-supported irrigation-user groups do manage, operate, and maintain their irrigation facilities effectively. Conversely, Vermillion (1997, quoted by Guerra et al 1998) cautions that analyses of the effectiveness of users' management of their irrigation systems indicate "a mixed set of experiences, with govern-ment contributions declining, farmers' costs rising, and little evidence of increases in water productivity, crop yields, or farm income". FAO (2000c, quoting a joint World-Bank/FAO/IPTRID review) concludes that irrigation-user groups are effective only when endowed with substantive power.
FAO (2000c, quoting a joint World-Bank/OED review) suggests that system maintenance might be more effective if the structures and their operation are simplified - though such an approach may be counter to the long-term objective of flexible, high-efficiency operations and may not allow for the expectation that the future more-educated rice farmers shall be more technically proficient than their forebears. IFAD (2001) reports that increased education - formal or informal - does indeed correlate with better returns from irrigation.
The World-Bank/OED review suggested also that maintenance might be improved if divorced from system operation; such an arrangement might facilitate, as in China and perhaps elsewhere, procedures whereby the user group employs full-time maintenance staff. It might facilitate also procedures whereby pro-poor programmes, such as the Japan Fund for Poverty Reduction and the Japan Social Development Fund and the Popular Coalition to Eradicate Hunger and Poverty, could finance irrigation-system maintenance as a worthy medium-term food-for-work programme. There is thus reasonable expectation that the ongoing expansions of rural education and training, together with some external support, may by Year 2015 enable a larger proportion of user-managed systems, whether then modernized or not, to be effectively and profitably operated and maintained.
Overall, improvement in the effectiveness of irrigation-water use shall depend critically on the formulation and implementation of appropriate and country-specific strategies and policies, variously targeting the near term (2002-2005), the medium term (2006-2015), and the long term (2016-2030). The major issues for comprehensive water-policy reform were well presented in IFPRI (1995c), and are here adapted for rice-oriented river-diversion irrigation, with relevance perhaps for tubewell operators also.
An initial requirement is to formulate and regularize the rights and obligations of irrigation users - as individuals and/or as groups. Rights will include the right of access to water - possibly in combination with tenurial right to land and the right to influence the operations and maintenance of the irrigation system. There shall be obligation to contribute to that maintenance. There shall be a right to receive - and an obligation to accept - water from up-slope contiguous land. There is strong need also for reform of irrigation agencies, as a component of irrigation-system modernization, as urged by the World Bank (Plusquellec, in FAO 1999g).
Within individual irrigation systems, mechanisms to ensure equity among users at higher and at lower elevations are probably best set within realistic and equitable regimes of water pricing and of water markets and trading. Such mechanisms should be supported by the identification and abolition of unwarranted subsidies (ADB 2001c) and by a corresponding inception, as in India and perhaps elsewhere, of farmer-directed water-saving incentives. However, IFAD (2001) cautions that during the removal of subsidies, poor farmers shall be vulnerable, and that transitional arrangements shall be needed to protect them. Nonetheless, equitable water-pricing regimes might be expected to achieve unaided the objectives of increased effectiveness in water use, and to achieve simul-taneously a desirable expansion of the irrigation-system's service area. IFAD (2001) reports also that informal markets - for both ground-water and surface-water, and incorporating share-cropper arrangements - are functional in parts of South Asia.
ADB (2001a) advises, however, that the complexities of measuring and regulating the volumes of water delivered to individual farms and the considerations of water re-use shall constrain or delay the widespread adoption of water pricing and water markets. Similarly, there shall be need for external assistance to provide training and start-up resources to the irrigation users to equip them to initiate and operate water-pricing mechanisms, and a corresponding need to implement and to finance procedures of regulation and of monitoring. USAID and ADB, in partnership, already have experience of providing such assistance (FAO 1997a: Molden and Makin). However, it shall be expected (FAO 1997a: Facon) that adoption of the required reforms and mechanisms shall encounter opposition from various interest groups.
[To assist and guide these various types of operational, constructional, and policy initiatives, FAO (2000a) has a regular-programme entity for Agricultural Water-Use Efficiency and Conservation - incorporating a strong Asia-Pacific component, and with a strong commitment to the modernization of irrigation. Additionally, FAO is one of the co-sponsoring agencies for the international network on Information Techniques for Irrigation Systems (ITIS) and for the International Programme for Technology and Research in Irrigation and Drainage (IPTRID).
For the aspects of policy and of assistance to irrigation-user groups and of performance monitoring, there is perhaps a near-term opportunity for FAO and other partners to mobilize external resources to assist democratic governments to initiate controversial policies - for which the costs of interventions now are likely to be much less than the costs of remedies in Year 2015 and thereafter.
For the near and medium term, FAO and partners can also help obtain resources and initiate and strengthen programmes to disseminate available technologies to improve on-farm water-use efficiency for rice and post-rice crops. Such programmes could include pilot-project programmes, and water-management inter-ventions within the FAO-assisted Special Programme for Food Security. For the medium and longer term, support can similarly be provided to help formulate programmes of irrigation-system modernization and in evaluating options for major new facilities.]
Aspects of crop nutrition and soil health were introduced in chapter 3.4.4. The soils for submerged-land rice culture have an enviable record of 5 000 years of sustained usage. Only recently, in historic terms, and as a result of irrigation-facilitated rice-rice cropping, have previously-productive rice soils come under such pressures that some may have degraded - physically, chemically or micro-biologically.
However, soils of inherently low fertility have in recent decades been brought under rice cultivation - whether for non-submerged (upland) or for submerged-soil (lowland - including floodprone and swampland) rice. Understandably, these soil-constrained ricelands, which receive minimal purchased inputs, have low productivity and high potential to degrade further, and the farm families that depend on them are consequently poor and often undernourished.
Ameliorative (SARM) measures are known for some though not all of these pressures and constraints. Additionally, increase during the coming decades in rural off-farm employment, and in production from the more-robust lands (possibly through the deployment of appropriately-sanctioned genetically-modified cultivars) may lessen the requirement to cultivate the most fragile of these constrained lands - as happened in the industrialized countries.
Furthermore, for all rice-system crops - whether lowland or upland, constrained or non-constrained - environmental and economic considerations dictate that there must in future be an increase in fertilizer-use efficiency and a decrease in nutrient losses. Such fertilizer-use efficiency is usually monitored - whether during one season (for nitrogen) or averaged over several seasons (for phosphorus, potassium, sulphur, zinc) - as the proportion of applied nutrient that is retained by the crop, or by the ratio of mass (kg) of produce to the mass (kg) of applied nutrient.
Additionally, multi-season comparisons for individual fertilizer elements of the off-takes (net of retained residues) with the inputs (from all sources, including fertilizers) can quantify the trends in soil-nutrient status. For potassium, in particular, there is evidence (Dobermann et al 1996a) of rapid depletion in intensive rice systems, and corresponding evidence of economic benefit of appropriately-applied potassium.
For micro-nutrients, there has since the onset (circa 1960) of the "Green Revolution" been a progressive development of micro-nutrient deficiencies in intensively cropped Asian soils. The progression and multiplicity of some of the more-important among these deficiencies (as portrayed in Box 2) has been: zinc; zinc and boron; zinc, boron, and iron and manga-nese; and currently zinc, boron, iron, manganese, and sulphur. Encouragingly, there is increasing national-scientist awareness of the growth-promoting roles of micro-nutrient elements, and of the procedures wherewith to measure their effects. There is correspondingly in the national extension services an increased laboratory capability - provided in part by World Bank, ADB, and various bilateral donors - for measurement of these elements.
Additionally, many "micro-nutrient cocktails" are now commercially available in many rice-production ecozones. Dobermann and Fairhurst (2000) provide - for rice - an excellent guide for the in-field recognition, prevention, and treatment for deficiencies, and in some instances for toxicities, of nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, zinc, sulphur, silicon, magnesium, calcium, iron, manganese, copper, and boron.
Throughout the Asian rice systems, and during four or more decades, vigorous programmes of strategic and applied research and extension - involving many national and international agencies, sponsors, networks, consortia, and projects - have explored the processes of submerged-soil chemistry and micro-biology, and have quantified fertilizer-use efficiency in agronomic and economic terms. They have thereby helped formulate well-founded recommendations for on-farm practices and government policies appropriate to these submerged-soil regimes - whether irrigated or non-irrigated.
[For the rainfed-rice systems of eastern India, IRRI-IFAD (2000) provides an account of "best-practice low-level" fertilizer recommendations that are realistic in relation to the resource endowments of farm families in this high-poverty region.]
In most rice-producing ecozones - whether poorly or less-poorly endowed - the fore-mentioned practices, policies, and farmer-support services are complemented by laboratories - several of them incorporating a micro-nutrient measuring capability, by personnel and by procedures for soil and plant-tissue analyses. Additionally, there are for many ecozones locally-appropriate correlations between the laboratory analyses and the expected crop responses at recommended fertilizer rates - particularly for phosphorus and potassium.
Initially, these research/extension programmes determined, usually for irrigated rice, the nutrient efficiency and yield response for individual mineral-nutrient formulations, for individual plant- and animal-derived materials and residues, and for biochemically-fixed nitrogen. They often determined also the influences on those responses of the method/timing of application, of plant-population density and geometry, and of rice cultivar - of which there is indeed an appreciable influence.
Subsequently, programmes of integrated plant nutrition management sought to identify and exploit, particularly for nitrogen, beneficial combinations of these various nutrient materials and management procedures and also of rice/nonrice-sequence inter-actions. Latterly, procedures of integrated crop management seek to assist farmers to combine the procedures of integrated plant nutrition management with those of integrated insect-pest management and with best practices of land, water, weed, and disease management. Increasingly, these programmes are addressing the more-complex issues of nutrient management for non-irrigated rice systems and sequences.
In most irrigated ricefields, the proportion of applied N (usually urea-N) that is taken up by the crop is less than 50 percent, notwithstanding that there are farmer-appropriate techniques whereby this proportion can be substantially increased. The unused portion of the applied urea-N enters the aquatic and atmospheric environments.
Similarly, it is noteworthy that animal-manure-N is prone to substantial leaching loss - particularly in East Asia. Relatedly, Steinfeld et al (1997, citing Bos and de Wit 1996) report that about one-half of the N excreted by poultry and pigs is lost prior to land application. More encouragingly, recent analysis (IRRI 2001b) of 1989-2000 northern-Philippines data sets suggests that rice-rice-sequence pollution, by fertilizers and pesticides, of domestic water supply is much less than previously feared and does not currently pose a human-health hazard.
|
Box 2: |
|
|
Epoch |
Micro-nutrients showing deficiency |
|
1960s |
zinc |
|
1970s |
zinc boron |
|
1980s |
zinc boron manganese |
|
1990s |
zinc boron manganese sulphur |
|
(The World Bank, ADB and bilateral donors have |
|
Nonetheless, it shall be prudent to be mindful of FAO's (2000d) forecast that during 2002 to 2030 the rates of nitrogen currently applied to rice crops are likely to increase substantially. Forecasts for vegetables - sometimes grown in association with rice on rice farms close to urban markets - suggest future applications of up to 1 000 kg N/ha.ann. The fore-mentioned IRRI (2001b) analyses indicate that large on-farm applications of fertilizer and pesticide to post-rice sweet pepper have resulted in domestic-water concentrations that exceed the WHO safe limits.
Moreover, for medium-production irrigated-rice enterprises, economic analyses indicate that the 1996-98 cost of purchase and application (to rice) of fertilizer nitrogen - the least costly and therefore most-used of fertilizer elements - was typically 15 to 20 percent of total production costs, and only 5 to 7 percent of produce value. These values suggest that there is little on-farm economic incentive towards efficiency.
However, international urea-N and ammonia-N prices, reflecting world oil price, increased by about 20 percent between January/March 2000 and November 2000/January 2001. Thus, although prices paid by farmers in South and South-East Asia are often governed by domestic policies and not by international supply/demand, a continuing and sustained increase in world oil price may eventually result in farm-level prices that encourage N-use efficiency. Additionally, there shall probably be medium-term pressures to impose environmental pricing on N-materials.
It would thus be prudent, on environmental concerns, to identify, develop, and popularize procedures of N-fertilization for rice systems that are both farmer-acceptable, utilizing incentives if necessary, and efficient, and - in the case particularly of deepwater rice - practical. Moreover, as indicated by IFDC (1999) and IRRI-IFAD (2000), for marginal ricelands and farm-families - the less-favourably rainfed and floodprone lands with low fertility and few suitable cultivars and limited access to credit for inputs - procedures will differ appreciably from those for the better-endowed ecozones and families.
However, it is for all systems well-recognized that N-supply should match rice-N-demand. More-over, such matching can be achieved, in irrigated and in favourably-rainfed ecozones, through traditional broadcasting of urea into the field water, or incorporation into temporarily-drained soil, when such broadcasting is guided by regular monitoring of plant-tiller number or of rice-leaf colour. Thus, IRRI (2001a) reports that 35 000 pieces of low-cost Leaf-Colour Card were distributed to Asian rice farmers during 1997-99. It is well known also that matching N-demand and supply, and consequent N-savings of 20-40 percent, can be accomplished by the use of controlled-release fertilizer-N (FAO 1999d, IRRI 2001a) or by the deep placement of briquettes (IFDC 1999) of fertilizer-N into the chemically-reduced soil layer.
However, because of the tedium involved, deep placement of briquettes is generally not accepted by irrigated-rice farmers - even in Indonesia, where suitable applicators were manufactured and distributed. But for resource-poor farmers in remote rainfed areas of Bangladesh, IFDC (1999) reports success using deep-placement technology in a programme involving easily-understood procedural guidelines and training, NGO collaboration, and production of briquettes (250 kg/hour, using machines costing $ 2 200) by local entrepreneurs.
For upland rice, fertilizer applications are usually minimal. Effective N-management is there best achieved through the "good-land-husbandry" procedures of sustainable agricultural resource management (SARM) which feature N-fixing legumes in agroforestry systems. IRRI-IFAD (2000) reports that rice and pigeonpea - whether in sequence or inter-cropped - constitute an effective combination in parts of eastern India.
For better-endowed ecozones and extension services, IRRI (2001a) makes available by Internet an on-farm decision-support system for rice; this system includes land, water, and pest management in addition to nutrients management. Similarly, for "mixed" crop-livestock systems, LEAD (1999) provides an internet-accessed "decision-support toolbox" wherewith to achieve environment-friendly management of livestock wastes. For rice-nutrition only, a palm-held-computer decision-support tool is in field use by agricultural extensionists in Thailand; and Dobermann and Fairhurst (2000) provide a decision tree wherewith farmers and extensionists can diagnose nutrient limitations from within-field measurements of yields achieved with and without individual fertilizer elements. For on-farm in-situ measurement of soil-nutrient concentrations, Dobermann et al (1994, 1996c, 1997) describe the use of resin capsules within procedures of site-specific nutrient management.
Precise quantification is needed for the N-uptake efficiency, for irrigated and favourably-rainfed rice, of the various component technologies that give promise of high N-efficiency. Such quantification is needed for major ecozones and for a range of application rates and for farmer-preferred rice cultivars and for both transplanting and direct-seeding systems.
Pertinent component technologies include the various categories of mineral N-fertilizers (possibly including polymer-coated controlled-release urea-N fertilizers), admixtures of mineral N-fertilizers with biologically-derived N-materials (especially poultry manure), leaf-colour-guided and tiller-number-guided N-application timings, foliar-applied growth regulators and possibly soil conditioners, and novel plant-population-density/geometry arrangements that can ensure sufficient rice grains at harvest to receive such amount of nitrogen as will generate a site/season-appropriate yield.
Vitally - there must be assessment also of the efficiency, and prospective N-application decreases, that would result from the combination of two or more of the more-efficient among the afore-listed individual N-technology components. Methodology to achieve the required high-precision assessments has been developed and validated for irrigated-rice systems in three rice-growing countries (FAO 1999d). This methodology includes field designs and computer softwares to undertake the required N-efficiency Mitscherlich-Model calculations both for agronomic and economic aspects. It is suitable, with appropriate training, for adoption by national extension services.
Additionally, FAO (1999d) has assisted Indonesian rice extensionists to design and validate a precise, impartial, and commercially-acceptable on-station methodology for evaluation and if appropriate, approval for commercial release, of fertilizer and/or growth-regulator products. The methodology can accommodate in any one season up to sixteen products/blends/compounds that have been developed/imported by manufacturers and distributors. Findings from these proposed quantifi-cations and evaluations shall be valid both for irrigated and for favourably-rainfed rice. For these lowland systems, the high precision in the proposed quantifications and evaluations is needed to ensure the validity and credibility of recommendations - both for the farmers, and also for the commercial-fertilizer interests, whose confidence and partnership shall be needed in any large-scale implementation programmes. For the farmers, credibility requires also that there shall be functional and trusted procedures of fertilizer-quality regulation.
For post-rice non-rice crops, in all rice-system water regimes, fertilizer recommendations and practices may expect to derive from the world literature on the fertilization of crops grown on non-submerged soils.
[As with irrigation management, so with plant-nutrition and fertilizer management, FAO has expertise and mandate to assist member governments and their farmers and fertilizer cooperatives to obtain resources and to initiate near and medium-term programmes, including pilot-project programmes and training, to evaluate and disseminate available technologies to improve on-farm fertilizer-use efficiency for rice and post-rice crops. FAO has a regular programme for Integrated Plant Nutrition Systems (IPNS), and co-ordinates a long-established network to improve the management of constrained (problem) soils. Plant-nutrients management expectedly features within the FAO-facilitated Special Programme for Food Security and within the FAO (2000a) Medium-Term-Plan Priority Areas for Inter-disciplinary Actions.]
For rainfed and for irrigated crop systems, the long-established methodology of yield-gap analysis constitutes a proven mechanism wherewith extensionists can help farmers identify and perhaps remedy constraints to the production of rice and of non-rice crops. Correspondingly, there are procedures of productivity-gap analysis (Steinfeld et al 1997) wherewith to diagnose constraints to livestock production.
The field-crop yield gap is generally defined (FAO 2000c 2001f, quoting De Datta 1981 and other sources) in terms of two components that together quantify the difference between a representative (usually average) on-farm crop yield and the "potential yield". The potential yield is usually measured in research/extension trials using the most locally-suitable cultivar at optimal plant population and crop-establishment date and using maximal (uneconomic) levels of inputs.
However, the physical conditions of cloudiness, temperature, growing-season duration, rainfall/irrigation sufficiency, and soil (possibly constrained) may differ as between the "average" farm and the research/extension site. Moreover, efficient farmers apply cost-effective, and not maximal, levels of agro-chemicals and other inputs. There is thus a realistic attainable yield that efficient farmers can expect to achieve.
The difference between this attainable yield and the potential yield constitutes the first of the two yield-gap components. It cannot be lessened by supportive on-farm interventions. Any increase in attainable on-farm yield must depend on increase in yield potential.
The second component of the yield gap - the difference between the representative on-farm yield and the realistically attainable yield - is however amenable to remedial interventions. This component quantifies the yield-constraining effects of institutional factors and of various biological and socio-economic factors - including sub-optimal crop- and resource-management.
For irrigated and for rainfed (including upland) rice, these factors include (FAO 2000c: Siddiq, Duwayri et al, Papademetriou, and other contributors, FAO 2001f): low-vigour and infected seeds and insufficiency of seeds of recommended cultivars; sub-optimal plant population and pre-harvest lodging; unbalanced and insufficient application of plant nutrients and persistence of correctable soil toxicities and micro-nutrient deficiencies; weeds, pest insects, diseases (viral, fungal, bacterial), molluscs, and rodents; lack of mechanization, and of peak-period labour, and of draft and water-pump power; delayed access to agronomic and financial inputs; and uncertainties of prices, markets, and rates-of-return.
Additionally, yield gaps may persist because of farmers' lack of technical knowledge, and in some countries because of insufficient institutional supports to yield-gap-directed interventions. These supports include the ecozone characterizations necessary for recognizing the opportunities to combat the yield gaps. Correspondingly, sub-optimal but remediable post-harvest operations contribute to a profit gap that impacts adversely on farm-family and community livelihoods.
The physical constraints of soil, rainfall, cloudiness, temperature, and growing-season duration generally cause greater loss of production (whether of rice or of non-rice crops) than do the biological constraints of seed quality and weeds, insects, pathogens, and other pests. Thus, as is cogently reasoned by Singh (1997), yield-gap analysis should be conducted for individual ecozones, rather than for whole countries. Correspondingly for socio-economic features, the major production determinants of land, water, labour, and working capital, and the aspects of inputs' costs and supply system and of outputs' prices and markets, and of risk and rates-of-return, shall vary within countries to such extent as to require ecozone-level analyses.
The prospective power of well-conceived and well-planned programmes of yield-gap analysis/intervention is illustrated (FAO 2000c: Lacy et al, Duwayri et al) by the Australian "Rice-Check Package" (and of its predecessor "Wheat-Check Package") and by the corresponding and evolving rice-production packages of China ("Seven Techniques" and successors), Indonesia ("Insus" and successors), the Philippines ("Masagana-99" and successors), and others.
Both the farmer-participatory "Rice-Check Package" (a "Ten Ton per Hectare Blueprint", Lacy 1998) and the "Seven Techniques Package" present guidelines for land preparation, optimal sowing date with appropriate cultivar, high plant-population density, weed control, water management, and (in the Australian package) leaf-N-guided nitrogen management. The "Seven Techniques Package" contributed to four decades' of impressive rice-yield increases in China. For the "Wheat-Check Package", FAO (2000d) reports that between 1985/89 and 1995/99 this package helped increase farmers' average yield by about 23 percent - from 6.8 to 8.4 t/ha.
Each of these packages emphasizes that because it is not possible to predict which yield constraints shall occur in any particular crop season, all components of the package must be rigorously adopted. All these packages, and a similarly successful rice-directed Egyptian package, emphasize the necessity for intensive training, large-scale demonstration, and institutional support.
The "Rice-Check Package" (Lacy 1998) has the farmer-directed dictum: Observe, Measure, Record, Interpret, Act. The outputs from adherence to this dictum provide a crucial input to the farmers' participatory but extensionist-guided regular discussions, monitorings, and evaluations of their rice management and its achievements. An adaptation of the Rice-Check/Seven-Techniques "package" procedure is included among the candidate interventions, for both irrigated and non-irrigated rice systems, in Section 5 of this document.
Such a procedure could contribute strongly to the "Farming-Systems Intensification" component of the four-component Special Programme for Food Security (SPFS). Moreover, and in consonance with the ideas formulated in this sub-section, the conduct/interpretation of yield-gap/constraints analyses is the first of those four SPFS components.
Furthermore, location-specific adaptive-research investigations (such as those previewed in chapter 4.3.4) could and should be associated with the evaluation/strengthening of the "package" procedure that is expected to be undertaken within FAO's SPFS-supportive Priority-Area Inter-disciplinary Actions (PAIAs).
Crucially, the PAIAs are expected also to contribute strongly to the fourth SPFS component: "The Vertical and Horizontal Diversification of Agricultural Production". In which context, it is pertinent (IFAD 2001) that diversification and intensification are complementary procedures wherewith to increase farm income and entitlements; and pertinent also (Dixon et al 2001) that intensification can facilitate diversification. However, these procedures can succeed in raising smallholder incomes only if there is access to the necessary assets and markets.
That there is indeed potential for Asian rice-system farmers to derive substantial gain from yield-constraints analysis is manifest in the statistics (FAO 2000d) that for both rice and wheat the top-decile yields are about five times larger than the lowest-decile yields. Notwithstanding that those data were aggregated at national rather than ecozone level, there is nonetheless some likelihood that within ecozones a vigorous programme of yield-gap-driven interventions would help raise the lowest yields, which are probably the yields of the poorest farm families.
Moreover, in relation to food production and security, FAO (2000d) indicates that at 1995/97, and prospectively at 2030, and for both rice and wheat, the yields from the large-scale producers are only one-half of the all-farms top-decile yields. There is corresponding implication that yield-gap analysis may help identify opportunities to raise these large-scale-producer yields.
Thus, for irrigated rice, which occupies rather less than three-fifths of the Asian-total rice area (Table 5), Asian-average on-farm yield is now about 5 t/ha - though notably above-average in North-East Asia, and substantially below-average in some South and South-East Asian countries. The advent (by Year 2005) of rice cultivars with appreciably increased yield potential could expect to raise this average to 6 t/ha.
Ecozone-specific yield-gap-driven interventions during 2002-2005 could by 2010 help increase this average somewhat further. Interventions might be particularly successful in those countries (Cambodia, Laos, India, Philippines, Sri Lanka) where current-average irrigated-rice yield is less than 4 t/ha. Relatedly, Siddiq (2000 Table 10) indicates that among twenty Indian rice-producing states, the state-mean on-farm yield was on average only one-half of the corresponding experimental-trial yield, with the proportion ranging from as little as one-fourth to as high as four-fifths.
The irrigated-rice-yield losses result predominantly from water and soil constraints (IRRI 1997), for which technical and cost-effective solutions are available - provided that correct diagnoses are made. Thus, chapter 4.2.4 indicates some of the soil-constraint-amelioration options. Siddiq (in FAO 2000c) reports also that India's 1980s irrigated-area yield-gap analyses elicited worthy and effective institutional responses. Moreover, comparison of results from the Indian yield-gap surveys of 1987 and 1997 indicates that though improved cultivars raised yield potentials during that 10-year interval, yield gaps were essentially unchanged - indicating the validity and benefits of the yield-gap methodology.
Concerns for the rainfed (non-irrigated) rice systems were expressed earlier in this document. For these rice systems, the yield-gap methodology is a particularly useful component in the identification of appropriate crop- and resource-management options. Correspondingly, for any rainfed-rice ecozone a preparatory and detailed and community-participatory analysis of the biophysical and socio-economic features is pre-requisite. These analyses determine the growing-season ("stable-rainfall-period" and its onset date) and soil-suitability constraints and opportunities and the prospective profitability for candidate cropping systems and sequences. The analyses help, similarly, to specify the management options and the characteristics required for the cultivars of the proposed component crops - and thus may identify needs for cultivar development to match those characteristics.
In this context, and despite the encouraging feature that modern cultivars are being adopted in some rainfed ecozones, there are many other rainfed ecozones - notably the deepwater and the upland - for which only traditional, low-yielding, though sometimes high-quality varieties are available. Some of these traditional varieties indeed have such strong consumer appeal that support to farmer-participatory selection and breeding to increase yield potential while retaining the consumer-preferred traits may constitute (ADB 2001b) a cost-effective pro-poor investment. As IFAD (2001) emphsizes, farmer-participatory breeding is a worthy complement to formal research.
For the more-favourable rainfed-lowland ecozones, which comprise one-fourth of the Asian rice area, and are home to many poor people, current Asian-average rice yield is about 2.5 t/ha. Improved cultivars and well-directed interventions during 2002-2005 might realistically be expected to raise rice yield in these ecozones to 4 t/ha by 2010. Dominant constraints to rainfed-lowland-rice production result from diseases and pest insects, from shortness of rice-sequence growing season, from shortage or/and excess of water, and from soil toxicities and deficiencies.
The development of the required locally appropriate cultivars - for a wide diversity of ecozones - may expect to be accelerated by the identification of "dominant environments" that characterize substantial areas ("targets") of rainfed-lowland rice. For ten such "dominant environments", a reference cultivar has been selected, and internationally distributed, to facilitate the quantification of genotype x environment interaction, and hence to simplify the (local) breeding targets. Additionally, preliminary hybrid-rice materials are currently being evaluated (IRRI 2001b) in rainfed-lowland India, Philippines and Thailand.
The rainfed upland and the rainfed flood-prone/swampland ecozones each occupy about one-tenth of the Asian rice area. On these marginal and often remote lands, a large proportion of the populace is poor, undernourished, and lacking of infrastructural and social amenities. Rice yields in these ecozones are respectively about 1.3 and 1.6 t/ha. In the flood-prone systems, water excess and shortage - and the difficulty of applying nutrients - are the over-riding constraints. In the uplands, rice yields are limited by soil-chemical constraints - exacerbated by erosion of surface soil, by drought, and by fungal (blast) disease, and weeds.
Rice-cultivar improvement perhaps offers the strongest option for achieving yield increases in the flood-prone and in the upland systems - including some prospective impact (by 2020) in the uplands from perennial rice, aerobic rice, and from C4-photosynthesis rice. The Asian Development Bank (ADB 2001a, 2001b) affirms its priority support for the development of cultivars for the less-favoured areas. For the uplands, agroforestry systems - alley-cropped, with shrub-legumes and/or with vetiver and other grasses - and other components of sustainable agricultural resource management (SARM) and of Integrated Land-Management Technology (ILMT) can facilitate soil stabilization, rainfall retention, nutrient recycling, and hence increased and sustainable yields.
However, in all three of the rainfed ecozone-types, production of rice and of non-rice crops is limited additionally by the economic risk associated with the unpredictability of the various biotic and abiotic constraints and stresses. In this latter context, FAO (1999b) emphasizes that in any SARM-type interventions the costs to be incurred by the participant farm families must be commensurate (allowing an appropriate "risk factor") with the prospective benefits; and those benefits must accrue to the implementing farm families, and not to off-site communities. Similarly, to encourage ILMT-type interventions, IFAD (2001) suggests that incentives may be needed - provided that the social benefits are substantial in relation to the costs. Dixon et al (2001) suggest that restoration of degraded uplands could be financed through food-for-work programmes.
For all ecozones, the aspect of rice-seed quality and vigour merits specific mention. For various countries, various sources (e.g. FAO 2000c, IRRI 2001b) indicate that the use of quality seed confers a yield advantage of some 9 - 15 percent; or inversely, that non-use of quality seed incurs a yield gap of 9 - 15 percent. Additionally - and importantly - quality seed also results in harvested grain of higher quality commanding a higher price. Nonetheless, only one-fifth of Asia's riceland receives high-quality seed - whether for lack of supply - perhaps a result in some ecozones (IRRI 2001b) of labour shortage - or for lack of demand.
Seed management is often the preserve of the female farm-family members. Seed-management training and micro-finance support to such farm-family members may thus constitute a highly cost-effective intervention. Such support might best be implemented in non-labour-constrained ecozones, and perhaps in partnership with NGOs, agro-supplies retailers, academia, and the local seed authorities. Previous FAO-assisted projects, such as TCTTI, provide models for such support.
In the non-irrigated ricelands, indigenous seed-management skills help maintain the biodiversity that is represented by the less-widely-grown rice cultivars. Thus in the rainfed parts of the Indo-Gangetic Plains, two-to-five, and sometimes as many as ten, different rice varieties - traditional and modern - may be grown within an individual farm (IRRI-IFAD 2000, quoting Kshirsagar et al, 1997). Procedures might be found, perhaps in association with the FAO programme entity "Alternative crops and cultivars" - wherewith to reward financially this endeavour in management of biodiversity and of its constituent seeds.
Globally, during 2002-2030, agricultural environments shall experience increasing pressures as a consequence of the needs for increased productions of crops and livestock. However, these pressures shall almost certainly be countered by the advent of improved technologies and procedures. Correspondingly, the pressures on agricultural-system biodiversity and habitats are forecast to increase less strongly than in the past. Conversely, global agriculture shall itself impose increasing demands and pressures on the global environment - particularly the atmospheric environment.
For the Asian ricelands, the current status and trends in natural-resource endowments were introduced earlier. This present section considers the strategic implications (during 2002-2030) of those trends. It considers also the impacts - both by and on Asian rice-systems' agriculture and their natural resources - of the forecast changes in global and in Asian climates. Prominent among these strategic considerations are those of nitrogen emissions (nitrous oxide and ammonia) and of carbon emissions (methane and carbon dioxide), sea-level rise, changes in patterns of precipitation and temperature, the geographic separation of zones of arable and of intensive livestock farming, and the opportunities for carbon sequestration.
For the gaseous emissions, FAO (2000d) suggests that agriculture (globally) might responsibly focus on lessening nitrogen emissions - which are forecast to impact more adversely on global climate than are the carbon emissions. Chapter 1.3.3 indicated that from global agriculture, including riceland agriculture and its livestock, ammonia emissions, which cause acid rain, are expected to double during 2002-2030. Moreover, the expected separation of intensive peri-urban livestock enterprises from the rural crops-based farming systems is likely to lessen the options for disposal of animal excreta to arable land, including rice-system land. There shall thus be need for policies, monitoring, and regulations enforcement to ensure that these excreta do not pollute the local ground and surface waters nor the global atmosphere. These needs are addressed in the fore-mentioned livestock-environment "toolbox" (LEAD 1999); they shall be particularly important in those peri-urban areas that experience large increases in populations of poultry, pigs, and cattle.
Nitrous-oxide emissions are forecast to increase x 1.5 during 2002-2030 - though the increase in rice-crop emission shall expect to be much less than x 1.5 in consequence of the forecast stabilization of riceland area and the expected development and adoption (prospectively with FAO assistance) of environment-friendly procedures of N-fertilizer management. Such procedures would expect to lessen also the release to the atmosphere of ammonia when urea fertilizer is broadcast into rice-field-submergence water.
Methane emissions from global agriculture are forecast (FAO 2000c) to double during 2002-2030. Livestock shall be the main contributor: there shall be consequent need for the management procedures presented in the LEAD "toolbox". Rice-crop methane emissions are forecast to increase much less seriously - in consequence of the development and deployment of rice cultivars that internally transmit to the atmosphere lesser quantities of soil-generated methane, and in consequence also of the adoption of more-appropriate ricefield water management.
Mean sea level is forecast to rise by about 0.2 m by Year 2030. The many coastal low-elevation ricelands would thereby suffer loss of production because of increases in soil salinity and perhaps in flooding. If by 2030 there are changes also, at low elevation, in river flows and aquifer recharges, the availability and quality of irrigation water for the coastal ricelands would be affected adversely. Moreover, low-elevation hinterland ricefields - as well as coastal ricefields - will expect to be at increased risk from typhoons and cyclones. For all elevations at mid-latitudes (including South Asia), precipitation is expected to decrease - with adverse effect for rainfed-rice systems (lowland and upland) and for aquifer recharge and hence for riceland irrigation.
Effects of increased global temperature are not expected to impact strongly on rice production. There may for all rice areas be some decrease in yield because of increased respiration, but that shall probably be compensated by increase in photo-synthesis resulting from increases both in atmospheric temperature and in carbon-dioxide concentration. In sub-tropical ecozones, there may be some increase in fungal and viral disease and insect-pest cool-season carry-over. However, for the sub-tropical Indo-Gangetic Plains, temperature increase is likely to bring adverse consequence (Singh 2001b) for post-rice wheat production. For sub-tropical rice-livestock enterprises, costs of animal housing may be lessened. For tropical-zone livestock in areas with decreased precipitation there may be increased heat stress and lessened production. The plant and animal biodiversity of ricelands is already much determined by human activity, and is consequently unlikely to be much affected by climate change, though there may be small effects on micro-organisms active in nutrient transformations, and on pollinators of rice-system crops.
FAO (2000d) suggests that technologies already exist wherewith to address most problems of pollution that do or will emanate from intensification of rice systems and from progressive global climate change. Moreover, the average effects of climate change (by Year 2030) shall be much less than the effects of economic and technical change. However, the tropical and sub-tropical eco-systems, and the poor communities dependent upon them - and who contribute least to global warming, shall be at personal and economic risk from increased frequency and severity of extreme events.
Ensuring that the ricelands do deploy environment-friendly and food-productive procedures shall require substantial efforts and resources from various national and international stakeholders. There shall be need for appropriate policies with attendant regulations and enforcement thereof. Notably, for many rice-growing countries there is need (UK/DFID 2000, ADB 2001a, IFAD 2001, World Bank 2001a, Dixon et al 2001, LEAD 1999) to identify and phase out those subsidies that encourage and reward environmental degradation and resource misuse.
Prominent among those environment-damaging subsidies (FAO 2001a; IFPRI 1999b, Singh 2001b) are those for fertilizer, water, electricity, credit, and livestock-feed concentrates. However, FAO 1999c and this document caution that small quantities of feed supplements and concentrates shall be necessary to raise productivity of smallholder livestock. IFPRI argues that the misguided subsidies should be redirected to promote organizational transparency and accountability and collaboration among public, private, and civil sectors of society.
Correspondingly, there is for some countries a continuing need to assist governments to review, and if appropriate repeal, anti-smallholder and anti-agriculture policies, and to initiate pro-rural and pro-smallholder policies that reward sustainable natural-resource management. Such pro-smallholder policies would expect to ensure equitable access to the resources of land, water, and common properties: the latter especially important to poor families as a source of fuel and fodder. ADB (2001c) and World Bank (2001a) emphasize the importance of good governance in addressing these several policy issues; ADB suggests also that the ADB-initiated sub-regional growth triangles could here assume an influential role.
Technologically, and predominantly in relation to irrigated systems, this document indicates that for rice-phase management there are environment-friendly and cost-effective procedures for water, fertilizer and pest management. For irrigated post-rice crops, CIMMYT (2000a) reports that no-till establishment of post-rice wheat can save 1000 m3 water/ha.crop, and by the lessening of tractor-fuel use and the avoidance of crop-residue burning can decrease by 13 t/ha.ann the release of carbon dioxide (CO2) to the atmosphere. Generally, populations of soil arthropods may increase where minimum-tillage practices are adopted. CIMMYT reports also that its prototype bed-system post-rice-wheat seeder lessens the wheat's requirements for water, nitrogen and pesticides. Each of these post-rice innovations is cost-effective.
Chapter 4.5.1 indicated that lessening agriculture's N-emissions should have higher priority than lessening C-emissions. Nonetheless, agricultural sequestration of carbon, whether in soil or in standing crops, is a viable (Agenda 21 and Kyoto Protocol) procedure wherewith to counter CO2-enhanced global warming. It is a procedure that can be adopted by rice-system farmers. Moreover, such adoption and the attendant financial compensation may be particularly attractive to farmers operating on constrained or degraded lands. These lands might include those affected by salinity - whether existing or induced by sea-level rise; such lands could sequester carbon in their soils at a rate of 0.3 t/ha.ann.
The degraded lands could include also the fragile upland ricelands, where appropriate carbon-sequestering crop/livestock systems could additionally help arrest soil and nutrient erosion - provided that land-rights issues are addressed (Dixon et al 2001). The industrialized-countries' procedures of deliberate and financially compensated "permanent land set-aside" might be adaptable for some of these fragile uplands - including their community-managed forest areas, and for areas for which alternatives to shifting cultivation are being sought (ADB via Dixon et al 2001 Box 6.8). Carbon sequestration in soil organic matter, which for post-rice crops can be facilitated by various procedures of conservation tillage, brings additionally the agronomic benefit of increased water-holding capacity and phosphorus availability - particularly important for upland soils.
It is thus pertinent that the carbon content of the annual global production of non-harvested crop residues (stalks, stubbles, roots) which could be incorporated into soil, and thereby insulated against oxidation to CO2, represents about 2.5 Bt (billion ton) carbon/ann in 1995/97, with forecast to increase to about 4.5 Bt carbon/ann by 2030. Ranges (derived via FAO 2000d, quoting various sources) for the estimates and forecasts for the amounts actually or forecast to be sequestered globally are 0.7 to 1.2 Bt C/ann at 1995/97 and 1.2 to 2.2 Bt C/ann at 2030. Corresponding ranges for East Asia are 0.2 to 0.4 Bt C/ann at 1995/97 and 0.3 to 0.6 Bt C/ann at 2030, and for South Asia 0.1 to 0.2 Bt C/ann at 1995/97 and 0.2 to 0.4 Bt C/ann at 2030. Appropriate policies, programmes, and incentives could almost certainly ensure that the totals of carbon sequestered at 2030 are close to - if not above - the upper values in these ranges.
Relatedly - though not a carbon-sequestering procedure - the large-scale co-ordinated growing of Miscanthus sp. or of Pennisetum purpureum (Napier or Elephant grass) as high-thermal-efficiency bio-fuel crops requiring few purchased inputs may also be an attractive proposition for rice-system farmers in appropriate ecozones. These species are of tropical and sub-tropical Asian origin. They cannot tolerate water-logging, but they can tolerate drought. Napier grass is already used in Asia as a cut-and-carry livestock feed. It has potential (Tucker and Johnson, 2001) as a biodegradable mouldable material for automobile and other applications. Cultivars of Miscanthus are, in trials in semi-temperate ecozones, N-responsive and highly productive of biomass. They emit little nitrous oxide and provide ecological-niche habitats for mammals and birds. They can be established by labour-generating planting of tissue-culture-derived vegetative materials.
Importantly, there already exist successful prototypes, expected to be operational by 2015, for medium-scale electrical-power generators that use these grasses (and possibly others, such as sweet sorghum) as their renewable bio-fuel. Such generators could be compatible with strategies - as in ADB 2000a, and possibly in the pro-poor objectives of the Japan Fund for Poverty Reduction - for innovative generation of renewable rural energy. Such energy generation could be perceived within an Agenda-21/Kyoto-Protocol scenario - perhaps particularly for rice-growing countries that are not petroleum producers.
[It is perhaps pertinent to observe here that the European Union has a pioneering network of research and development for crops for industry and energy - in which Miscanthus and other tropical-origin grasses are featured. Arrangements might be made to avail of that network's expertise and experience - and perhaps of a World Bank "Learning and Innovation Loan" - to evaluate the potential of these (and of other) quick-growing grasses as prospective electricity-generating bio-fuels - and perhaps within a women-oriented pilot project in partnership with NGOs and academia. There are also coordinated bio-fuel-grass programmes in North America, and possibly in Japan.]
Many of this document's paragraphs have relevance and implication for the socio-economics and for the wellbeing of rural households and for the several agricultural policies that affect rural communities. This present section correspondingly highlights, from among those preceding items, various economic, policy, and social features that impact strongly on those rural households and their livelihoods - and on their legitimate aspirations to improve those livelihoods.
Interventions through which FAO and partner agencies could assist member governments to improve the livelihood and wellbeing of rural rice-based communities would expect to be integrative - of technological, infrastructural, and socio-economic components - as urged by various stakeholders (UK/DFID 2000; FAO 2000g 2001a, IFAD 2001, World Bank 2001a, b), and as conceived within the FAO-facilitated Special Programme for Food Security.
Interventions would be guided also by the various and well-documented "codes of best practice" - such as the IRRI-IFAD-ICAR-IIRR (2000) "Sourcebook of Best Practices and Strategies" (for rainfed rice systems) and the "Rice-Check Methodology" (for irrigated and for favourably-rainfed rice systems). These codes variously and appropriately emphasize the needs for participatory appraisal, planning, and action - whether of research, development, extension, implementation, or evaluation. They emphasize also the need for maximal adoption of indigenous and locally-relevant knowledge, experience, and technology.
Among socio-economic concerns, those of reliable access to micro-finance facilities, and of endowments and associated services, are especially important to rural households. Micro-credit and micro-savings are important particularly for "smoothing" of income and consumption; important also - through their insurance aspect - for lessening household vulnerability to illness, emergencies, catastrophes, and income interruption (IFAD 2001, IFPRI 2001). Micro-finance serves also (ADB 2000a) to build the confidence to save, to borrow, and to invest - and is thereby important in the longer term, and in some circumstances, for family investment in human capital via children's education. However, IFAD (2001) advises that poor clients use micro-finance services primarily as a source for several small, emergency loans, rather than for a single, large, investment loan.
Within the Asian rice-based food-and-livelihood support systems, and indeed within other farming systems, the availability of micro-finance is often a crucial pre-condition for the adoption of new technologies. Such micro-finance, whether from savings or credit, may sometimes be provided from within the family or extended family. With such finance, from whatever source, farmers on even the smallest holdings are not averse to new-technology adoption - as is quantified by the all-India analyses described in chapter 1.4.2. Micro-finance services are thus well recognized as a valuable support to smallholder agricultural production, and perhaps to the lessening of farm-family hunger.
However, IFAD (2001) strongly cautions that the extent to which micro-finance lessens long-term poverty is uncertain. It suggests that micro-finance is perhaps most effective in alleviating short-term transitory poverty, and more likely to be effective in lessening long-term poverty when used as an adjunct to other poverty-alleviating measures.
Relatedly, ADB (2000a Appendix 2) estimates that 95 percent of poor Asian families - rural and urban - are unable to access institutional financial services and credit. More generally, IFAD (2001, quoting Hulme 2000) states: "many micro-finance institutions virtually never work with the poorest... and many have high proportions of non-poor clients". This notwithstanding IFPRI's (2001) observation that poor people, and smallholder families, are willing and able to borrow at market rates. ADB (2000a 2001a) and IFAD (2001) similarly emphasize that procedures of subsidized credit are misguided, and that planned interventions should have sufficient profitability that they can effect full-costs recovery.
Singh and Houtman (2002) caution, however, that the poorest families need intensive training before they can access and benefit from the formal micro-finance system. The high costs of this training might appropriately be borne through donor assistance, rather than by the financial institutions. Similarly, ADB (2000a) notes that micro-finance understandably has higher transaction costs for unsecured small loans - though these costs can be lessened for loans to groups of persons. Correspondingly, Singh and Houtman (2002) note that because of their large numbers of small transactions, the micro-finance institutions need large-capacity data-management systems.
To poor rural people - and especially to the women and illiterate among them - the "long-term borrowing privilege" is a crucial endowment, particularly at times of emergencies. The ability of the informal credit sector to provide such long-term privilege, and to respond quickly and with minimal bureaucracy, is in part the reason that poor people may prefer the informal to the formal, project-constrained, shorter-term systems - notwithstanding that the latter may offer a wider range of options ("products"). Moreover, the informal systems do not require - and many formal systems do require - a regular attendance of clients at meetings; this feature is important for poor migrant-worker clients. Similarly, formal-system requirements for loan repayment through regular instalments can cause difficulty for poorer borrowers whose cash-flow may be highly irregular.
There is thus a recognized need (ADB 2000a 2001a, World Bank 2001a) to strengthen the capacity of such agencies as can provide micro-finance services that incorporate strongly the features that are required by the rural poor. Particularly, micro-finance components within short-term projects are more likely to provide long-term benefit if they operate through the existing micro-finance system rather than as a stand-alone finite-duration facility.
The informal sector, and also the formal sector through Grameen-Bank-type programmes, both recognize that for poor borrowers social collateral is a worthy and necessary substitute for the unavailable physical collateral. However, the informal localized rural-micro-credit sector is subject to high "risk covariance" in that a single event or situation (natural disaster, or crop failure) can result in a simultaneous repayment-default by many borrowers. The informal micro-credit suppliers therefore understandably practise judicious loan rationing. Borrowers correspondingly enhance their "credit worthiness" by availing of part, only, of their informal credit limit.
For those rural poor, including many landless poor, who have neither borrowing privilege nor credit worthiness, the formalized systems of safety nets, including food-for-work programmes - perhaps subsuming some irrigation-maintenance work, as reported (IFAD 2001) for Bangladesh and Maharashtra, India - provide a vital means of survival (FAO 1998b).
In providing assistance and credit to these very poor persons, the need to identify the target clientele is well recognized (FAO 1998b; IFPRI 2001). IFPRI thus has a procedure - involving 300 indicators - to quantify the means available to households to fulfil their basic needs; and UNDP compiles an internationally applicable "human-development index". FAO (1998b) commends procedures whereby the target clientele has incentive to avail of pro-poor benefits of assistance and credit, but non-target persons have no incentive to pre-empt those benefits; procedures of "self-selection" of bene-ficiaries can be successful. FAO (1998b) cautions also that well-targeted programmes may be "de-railed" by powerful local politicians. ADB (2001a Appendix 4) similarly advises that reforms to rural-finance-market policies are more-often blocked by political obstacles than by economic forces. These dangers may increase when administrations are decentralized.
An IFPRI (2001) global database records the numbers, locations, and sizes of rural micro-finance institutions, including NGO-operated institutions. These institutions have (at 1997) a global clientele of 54 M (million) members - the great majority of them in Asia - and administer US$ 18 B of outstanding loans, and US$ 13 B of savings. Micro-finance is indeed (Singh and Houtman 2002) an emerging industry - an industry that is largely the creation of the non-governmental and private sectors. About one-half of the operational micro-finance institutions have fewer than 2 500 members, but one-in-twelve have more than 100 000 members. IFPRI (2001) reports that - for logistic reasons - the institutions in Bangladesh, and perhaps elsewhere, tend to have a lesser concentration of branches, in relation to numbers of poor persons, in remote impoverished regions as compared to more-developed rural regions.
[FAO, with various partners, assists member governments and projects through training, advice, and tools for micro-finance - as through the FAO-GTZ MicroBanking software and the Partnership Programme on Capacity Building in Rural Finance.]
Other endowments that are most needed by riceland families - and particularly by the poor and landless families - include legally-assigned land - no matter how small, equitable access to irrigation (where available) and to potable drinking water and sanitation, and to agricultural-extension services, functional institutions, infrastructures, and markets (IFAD 2001, Dixon et al 2001), and viable opportunities, including necessary entry permits and appropriate skills training, for rural enterprises. Transparent systems of justice - and their enforcement - are pre-requisite; as also is good governance (ADB 2001c, World Bank 2001a). Similarly, education, health care, supported by food-quality-monitoring facilities, and other social services are endowments that require strengthening in rural areas if populations and communities are to be retained against the forces of rural-urban migration. Such services will bring benefit also of increased capability and competence to perform successfully in food-production and in associated rural enterprises, including enterprises sub-contracted by urban manufacturers.
Functional institutions - national, province/state, district, sub-district, and village - are essential for pro-poor rural development. In some rice-growing countries and ecozones, there is need to strengthen those national and those devolved institutional capacities that assist government, civil society and community-based organizations, and producers' associations/co-operatives, to participate collectively in the formulation and implementation of rural-development policies and programmes. In some countries, such strengthening shall need to include actions to improve the mechanisms/procedures wherewith powers and responsibilities become legally devolved from the national ministries/departments, and to familiarize the national and the regional/local agencies with the content and implication of those mechanisms.
Institutional strengthening is expressly needed to enable the poor to secure and to retain usage/ownership entitlements to individual-household land-based resources, and to properties operated in common, and to facilitate smallholder-organization capacity to manage such common properties. There shall be an associated need for programmes and resources to facilitate, both nationally and locally, efficient procedures of land registration and administration. For some land systems, including some irrigated ricelands, such procedures shall require to accommodate the various types of tenure and of rights - whether private property of individuals or of groups, open-access, common-property, state property held in trusteeship, or other.
Fortunately, much of the required institutional strengthening can draw on substantial bodies of instructional materials and educational toolkits on aspects such as devolution mechanisms, co-operatives organization and operation, and capacity building for poverty alleviation and for small-business planning and development. Ongoing efforts in capacity building for small-business planning would expect to benefit from maximal synergy with technical specialists in primary production and in value-adding technology - whether for crops, livestock, fish, or forest products. Institutional strengthening can draw also on the effective procedures of "success-case replication".
[FAO (2000a) has the expertise and mandate to contribute, within multi-sector integrated programmes and through its Rural Development Division (Rome and Bangkok), to much of this urgently-needed rural development.]
Similarly, pro-active skills and vocational training shall be a highly worthwhile endowment investment - preparing current and future farmers and farm-family women for the transformed rice-system agriculture of 2010-20 and 2020-30 (IFAD 2001, Dixon et al 2001, FAO 1999c). Skills shall be needed in managing the new types of rice plant, and in managing the non-rice crops, including oil crops and feed crops and perhaps bio-fuel crops, that are grown in sequence or in association with that rice. Skills shall be needed also in modern techniques - of husbandry, reproduction, health, and hygiene - for poultry- and ruminant-livestock management. And skills especially in managing the complexities of the integrated farm system - including financial and value-adding and marketing aspects.
However, among current rice-system farmers, few have formal education beyond primary level, and many have not even completed primary schooling. They nonetheless have indigenous knowledge of agricultural practices and economics. For these current farmers, appropriate training might best be provided through agricultural extension programmes, perhaps adopting the FAO model of Farmers' Field Schools, emphasizing "training of trainers" and "lead farmers". Such procedures have had notable success in training women farmers in seed collection and management. Similarly, the Rice-Wheat Consortium (2000b) reports excellent results (in Bangladesh) for a well-prepared and personal-invitation "whole-family training" on practical aspects of wheat management within rice-wheat-system farming. This particular training methodology may expect to provide to farm-family enterprises the enthusiasm and dynamism and new knowledge of the young, together with the wisdom and experience of their elders.
But different strategies shall be needed for the future farmers - who are already receiving benefit, not available to their forebears, of substantially more formal education. Some of these future farmers may wish to become specialists in a particular crop or livestock commodity. For all of them, development of community-level information-technology (inter-net) extension services and adaptation of the Field-School model could avail of the increased literacy and numeracy and computer competence provided by their expanded education. Such development and adaptation should assist the riceland farmers, and the associated entrepreneurs and next-generation extensionists and adaptive researchers (ADB 2001b) to acquire the agricultural and the entrepreneurial expertise that will equip them to share in the increases in national wealth that shall derive from the general expansion of Asian economies.
For today's rice-system farming, many excellent extension and training materials remain little-used by their intended practitioners because they are available in English-language only. However, for almost all rice-growing ecozones there are now computer-software packages wherewith these English-language materials can with relatively little effort and cost be translated into the local language. A vigorous and selective programme of translations, and perhaps of co-publication, would constitute a very cost-effective training intervention by FAO and partners and sponsors.
[FAO is the custodian and publicist for WAICENT - the World Agricultural Information Centre.]
Crucial for overall rural development - and for alleviation of rural hunger and poverty - is rural-women's development. Thus, IFPRI (2000a) analysis indicates that among five candidate determinants of child undernourishment, women's status and education explain far more (43%) of the undernourishment variance than do food availability (26%) or income per person or democracy or safe water. The mechanisms whereby women's status and education are postulated to lessen hunger and poverty are increases in standards of family care, in food management, and in woman-controlled family income. It is thus encouraging to publicize a report from Bangladesh (IFAD 2001) describing an NGO-facilitated programme wherein rural women successfully control water-yielding assets and receive the proceeds of water sales to farmers.
For poverty, specifically, ADB (2000a Box 1) stresses that "improving the political, legal, cultural, economic, and social status of women is pivotal to poverty eradication". Indeed, the poverty-alleviating success of the Grameen-Bank procedures has in part been mediated through the increase in the collective and individual self-respect and status of the female members. Nonetheless, in many rice ecozones, female heads of households, and female farm managers, still have lesser status and opportunities, and fewer legal rights (IFAD 2001 Box 3.8), than their male counterparts. Thus - and acknowledging the reality of rural-urban male migration - there is strong need to target support, including adult education, to those rural women who perforce operate as head both of the farm family and of the farm enterprise.
Addressing the overall developmental benefits of women's education, UK/DFID (2000) emphasizes that "education of girls is probably the single most effective investment in development that any country can make." Similarly, ADB (1998) stresses that "investment in the education of girls brings long-lasting returns to society". The international (Year-2000) undertaking of the Dakar Educational Framework for Action is expressly helpful: "No countries seriously committed to education for all will be thwarted in their achievement of that goal by lack of resources" - with the understanding that resources shall extend to such essential costs as books, uniform, and transport. Significantly for rural-poverty alleviation, IFAD (2001) reports that incremental education to females gives larger increases to household income than does incremental education to males.
It is similarly noteworthy to recall the UN system target (and the Manila-Declaration target) to eliminate gender disparity in primary and secondary education by Year 2005. However, and notwithstanding the encouraging trend in net primary school female enrolment, UK/DFID (2000, citing UNICEF) and ADB (2000a) caution that the statistical reality of actual non-attendance, as distinct from non-enrolment, is that in South Asia 26 percent of male children, but 38 percent of female children, fail to attend primary school. IFAD (2001 Table 2.6 quoting UNESCO) reports that this South-Asia male/female disparity in schooling and literacy is substantially higher in rural than in urban areas. Consequently, in South Asia, women's literacy rate is inferior to that of Sub-Saharan Africa. Rice-system technical assistance (to member governments) by FAO and partners must therefore be mindful of the vital need for women's education and development.
Fortunately, rice-system interventions do afford opportunities to educate, to train, and to empower rice-farm women. Indeed, women's economic contribution to Asian rice production is immense but generally unrecognized and unappreciated. Among those contributions, and in several rice-production systems, women have responsibility for specific and important components of the crop management and processing - perhaps undertaking four-fifths of the workload in transplanting and weeding and in harvest and post-harvest operations (IRRI-IFAD 2000). Notably, and in various parts of Asia's riceland, rural women have a specialist role in seed management and in livestock husbandry (FAO 1999c).
Thus, women-oriented skills training in these various activities - publicising the "best-practice" methodologies already validated through FAO and through other-agency projects - could constitute a highly cost-effective investment. Training would thus be especially appropriate in seed management, and in fodder production and in straw (livestock-feed) management - including the aspects of straw (feed) nutritional quality and the enhancement thereof through urea supplementation and bacterial inoculation (FAO 2001a). Training of women in general aspects of livestock management would similarly be a worthwhile investment (FAO 1999c). Correspondingly, seed-knowledgeable women have expertise and experience to contribute to farmer-participatory research and cultivar selection.
However, the provision of women-pertinent rice-system and rice-enterprise training shall need to be supplemented by a strengthening of the ongoing efforts that seek to develop technologies and tools that are appropriate to farm-family women and to their duties and time constraints. Such tools must also (IFAD 2001) be applicable to the production and processing of poor people's food staples.
Worrisomely, it is cautionary to note that poor rural women derive cash or share-crop income from rice transplanting. Pro-poor and pro-family programmes and policies for the ricelands shall thus need to be mindful of the labour-displacing adoption of direct seeding - compared to transplanting - of lowland rice. Loss of this income could have serious consequence, since income that is earned by rural women is more likely to be invested in the education of female children.
It is noteworthy also that poor rural women's off-farm activities, such as fuel and fodder gathering, may be severely impeded during periods of drought. The involvement of farm-family women, and perhaps of their increasingly environment-conscious children, in whole-family agricultural training and in the implementation of SARM resource-management methodologies (as recommended in FAO 1999b) could thus be a very worthy investment. Integratively, training of adult rural women in the basics of financial management would expect to provide vital strengthening to farm-household economics and hence to family and community wellbeing.
For farm-family nutrition, interventions may usefully assist rice-system women to avail (perhaps with NGO and CBO partnerships) of the proven systems of maximization of benefits from home gardens and from the FAO programmes and publications on making maximal nutritional use of available food (FAO 1999a).
In rice-growing countries where the prevalence of low (human) birth weight is worrisomely high (Bangladesh, Cambodia, India, Myanmar, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka in that context), such nutrition-oriented interventions would provide effective augmentation to those ongoing programmes (national, UNICEF, WHO, others) that already are addressing low-birth-weight incidence. Better-developed infants - and hence better-developed children and adolescents - are likely when adult to be innovative and energetic as rice-system workers and managers, and correspondingly better able to contribute to the strengthening of rural enterprises, environments, and governance. FAO has the mandate and expertise - and indeed the obligation - to be a major participant in such integrated interventions.
Procedurally (and following ADB 1998 and other sponsoring agencies), it shall be expected that all interventions that aim to improve the wellbeing and status of rural women shall be integrated ("main-streamed" - and not "stand-alone") within all appropriate rural-development and rural-hunger-and-poverty-alleviation programmes.
FAO similarly has the mandate and the expertise to assist member governments to devise and to target and to implement policies that can facilitate smallholder enterprise, rural livelihood, poverty alleviation and food security. This publication indicated the benefits that smallholder rice farms can make to the agricultural and to the national economies, and to food security. FAO might correspondingly assist governments and agencies to review their current agricultural and rural-development policies and if appropriate to modify them so as to maximize smallholder activity and output - noting IFAD's (2001) insistence that priority must be accorded to investment and to research/extension for poor-people's food staples.
Such assistance to national and to devolved government should expect to include components to strengthen the institutional capacity to define and to implement policies and procedures - for primary production, for value-adding enterprise, and for infrastructural supports. Prominence might be accorded to aspects of resource-use rights and tenure, of training, and of information provision, for all rural-livelihoods stakeholders. In training and information provision, priority stakeholders would be the farm families and the agricultural extensionists. For each of those groups, pro-active capacity strengthening would accommodate the differing needs and capabilities of the current generation and its successor generation.
To enhance food security and community-scale rural enterprise, policy might usefully initiate tax-incentive mechanisms, analogous to the forestry-investment incentive in industrialized countries, wherewith the private sector can be encouraged to invest in smallholder agriculture. Correspondingly, for the remote ricelands, particularly the upland and deepwater areas, policy can facilitate the public-sector provision of those rural infrastructures that shall attract private-sector employment-creating investment, and can further facilitate rural employment through justifiable environment-conserving incentives and appropriate food-for-work programmes.
The identification and subsequent repeal or amendment of anti-rural and anti-agricultural and anti-smallholder policies and fiscal regimes is especially important for the rural communities - and correspondingly important for the broader national interest. So also is the need to identify and to remove the impediments to the operation of existing policies, statutes, and regulations. The urgency for such actions is recognized in a recent draft for the World Bank's (2001a) rural development strategy, which places the crafting of efficient and pro-poor policies as the first of its strategic priorities - and notably so for East Asia. Similarly, country-specific pricing policy for rice and for other poor-person staples may take account of the sources of marketable surpluses in determining the most-appropriate pro-poor food-pricing strategy.
Generally, there is for agriculture and for the rural economies a need to review and to revise inappropriate and environment-damage-provoking regimes of subsidies and price supports: in ADB-2001c and IFAD-2001 and World Bank-2001a terminology: the "perverse and distortionary incentives".
Correspondingly, a strengthening of environment-enhancing policies, as of crop-nutritional procedures and livestock-excreta management and of crop/livestock/fish synergies, and of forest/water-shed management, would promote sustainable food security and increased rural incomes. Thus, acknowledging that pro-rural- poor strategies should be labour-absorbing and job-creating (ADB 2000a, IFAD 2001 and World Bank 2001a), there is high merit in SARM recommendations (FAO 1999b) that taxes on labour should be repealed and replaced by taxes on natural resources.
Similarly, well-founded policies on common-property management - perhaps adapting the procedures of the fishermen in Alanya, Turkey or in the Oxbow Lakes of Bangladesh - can protect natural resources and promote their sustainable utilization. ADB (2001a) similarly urges that policies - perhaps including taxation policies - should reflect the scarcity value of natural resources as inputs and sinks for anthropogenic activities.
[FAO has the expertise and mandate to advise and assist member countries in matters of agricultural-taxation policy and of common-property management, and to do so in consonance with holistic policies for rural-livelihoods improvement.]
Gender-related policies are recognized as being needed - and are being pursued by several member governments and civil societies - to address the issues that were featured in this document's immediately preceding section. Policies may need to recognize explicitly the economic inputs of farm-family women to rice-system production and food security and to farm-family and to rural-community nutrition and welfare. Legal embodiment of policies shall almost certainly be needed - and external assistance provided thereto - to assist rural women to attain equitable access to assets, entitlements, and production-facilitating and income-generating resources, and to education and to legal procedures.
For policy relating to micro-finance, the role of government, perhaps with donor and private-sector assistance, is to ensure a regulatory and registratory and supervisory system in which micro-finance institutions can flourish. There is complementary requirement for appropriate standardization and risk-assessment procedures that will prove attractive to commercial capital. However, IFAD (2001) counsels that "untrammelled financial markets cannot expect to lessen long-term poverty".
For the rice systems during the oncoming three decades, water-related policies shall be prominent. Policies relevant to a new century shall be needed to facilitate the modernization and maintenance of many of the older rice-irrigation systems. Such policies shall need to accommodate the concerns for accountability, system-management capability, and incentives, and for equitable treatment for upstream and downstream lands and for those dependent on groundwater and those on gravity-flow (surface) water. They may accommodate also the possibility of water-efficient "aerobic-rice" cultivars.
Importantly, and irrespective of whether such water-related policies shall be determined by central government or by decentralized government, it shall not be possible to ignore the legitimate demands of non-rice users of diverted water (ADB 2001c), nor to retain unjustifiable water subsidies (IFAD 2001). Thus, for irrigated-rice users of water, there shall be consequential requirement for policies that promote and enforce productive water use. Such policies are likely to be based on equitable, but contentious, systems of water rights and water obligations, and of water markets and water pricing - including a true pricing of electricity for tubewells, and must note from chapter 4.2.5 the technical difficulties of determining farm-level water costs.
[FAO is already assisting member governments to formulate policy options for their water sectors - including their irrigation components and the participatory management thereof.]
At the global scale, FAO, through its Commodity and trade policy support to developing countries for trade negotiations, and with partner agencies) is able and willing to assist member governments to adapt their national and international policies and strategies so as to achieve optimal benefits - including appropriate "safety nets" and "Green-Box" benefits - from their membership of and from their prospective influence on the World Trade Organization.
