CHAPTER 3 - ENHANCING PRODUCTIVITY AND SUSTAINABILITY OF FAVOURABLE ENVIRONMENTS

3.1 Programme Goals

Programme 2, ‘Enhancing Productivity and Sustainability of Favourable Environments’, maintains its vision is "to alleviate poverty by increasing on-farm productivity, and ensure continued increase in rice production to meet population growth, while ensuring rice prices continue to decline, through reducing input cost". IRRI and the collaborating NARS breeding projects for irrigated and favourable rainfed environments see their role as a combination of maintenance breeding (to counteract disease and pests, maintain current yield performance) and improving yield and quality traits. The natural resource scientists’ vision is of sustainable, resource-efficient farming systems that will use less water for more crops with less wasteful or marginal agrochemical and fertilizer inputs. In developing sustainable systems, they plan more use of the long-term experimental data available to IRRI from many localities to identify the most effective combinations of agronomic practices for different environments, as well as short-term tactical experimentation. The emphasis here, and through the delivery mechanism afforded by the Irrigated Rice Research Consortium (IRRC) is to move into an era of ‘knowledge-intensive crop management’.

The Programme consists of four Projects, with a total budget of US$10.29 M in 2003 and 24 FTE international scientists, including post doctoral fellows. Table 3.1 shows the distribution of resources between the Projects in 2003.

Table 3.1 - Distribution of Resources Across Projects for Favourable Environments, December 31 2003

The objectives of the individual Projects are:

Project 3, ‘Genetic enhancement of yield, grain quality and stress resistance’: to develop rice varieties with at least 20% higher yield potential, improved grain quality and durable resistance against major pests.

Project 4, ‘Managing resources in intensive rice’: to develop and evaluate decision tools, environmentally safe and efficient farm management practices and appropriate farm machinery to bridge the yield gap between existing production systems and potential of modern varieties, in environmentally sound ways.

Project 5, ‘Enhancing water productivity in rice systems’: to develop socially acceptable and economically viable novel irrigated rice-based systems that give options to farmers to save water in rice cultivation.

Project 6, ‘Irrigated Rice Research Consortium’: to provide a suitable structure and mechanism to facilitate technology impact in sustainable irrigated rice production to: 1) identify regional research needs in irrigated rice; 2) promote research collaboration; 3) support the integration of research; 4) leverage resources from Consortium members; 5) strengthen multi-institutional and interdisciplinary research; and 6) facilitate technology delivery to impact. Countries involved are Bangladesh, Cambodia, China, India, Indonesia, Lao PDR, Malaysia, Myanmar, Philippines, Sri Lanka, Thailand and Vietnam.

3.2 Programme Overview

Although almost as much land is used in production of rainfed-bunded or upland (field environments) rice as irrigated rice (59 million ha vs. 73 million ha irrigated), an estimated 77% of the rice yield in Asia comes from irrigated paddy, and the trend over the past 25 years has been for the proportion of rice coming from irrigated land to increase by nearly 1% per year, despite the loss of some paddy land to other forms of development (Table 3.2).

Table 3.2 - Irrigated and Unirrigated Rice Land, Production

Source: IRRI 2003 Bell and Lapitan, internal document

Rice in irrigated systems is the source of the main bulk of the food that feeds the urban poor, and many of the rural landless. For this reason IRRI continues to place nearly as much emphasis on improving productivity gains from irrigated systems as non-irrigated regions through combined strategies of raising yields, reducing input costs and improving the sustainability of irrigated farming systems.

In the 1998-2000 MTP, IRRI developed its priorities involving both objective analysis and subjective judgements, with a balance across rice ecosystems and regions. During the past five years, some of the priorities proposed for Programme 2 in the 1998 MTP have changed in emphasis or detail with the completion of studies on methane emission from rice fields, and a few new priorities have emerged, including ‘Golden Rice’,‘aerobic’ rice and post-harvest technologies. The emphasis on ‘breaking the yield barrier’ has been reduced, and emphasis has shifted to achieving greater yield stability, providing consistently high yields in the field, and integrating systems of breeding and agronomic strategies.

In the latest MTP for 2004-6 the strategies for identifying priorities have not been explicitly described; this is an unfortunate omission. Priorities identified for the next five year period show little major shift from the past, and the Programme vision and main elements remain essentially the same as they were, other than the emergence of a new priority on post-harvest technologies and yield loss reduction for the first time, and a change in emphasis in some specific transgenic applications. So called ‘New Frontier’ areas of research are no longer identified by this title, and have lost emphasis; others have been incorporated into mainline project areas.

Breeding: IRRI has had a long history of searching for ways to obtain major increases in rice yield per hectare, over and above the small incremental increases that derive from conventional breeding programmes. Thus, the New Plant Type (NPT) was initiated in 1989 to develop a radically different rice morphology that could increase the yield potential by up to 50%, by redesigning the plant architecture in terms of energy capture and efficiency of conversion^[9]. Early promotion of the concept of the NPT as a ‘super-rice’ led to unrealistic expectations of yield gains in the early 1990s, but the past five years has seen a more realistic evaluation and solid gains made in producing high yielding varieties that will outperform current inbred lines. The NPT project has also had a spin-off benefit by infusing new genetic variability into the modern genepool of tropical japonica lines, now crossed with indica, to provide high yielding variety genepools. Secondary traits of exciting potential include better lodging resistance than occurs solely in the inbred indicas, higher nutritional quality and aerobic adaptation that is of value to both unfavourable and favourable environments. Genuine progress towards achieving the theoretical potential of the NPT has been slower than originally forecast but yields above 10t/ha have been achieved, similar to good inbred lines. This initiative also stimulated a range of alternative strategies for achieving stable, large yield improvements, including more investment in developing hybrid rice varieties which can yield up to 20% above inbred lines.

Other more conventional breeding strategies that have been equally successful in increasing yield per hectare include shortening the time to flower and ripen, reducing losses from pests, diseases and weeds both by breeding for resistance and competitive advantage.

The pace of new developments in plant biotechnology has quickened in no small measure in the past five years due to stimulus provided to geneticists from the international scientific community’s project to sequence the rice genome of O. sativa ssp. japonica, through the IRGSP. IRRI genetics and plant breeding programmes have benefited from this work. As a result of these developments, it is now possible to make real headway in pin-pointing the QTLs related to such complex traits as grain yield itself, under multi-gene phenotypic expression. While there is a large gap between identifying genes and QTLs, and having well adapted crops growing in sustainable production systems that provide benefits to the rural poor, IRRI’s breeding programme is on the verge of bridging this gap with lines incorporating abiotic stress tolerances applicable to both Programme 2 and Programme 3 (‘Improving Productivity and Livelihoods in Fragile Environments’).

Production systems: At the start of the present five-year period, the principal concern facing Programme 2 was the apparent yield stagnation and possible yield decline noted on continuous rice plots at IRRI Los Baños and elsewhere. While subsequent investigations demonstrated that this problem was most evident in very high yielding, high nitrogen input locations, there were concerns that productivity was stagnating or declining also in long continued high input paddy rice in some farming districts in South and East Asia. In 1999, a CCER was undertaken on this ‘mega-project’. Findings showed that, although there had been changes in the soil chemistry and biology of long-continued high input rice monocultures that were constraining productivity, balanced nutrient management without excessive use of nitrogen was the key to sustainable production and fertility maintenance. Subsequent research identified that optimum productivity and sustainability came from reducing inputs and timing these more closely to the phenology of the crop. These have paved the way for a new approach. The ‘mega project’ was therefore transformed into work on sustainability of intensive irrigated production systems, and continues to underpin the implementation of sustainable production systems that form the current Project 4. This led to the present emphasis placed on site-specific nutrient management (SSNM) which has now progressed from a research finding to a major operational tool distributed through national agricultural agency programmes. This is, in itself, a major shift in scientific attitude towards much more fully integrated systems of sustainable crop production and is strongly commended by the Panel.

In recent years, IRRI’s recommended crop and soil management systems have received a strong challenge from a system proposed by Norman Uphoff and others^[10]. The system being promoted claims to provide yields that are two to fourfold those from conventional farmers’ fields without recourse to purchased inputs. IRRI scientists, collaborating with other research institutions in China, Japan, Australia and the Philippines, have reproduced this production system and compared it with good local farmer practices. In every case, the SRI performed less well than commonly used good practice and the claims for SRI would now appear to be largely discredited in matching high yields in irrigated environments^[11]. It has, however, raised interest among donors and some Asian government agencies, as for instance in Lao PDR, because of its reliance on ‘organic’ production methods. However, numerous studies undertaken at IRRI and worldwide on the nutrient demands of 5-10t/ha grain crops demonstrate that no high yield production system can be sustained even on the most fertile soils without nutrient replenishment. It is the Panel’s view that advocacy of this approach could place in the minds of poor nations and farmers, cruelly false hopes of gains in rice yields which cannot be realised.

3.3. Achievements and Impact

3.3.1 Genetic Enhancement of Yield, Grain Quality and Stress Resistance

Project 3 uses conventional and biotechnological approaches to develop a wide range of cultivars that are 20% higher yielding than present high-yield varieties, incorporating durable pest resistance through pyramid breeding and marker aided selection (MAS). IRRI’s main role in rice breeding is now, and has been for some time mainly at the pre-breeding stage, to develop potentially useful parents for selection in national breeding programmes, in a truly collaborative set of arrangements that is highly valued by national research agencies.

The major outputs from Project 3 are discussed in following sections.

3.3.1.1 Improved inbred lines possessing high yield, multiple resistance and improved quality

Over the past five years, IRRI has provided 22% of the direct-cross varieties released by NARS and 31% that involved at least one IRRI parent in the cross, most of which have been for irrigated environments. A total of 309 varieties were released for all ecosystems, of which 53% were IRRI breeding lines or the cross involved at least one IRRI parent. This continues a long tradition of international exchange and flow of rice germplasm in which IRRI has been at the hub of the interchange that is rightly described as extraordinary^[12], and has been highly successful in maintaining the flow of new varieties released in Asian countries. The Panel commends this continued strong flow of valuable material into national breeding programmes.

There has been a substantial effort to introduce multiple pest and disease resistance into widely grown varieties, and good resistance has been developed against brown plant hopper, bacterial blight and tungro disease. This has been achieved by introgressing lines from wild species, and it represents a significant advance on earlier lines developed for single pathogen resistance. Several NPT lines now have multiple disease and insect resistance, and one of these has also yielded over 10 t/ha in field trials. The Panel considers this to be a notable achievement.

There are exciting new developments in the pipeline with some of the marker assisted breeding products, such as strong QTLs identified for both irrigated and rainfed lowland rice varieties. In close collaboration with the Indian and Bangladeshi breeders, IRRI has identified QTLs for tolerance to moderate salinity for irrigated conditions, increased P-uptake, and tolerance to various toxicities and drought. Using high yielding and popular varieties, such as ‘Swana’ that is grown in over 20% of Eastern India and parts of Bangladesh, submergence tolerance trait^[13] is being incorporated to secure more reliable yields for millions of poor farmers in a mixture of rainfed and irrigated environments.

Other notable achievement highlights for the past five years are:

• several varieties that show no yield loss under water-saving (alternate wet-dry) conditions;

• excellent performance of Bt (Bacillus thuringiensis) transgenic rice in fields infested with rice-eating caterpillars (Lepidoptera);

• several genes pyramided into advanced breeding lines to confer aromatic flavour;

• ‘Golden rice’ with elevated the â-carotene of first generation varieties, now suitable for Asian consumers; and

• Xa21 transgenic rice cultivars developed and evaluated in the field in China, Philippines and India.

NPT lines for irrigated conditions now yield up to 10t/ha in some seasons, similar to the yields achieved by hybrid rice varieties or the best modern inbred indica lines. Progress was slower than hoped for in achieving high levels of grain filling because early NPT lines, derived from introducing dwarfing genes into tall tropical japonica rice varieties, had such prolific panicles that grain filling was never complete by senescence. Indica-japonica crosses that introduced genetic traits associated with long grains in place of short grains have overcome much of this problem. Particular emphasis is now being placed on incorporating grain quality such as long translucent, mildly aromatic grains with intermediate amylose content, which are the traits preferred by consumers. As grain filling remains a challenge in NPT lines, the Panel suggests that the most useful future work for IRRI to focus on will be the physiological basis to achieving full grain filling, while NARS programmes continue to focus on variety production.

Progress with Golden Rice transgenic rice has been slow because of the necessity to remake all the transgene constructs to satisfy IP requirements, using a different selectable marker. However, progress has been made by IRRI and its partners to get successful transgenics made, with agronomic and health benefit trials undertaken. The Panel considers that IRRI has good leadership to manage these issues.

The situation for the transgenic rice lines has become more complex in the past five years, despite the rapid rate of progress in the science. Transgenic food crops have been the focus of intense public scrutiny relating to consumer acceptance, international trade and regulatory issues on biosafety. Some Asian country policies are enthusiastic, others are more cautious. While the progress made in producing transgenic rice lines that are resistant to a range of pests and diseases was initially seen to have major environmental and cost saving benefits, IRRI must now keep a close watch on their acceptance in the market place. This is therefore discussed in more detail in Chapters 1 and 2.

3.3.1.2 Heterosis, Grain Quality and Resistance in Rice Hybrids

In 2002-3 the average increase in yield of current IRRI hybrids tested against best inbred lines across 15 regions in the Philippines was 31.4%. These are exciting results in IRRI’s search for higher yield potentials. Several heterotic hybrids now also have both better grain quality and higher iron content than popular varieties currently grown by farmers. This is important as many of the earlier hybrids were of poor quality with low consumer acceptance. There is general strong interest now in hybrid rice across Asia, not least in stimulating the private sector involvement in participating in seed production. Nevertheless, hybrid seed production is an expensive business and the cost of seed must be recovered by crops that have a higher yield and are of equal quality for farmers to adopt hybrids everywhere. Breeders are pushing ahead to develop two-stage hybrid production systems using environmentally sensitive male sterile systems which will reduce seed production costs.

Hybrid rice is already being grown in many areas of Asia. In China, nearly 18 million ha of the 33 million tonnes of harvested rice land were planted to F1 hybrids as early as 1992. Hybrids are now being grown on several hundreds of thousand hectares in Vietnam, India (280,000 ha in 2003), and the Philippines. The jury is still out on whether these developments are commercially viable and sustainable in the long run. Interestingly, in China, hybrid rice was most successful when the grains sector still had large elements of the command economy, but as it moved towards a more market oriented system, the acreage under hybrid rice dropped from 58% in the early 1990s to 40% in 2000^[14]. In Vietnam, hybrids are mostly grown in North and Central provinces where, because of the persistent shortage, the state procurement system plays a bigger role, and not in the South, where market mechanism functions more freely.

On the production side as well, it is important that IRRI comes to a decision on the extent to which it invests in market based criteria in pursuit of grain quality traits, such as fragrance, grain size and colour, and whether to pursue hybrid rice seed production as a major strategy, given the fact that hybrid seed is expensive to produce and must be purchased each year. This may exclude poorer rice farmers from benefiting from its advantages. National breeding programmes and the private sector are already well established in these areas, servicing the needs of the richer rice farmers rather than the needs of smallholders to improve low yield levels and yield stability against the endless threats of pests, diseases and weeds.

IRRI’s achievements in pure line developments are very substantial, particularly given the relatively small size of the Programme and the complexity and diversity of the breeding objectives of its NARS partners. IRRI undoubtedly continues to have a very strong impact on national breeding programmes in Asia equivalent to that described a little earlier by Evenson and Gollin (1997), and provides nearly a quarter of the parent material into successful releases. Respondents to the review questionnaire and NARS representatives interviewed by the Panel consistently identified the value of the germplasm exchange, shuttle breeding programmes and the capacity of IRRI’s experience in rice breeding and biotechnology expertise as key factors in IRRI’s role in the region.

3.3.2 Managing Resources in Intensive Rice

IRRI sees the key to maintaining high yields for the long-term to be a knowledge-intensive ‘tool set’ that requires integrated management and information packages for farmers and advisors. This has been a major advance in understanding the basis for sustainable, intensive irrigated rice systems, and can been used for a diversity of different applications as production systems change to meet new challenges in the future. Much of this core knowledge is now freely available to all through the Rice Knowledge Bank on the web, and is constantly updated in a very valuable service provided by IRRI (see Chapter 5).

Plant-based rapid assessment of nitrogen requirement, using the Leaf Colour Chart (LCC), is the basis of site specific nutrient management (SSNM). Over 500,000 LCCs have been distributed to date, targeted at irrigated and favourable rainfed lowland areas of tropical and subtropical river basins which adopted intensive modern rice production early, and have grown two crops a year or more for over three decades. Research findings on SSNM across many sites have verified that this approach improves field-level productivity, with flow-on benefits to individual farmer incomes^[15]. To date, environmental benefits have not yet been measured. In the ‘three-reductions three gains’ campaign in Vietnam, for example, with more accurate placement and time of application of the nitrogen, savings of up to 40% of N-fertilizers were achieved, with savings of US$35-58 per farmer across eleven provinces of Vietnam. Use of the drum seeder results in both lower seeding rates and improved crop health, which also reduces the need for pesticide applications and produces higher yields as a result of the lower losses due to pests.

Through the Irrigated Rice Research Consortium (IRRC, see below), SSNM is being disseminated on a wide scale through partnerships among farmers, public and private organizations, NARS and IRRI at 21 sites in eight countries in tropical and subtropical Asia, each representing large domains (> 100,000 ha) with similar soils and cropping systems. Environmental impact studies are now needed to assess whether reductions in input use are having any widespread effect, and IRRI recognizes that combined economic and environmental ex post studies should be conducted in future to demonstrate the gains that are being made with these input reduction programmes.

IRRI is now developing SSNM for other elements such as phosphorus (P) and potassium (K) within a simple framework for farmer application that integrates fertilizer use with other seasonal crop operations. Demonstration nutrient-omission plots identify which nutrients are required and give farmers a tool by which they can achieve balanced nutrition. For example, research results have indicated that hybrid varieties may require higher K applications to achieve full yield in farmers’ fields, whereas farmer applications of phosphate have often been found to be greater than are now needed, as residual P contents are high in many paddy soils.

IRRI’s contribution to the Rice-Wheat Consortium (RWC) has been a major part of Project 4 over the past decade. The RWC stemmed from the concerns that intensification of irrigated rice-wheat system that occupy one fifth of the grain producing areas of Bangladesh, India, Nepal and Pakistan had started to exhaust the soil and was leading to yield decline, particularly in the wet season rice, from an average of 5 t/ha to 3t/ha in twenty years. As it is estimated that the demand for rice and wheat will grow at 2% per annum in the next 20 years in this region, there was a need for a radical reappraisal of the existing production systems.

The Consortium has been outstandingly successful in developing more sustainable production systems that will be of benefit to many of the 1.2 billion people who live on the Indo-Gangetic Plain. The challenge has been to adapt the land, puddled for rice in the wet season, into a suitable seedbed for wheat and other crops in the dry season and back to rice in time for the next monsoon. In the wetter, eastern ecoregions of the basin there can even be a third crop, provided the rice crop can be planted, grown and harvested rapidly. When conventional rice and wheat production systems are used sequentially on the same land, both crops suffer yield losses. IRRI has been the collaborator responsible for selecting and testing appropriate rice varieties, and developing a range of direct seeding, reduced tillage, weed management, and rice harvesting technologies, that can both maintain or even improve rice yields, while reducing the turn-around time between crops, and adapting this package of technologies to the different agro-ecological regions of the Indo-Gangetic Plain. Despite earlier difficulties in reaching the yields achieved in conventionally puddled systems, yields are now equal to the best conventional crops. Modified irrigation in formed beds, combined with zero tillage and direct seeding, also give substantial savings in water use, labour and fertilizer inputs. This represents a great achievement.

A review of the RWC was carried out in 2003, which praised the successes that had been made in developing these more sustainable and productive systems, but proposed changes to the organization and methods that will be required for the RWC to scale up its activities and extend its impact more widely to the rural poor in the future.

The RWC has emerged as an innovative model for regional and international collaboration, on the basis of its strong and credible record of achievements. Many of these have been compiled and documented^[16]. The review recommended that the RWC continue to focus on knowledge generation and exchange of knowledge and people, with IRRI and CIMMYT continuing to provide facilitation and coordination.

In the period under review, IRRI’s entomology and plant pathology research has focussed increasingly on IPM systems in which disease diagnosis and incidence, biological control and use of plant resistance breeding are all used, in order to provide rapid tactical assessment of pest and disease incidence severity and appropriate advice on methods of control. Biological control, which was heavily supported in the previous five year period, is still researched as one tool in IPM, but attention has shifted in recognition that biological control cannot at present provide complete protection by itself.

Several studies have been conducted to assess the environmental impact of IPM on rice production systems in Asia. It is now well established that insecticide sprays disrupt normal food web developments in rice ecosystems, creating situations that favour secondary pest infestations, and a similar situation occurs with over-reliance on herbicides^[17]. Reduced pesticide use is also beneficial to other aquatic ecosystems, for example by providing better opportunities for fish and shrimp farming, duck raising and improved nutrient cycling within rice paddies. These provide additional economic benefits to farmers and have been the basis of highly successful adoption programmes in the Philippines, Indonesia and Vietnam such as the ‘Three reductions, three gains’ dissemination programme in several provinces in South Vietnam. IRRI’s role in working with NARS to change farmer practices is highly commended by the Panel as a successful achievement that has had great beneficial impact.

3.3.3 Enhancing Water Productivity in Rice Systems

Project 5 reflects IRRI’s responsiveness to the looming water crisis in many parts of Asia, in which competing demands for water will force reductions in water available to irrigation farmers. As irrigated rice takes an estimated 55-60% of all water used for human purposes in Asia, the greatest gains can be made by improving water use efficiency in rice-based irrigation systems. While rice is exceptional among cereals in being able to grow in flooded conditions, continuous flooding is not an absolute requirement even for paddy rice, and IRRI has been at the forefront of developing alternative production systems that cut the consumption of irrigation water for rice. Experimental results from the experience with the RWC in India showed that 15 - 40% savings in pumping time can be achieved over the traditional methods of growing paddy rice in the monsoon season^[18].

IRRI’s research has shown that changes to the water regime of the crop have a number of spillover implications for crop establishment, weed and pest control, and nutrition. Among the disadvantages of reducing flooding time in irrigated systems the problem of adequate weed control is greatest, but plant nutrition and microbial activity are also affected. All of these effects must be further addressed before widescale promotion is attempted, and different technologies are therefore required at different stages of adoption. At present such technologies as drum-seeders and broadcast seeding, surface and subsurface wet seeding, dry seeding, aerobic rice (grown in non-puddled soils with no standing water but supplementary irrigation), zero-tillage, furrows and raised beds, are all being tested and demonstrated individually and in various combinations. Alternate wetting and drying is now considered a mature and proven technology; IRRI’s role has been one of providing the technology transfer needed to extend it out from test sites to other parts of the Philippines and beyond. Research results have given an average water saving of 20% for both deep and shallow tubewell systems, with no yield loss compared with conventional systems. Weed control is often the key constraint, so if submergence-tolerant varieties can be sown into just-flooded fields which inhibit weed growth, farmers will be saved the expense and management problems of using herbicides. The submergent-tolerant varieties being produced in collaboration with India containing this attribute should be ready for release within a year or two.

‘Aerobic’ rice systems in which rice is grown in wet but not saturated conditions provide even greater saving in water (of up to 40%), but result in yield loss if current lowland varieties are used. At present, aerobic rice yields are two to four tonnes/ha less than equivalent irrigated rice yields from adjacent blocks. However, in the Huang-Huai-Hai plain of Northern China, water scarcity is now so severe that ways must be found to decrease water use by rice, both in irrigated and rainfed systems. This part of Project 5 involves breeders very closely, who are engaged in developing rice varieties that can cope with fluctuating or non-saturated water conditions, and for this reason aerobic rice is a target problem for research in both Project 5 (Programme 2) and Project 7 (Programme 3). The development of aerobic rice germplasm is still in its infancy, and appropriate management systems need to be developed to cope with the range of soil environments in both irrigated and non-irrigated systems^[19].

These innovations present some exciting possibilities of obtaining really significant water savings without losing the yield benefits of current irrigated rice systems, and the Panel strongly commends IRRI’s contribution to these advances. A number of economic and impact studies on the benefits of water saving technologies have been undertaken by IRRI scientists and other independent researchers in recent years. These have convincingly demonstrated that AWD is providing better economic returns than full irrigation to farmers on the very large irrigated areas in China, and in areas where pumping from tube-wells provides irrigation water so reductions in pumping provide a significant saving in energy costs to farmers^[20]. Savings of US$20/ha were typical in one study. This type of win-win situation offers exciting possibilities for real improvements in the sustainability of irrigated rice farming in many parts of Asia where groundwater drawdown has reached a critical situation, and farmers’ profits are being eroded through the continued decline in rice prices.

The Panel considers that AWD, other water saving technologies and systems of aerobic rice production have wide implications both for farmer profits and for the governments of partner countries who are facing potential water crises in their urban supplies. However, they will clearly need a larger network of ARI scientists and water specialists to realize the opportunities offered. Such opportunities go well beyond the current initiative of the Challenge Programme for Water for Food, in which IRRI is already a lead player in association with IWMI. The two IARCs share a long history of collaboration in this area and provide a strong focus for innovative and applied research to tackle this major problem. More funding for collaboration will be needed between IRRI and the water industry science and engineering community, for example, to upscale the benefits in large irrigation scheme areas. IRRI is already a member of the International Commission on Irrigation and Drainage where national water planning and policy agencies exchange information.

IRRI has initiated the International Platform for Saving Water in Rice (IPSWAR) as a means of promoting water-saving technologies among stakeholders. This is an excellent initiative. This issue has implications beyond those of Project 5 and is therefore discussed further in Chapter 4.

The Panel commends IRRI for the work of Project 5 on economic and impact studies about the benefits from water saving technologies in different environments, and suggests that they use such studies to further promote these technologies in future government planning and water policies.

3.3.4 Irrigated Rice Research Consortium

The Irrigated Rice Research Consortium (IRRC) was developed in 1997 as a mechanism to promote interdisciplinary research among rice growing countries in Asia. It is supported by the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC) and was externally reviewed in October 2003. The review report and accompanying documentation was available to the Panel and forms the basis for this analysis. IRRI provides a structure and mechanism for partnerships with the NARS (Bangladesh, China, India, Indonesia, Myanmar, Thailand, the Philippines and Vietnam) which facilitate and strengthen research and technology delivery to irrigated rice systems.

The process is one of using workgroups formed around specific research needs that have high potential impact. Workgroup teams are interdisciplinary with a mix of research and extension workers drawn from IRRI and the collaborating NARS, who all work on the same sites in three or more countries. Currently, the technical workgroups include those on nutrient and integrated nutrient-pest management (Reaching Toward Optimal Productivity), hybrid rice, water saving, weed ecology, and rodent ecology. The recent establishment of a post-harvest group is very welcome. Hopefully, it will encourage IRRI to direct more resources into a significant area of yield loss that has been quite overlooked. When the difference in head rice recovery between average village mill performance and good two and three-pass technology and practice can be 10-20%, this seems to be an obvious area for more appropriate village-scale development, as well as farmer and miller education. It also affords an opportunity to link production and post-production systems, and for IRRI and NARS to strengthen relationships. This Consortium provides the main delivery channel of IRRI’s irrigated production systems research into the Asian region, as described earlier in this Chapter in relation to SSNM. It uses a combination of on-farm demonstration and research sites, participatory approaches, baseline and follow-up surveys, workshops and training activities to promote easy-to-use ‘best practice’ tools by farmers.

The IRRC review found that IRRI had been largely successful in achieving its goals in identifying and addressing regional needs in irrigated rice and in establishing collaboration and flows of information. The more challenging goals of spreading the achievements wider to more of the poor, assisting the diversification to other crops and into markets, and assisting government agencies in scaling up successful technologies for widespread adoption still remain. These issues are recommended for further work in a third phase of funding (beyond 2004). Many of these new challenges require integration of technologies across different disciplines and issues.

The review recommendations are interesting because they are precisely those that the EPMR Panel has identified as a challenge for the whole of Programme 2, if not for IRRI as a whole, reflecting the emergence of more complex mixes of public and private sector research and development in Asia, the liberation of command economies in some areas, and the emergence of significant commercialization of agricultural inputs (such as germplasm, advisory services, machinery and equipment, fertilizers and agrochemicals).

The Panel considers that this Consortium, together with its equivalent for the unfavourable environments (CURE), could grow to become the main delivery channel for nearly every product and information flow between IRRI and the NARS.

3.4. Vision and Future Objectives

Programme 2 has a vision of irrigated rice lands that can continue to provide much of the increased rice production that will be needed by an increasing world population through reduced input costs that give benefits to farmers and cheap rice to consumers. The advances of the last five to ten years in both successfully breeding for pest and disease resistance, greater yield and quality, and developing much more sustainable production systems give hope that this vision is more likely to be realized than in the past. This is an adequate ‘business as usual’ vision.

Today, however, there may be more cause for excitement and hope that this prospect will be realized than at any time in the past thirty years, through the dual explosions in information technology and biotechnology that have occurred in the past five years that may be captured and transformed into helping the lives of the rice dependent poor. If these new technologies are to make a difference, it should be in accelerating the pace of change in poverty alleviation through much more widespread adoption and utilization of the best irrigated rice production systems currently possible. The Panel would like to see these explicit objectives captured in Programme 2.

The Programme’s vision does not include the possibility that rice will decline in importance as a crop in more affluent and productive irrigated regions. These lands are critical to the production of rice for the rapidly increasing urban population and landless, although continued declining net profitability from rice may lead farmers to change to more profitable crops where they can, as discussed in Chapter 1. Nevertheless, IRRI may benefit from developing an overall framework that identifies the most effective entry points in the whole of the rice production-consumption value chain. In particular, Programme 2 would appear to need more information on patterns of rice consumption, distribution and marketing, and the likelihood of change in the relative value of different crops in irrigated rice-based farming systems in Asia over the next five to ten years.

More detailed statistical and spatial analysis of the extent of current innovative technologies and modern varieties would also assist in closer targeting future regions and domains of special need. What is needed is information that closely identifies the areas where populations are increasing but standards of living are not. These are not confined solely to unfavourable environments, but also include irrigated areas where population densities are very high, alternative sources of employment through industrialization lacking, and poverty is endemic. IRRI should be able provide an unrivalled ‘package’ of technologies to assist such regions in stimulating improved rice production for poverty alleviation, and deliver these through the mechanism of the IRRC.

IRRI has already conducted estimates of yield losses that can be used to assist biotic and abiotic breeding priorities. In a large study that drew on estimates for all South and South-East Asia, the largest losses were associated with weeds, followed by insects and soil related stresses. With irrigated rice yields in farmers’ fields still averaging only 3.5t/ha world wide compared with best experimental practice of 6-7 t/ha in the wet season and over 8 t/ha in the dry season, more benefit might be gained from closing the yield gap with better farmer practice, than from the spectacular yields being achieved by plant breeding that are not always applicable to more than a proportion of leading farmers in irrigated areas. In the future, Programme 2 needs to draw more from its own and external studies on the relative losses and the benefits and costs of different areas of research^[21].

This information should guide priority setting among the various objectives in the three Projects that are developing and delivering rice technologies in this Programme.

3.5 Overall Assessment

In the past five years, Programme 2 has evolved from its earlier phase of prescriptive formula based solutions to rice production, to mature understanding of the complexities of sustaining and intensifying irrigated rice systems that will not fail either through environmental degradation, or through inability to provide food or profits to consumers and farmers. This is a major change in thinking, which is strongly supported by this Panel, and brings IRRI’s view in line with concepts of world ‘best practice’ in agricultural management. It has been accompanied by a shift in delivery approach to providing farmers and advisers with ‘knowledge-based’ tool kits, rather than ‘recipes’ and a suite of varieties and crop management options that allow farmers choice, even within the restrictions of relative poverty and inadequate resources.

The Panel sees this change in approach as providing the Programme with an excellent basis on which to tackle the next five years. There have been some difficult scientific challenges to address in the past five years, including the slower than expected progress with the NPT, the concern over potential and actual yield decline in intensive production environments, and the SRI diversion. IRRI’s scientists have tackled these and other more rewarding challenges with energy and rigour, and have provided effective solutions and answers.

IRRI’s irrigated rice research is soundly based on a great wealth of experimental data, able to draw on an unrivalled germplasm collection and a great depth of knowledge about the rice plant and rice production systems in Asia. IRRI has a unique position as an international collaborator that the NARS and other agencies and institutions trust and see as an impartial facilitator which provides the basis to the various networks and consortia that operate to support and improve rice-based research in Asia. This is a position that no other advanced research institute can match, where relationships inevitably are bilateral rather than multilateral as they are at IRRI. The scientific reputation of IRRI’s staff in Programme 2 is of good to excellent international standing, and its policy and commitment to free interchange of germplasm, information and training has an increasingly important role especially for poorer countries as the controls over IPR and genetic material become greater through commercial, and certain countries’, vested interests.

There are 26 IRS and PDF (post doctoral fellows) contributing in part to Programme 2, who also work in at least one other Programme. This provides good cross-cutting interaction which stimulates creativity and scientific debate. A further eleven scientists are totally committed to Programme 2, mainly in the agronomy, breeding and physiology areas who are able to keep the focus and drive needed for Project outcomes. The Panel considers this an adequate balance of time allocation. The Projects are well served in the biological and physical sciences, but have only 0.75 IRS social science/economics. The external environment in which it is now operating, and donor commitment to the broader scale issues of poverty alleviation and the environment require closer working relationships with economics and social science studies, both to demonstrate the value of its investments in irrigated rice research, and to ensure that varieties, innovative technologies and information packages are relevant to the social, cultural and financial environments to which they are applied. This issue is discussed further in Chapter 5.

The Panel suggests that Programme 2 strengthens its collaboration with social scientists and economists to ensure that the accelerated release of new varieties adapted to a range of biotic and abiotic stresses meet farmer and consumer acceptance for adoption into sustainable and financially rewarding farming systems.

The productivity of all Projects has been very high over the past five years, and the Panel was impressed by the dedication and commitment to achieving real improvements on the ground demonstrated by all the staff they met. The quality of the science can be assessed by the number of refereed publications, which averages nearly four per research scientist per year, higher than found in many western universities, and particularly commendable when considered against the high level of other products and communication activities (through the IRRC and Training Centre) to which all scientists contribute, and the high demand for books, articles and newsletters published by IRRI. The Panel is impressed with these achievements and the high quality of the research work undertaken in Programme 2 over the past five years.

The work being carried out to improve the sustainability of intensive rice production systems has high potential environmental benefit as well as the real improvements that should continue to flow to poor people in terms of cheap, nutritious rice and more profitable farming. Encouraging environmental groups and international NGOs to support this work and popularize its message, not only in Asia itself, but on the world stage, would be of great added value in lifting IRRI’s profile among influential sectors of the donor community. A start has been made to work with some NGOs on issues related to IPM, but could go much wider.

The Panel suggests that IRRI develop a closer dialogue with influential international NGOs to assist in the promotion of its win-win conservation-based water, nutrient and pest-management irrigated rice farming systems at community level.

The Panel recommends that IRRI links the work currently carried out in Project 5 with the challenge of achieving higher yields in the most intensive production systems in the context of diminishing water supplies. Further, IRRI should extend its modelling and GIS research to optimize water-saving technologies at the irrigation scheme level to provide options for water allocation.