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OUR LAND of the northeast has dark damp soil. Kum fish pop about like
crocodiles lashing their tails. Nang fish pop up with a thunderous sound.
Cicadas cry out like a gong sounding the hour.’ So goes an old song from
Thailand. It is not very long ago that abundant water nourished the rice
fields in the lowlands of northeast Thailand and the nang and kum fish popped
thunderously into the nets of the farmers. Today the northeast is the poorest
region of Thailand. Deforestation of important watersheds, agricultural
chemicals leaching from the soil and the pressure ofa growing population
have damaged the country’s water resources. Rainfall is unreliable. Droughts
and flash floods menace crops, while streams and ponds that once held water
all year now dry up for several months during the hot season. Fish, the
main source of protein for villagers, disappear with the water.

The loss of forests rich inresources and a reliable supply of clean
water affects farmers throughout Thailand. Conditions are particularly severe
in the northeast, where two-thirds of the families earn less than 14 300
baht (Pounds sterling 290) a household a year. The average farming family
in the northeast has about 20 to 25rai (6.2 rai equals 1 hectare) ofland,
although many have less. They grow a wide range of glutinousand ordinary
rice, both traditional varieties and some that they have improved locally.
Farmers harvest only one crop of rice each year, except in the irrigated
areas that account for less than 1 per cent of the northeast, where they
raise two. The soils are so poor, being sandy, saline and infertile, that
in some places the rice yield may be as low as half a tonne per hectare.
Although self-sufficiency in food is of paramount importance for a family,
few small farmers can grow enough to sustain themselves all year. Before
the planting season, farmers must borrow money for fertiliser and enough
rice to last until harvest time. After the harvest, as much as 20 per cent
of the crop may go towards paying off debts. One or two bad harvests, or
illness, can plunge a family into debts it can never hope to repay. Raising
fish offers at least a partial solution to these problems, contributing
cash, as well as food, to family budgets.

Rice paddies cover most of the lowland and plateau areas of Thailand.
They provide a natural habitat for fish during the rainy season when fields
are flooded. In the past, fish entered the paddies from overflowing ponds
and streams, a bonus for a farmer. Families could catch fish as they needed
them, harvesting the rest with the rice. However, changes to water supplies
have cut down this supply of free protein: as rivers and streams dry up,
fewer fish survive in the rivers or reach the rice fields. Poor farming
families have suffered; in some areas more than 50 per cent of preschool
children are malnourished.

Suddenly fish are reappearing in the rice fields of the northeast, but
they are not wild. Farmers have introduced several species of fish to eat
at home or to sell in the market. Three years ago, only a few enterprising
farmers experimented with ‘rice-fish culture’. Now the practice is spreading
quickly among farmers throughout the northeast.

Rice-fish culture probably began in China where archaeologists have
traced it back to the mid-Han dynasty, around AD 100. Chinese colonists
brought it with them to Southeast Asia about 1500 years ago. Another source
could have been India, where rice and fish have shared fields for thousands
of years. Farmers in Central Thailand used modern methods to raise fish
and rice together in the 1950s but the practice has declined in the past
20 years. With the spread of irrigation and the help of chemicals, farmers
can grow two crops of rice each year. Their fields are now saturated with
fertilisers and pesticides. In the poorer northeast, where farmers cannot
afford large amounts of chemicals, fields remain relatively uncontaminated
and are ideal for rearing fish.

Several government and non- government organisations recently began
to mobilise support for farmers’ efforts and for research on the farms into
the many different ways farmers rear fish in paddy fields. The organisations
include CUSO, an independent Canadian organisation, which sends skilled
workers to developing countries, the International Development Research
Centre, which is a Canadian group funded by the government, the Appropriate
Technology Association,a Thai nongovernmental organisation, and the FarmingSystems
Research Institute of Thailand’s Departmentof Agriculture.

Fish farming is complicated: you cannot just add a handful of fish fry
to a paddy field, wait a few weeks and scoop up fish for dinner. But it
requires few inputs other than labour and builds on the existing skills
of farmers. Farmers must raise banks (bunds) around the paddy field to stop
fish from escaping and prevent predatory fish from entering. They need a
nursery pond to hold fry until the fish reach fingerling size(3 to 4 centimetres)
and are released to fend for themselves. And if there is no natural low
spot to provide a retreat whenthe water level falls in the dry season, farmers
must dig a refugefor the fish.

The fish raised in fields are tilapia, silver barb and common carp (Cyprinus
carpio). Farmers typically stock a mixture of species at 400 to 800 fish
per rai. Unlike local wild fish, which are for the most part either tiny
or carnivorous, these fast-growing species feed on plants and insects. They
live together happily: the silver barbs feed at the surface, for example,
while carp prefer rooting round for detritus and insect larvae in the mud
at the bottom. The practice of rearing several fish together converts weeds,
insects and wastes efficiently into protein for human consumption. In the
four or five months that the rice fields are flooded, some fish will reach
weights of up to half a kilogram, but even the smallest fish end up in fish
sauce or are fermented into the pungent ‘pla raa’ (rotten fish) that accompanies
almost every meal in the northeast.

As is the case with most new farming practices, farmers can best learn
the techniques of rearing fish from each other. Some government groups such
as the Farming Systems Research Institute encourage a farmer-to-farmer approach.
Examples can be powerful. In Khon Kaen when the rains were late, fields
and shallow ponds dried up. The rice plants that a few optimistic farmers
had planted were ringed with deep dry circles of cracked soil. On one side
of a bund in the middle of this desolation, parched fields stretched away
towards the village. On the other side, Noolit, a farmer, crouched in a
patch of bright green water convulvulus (a common vegetable), feeding rice
bran to the fish in one of his three ponds. Seeing the contrast, neighbouring
farmers will soon follow Noolit’s example.

Noolit began to raise fish four years ago. His ponds hold water all
year so he can keep a stock of fish through the dry season. With a permanent
supply of fish, he will not have to buy tilapia fingerlings again: he can
breed his own, and he will have enough fry to give some to his neighbours.

Noolit has planted the high banks around his ponds with vegetables and
trees: corn, chillies, sugar cane, cucumber, beans, papaya and banana. No
need to use pesticides on this one, said Noolit, indicating the water convulvulus,
nor on any of the other native vegetables, but vegetables for selling in
the market need regular treatment with pesticides. Although he tries to
use pesticides that will not harm the fish, the proximity of the treated
plants to the fish pond remains a problem.

The use of chemical pesticides is still restricted in the northeast
because they are both expensive and a hazard to health. Most farmers do
not use any pesticides, but those who do generally apply them selectively
to affected areas of the crop. They place balls of sticky rice soaked in
pesticides, for example, beside crab holes. Diseases, such as leaf spot
and sheath blight, and pests, such as stem borers and gall midges, are a
constant menace. Several pests spend part of their life cycle in or near
water where they are vulnerable to fish. The newly hatched larvae of a variety
of stem borer, for example, suspend themselves from silk and are blown from
plant to plant. Many of these airborne travellers end up in the water where
the fish eat them. Larvae of another variety of stem borer migrate by means
of a little boat made of rolled leaves, which fish snap up. Spores of sheath
blight, a disease of rice, survive the dry season buried in the soil; when
the rains float them to the surface, fish eat them. Fish play a significant
role in controlling many pests and diseases of rice. They also eat weeds
and algae that compete with rice for nutrients, carry diseases and act as
hosts for pests. Common carp feed mainly on flies and other small insects,
tilapia eat filamentous algae and diatoms and silver barb eat higher plants.

ALTERNATIVES TO FERTILISER

Fish wastes and the extra feed given to the fish, including manure,
rice bran, termites and vegetable waste, increase the amount of organic
fertiliser in the rice-fish field, while the movement of the fish over the
field spreads the fertiliser more evenly than the farmer can. As a result,
farmers need much less chemical fertiliser. In many cases they have found
that, even when they apply no chemical fertiliser, yields of rice are equal
to or higher than those of fields without fish. These are important factors
for subsistence farmers.

Rice-fish culture is an extension of Thai farmers’ traditional farming
and fishing activities. Because it costs little and carries few risks, small
farmers without savings or access to credit can afford to try it without
taking chances with their families’ already precarious livelihoods. To begin
with, farmers have to work much harder than if they planted only rice; in
the first year they must build ponds, banks and trenches. They also have
to buy fingerlings. Buying the fish fingerlings is the largest expense at
about 10 baht (20 pence) a 100. Farmers who keep a pond for parent fish
full in the dry season, however, can produce most of the fish fry they need
for following seasons. Tilapia begin to breed after three months and common
carp also spawn readily. Farmers sometimes buy extra food for their fish,
particularly rice bran, but household wastes, animal manure and plant debris
are free substitutes.

After the first season, farmers generally spend less on a field supporting
rice and fish than on a field where only rice grows because the fish provide
free manure and control pests. The profit from a rice-fish field can be
double or more that from an ordinary field, because of the better yield
of rice. The family can also sell any fish it does not eat, and fish fry
and fingerlings.

The success of rice-fish farming often encourages people to adopt other
integrated agricultural practices on their farms. A year-round source of
water ensures that vegetables and fruit trees, often planted on the sides
of ponds and the high banks of the rice-fish fields, will survive a drought.
Chickens and pigs also need water all year. They produce wastes that can
feed fish and fertilise rice fields. Some farmers raise their livestock
in pens built on stilts directly above the pond; fish congregate in the
shade of the pens and wait for morsels of manure and food to fall into the
water.

The farmers of northeast Thailand can no longer rely on the bounty of
forest and stream to supplement the produce of their rice fields. They must
work to recreate that natural abundance on their own small plots of land
– recycling resources, wasting nothing, improving the land through wise
and careful use. Rice-fish fields are an important part of the process.

Janet Durno is programme officer for CUSO Malaysia and editor of Sustainable
Agriculture Newsletter.

Further reading Doing Development, edited by Richard Holloway, Earthscan
Publications 1989.