ÐÓ°ÉÔ­´´

In the paddy fields of Asia, you see them everywhere – people wearing
T-shirts or baseball caps, sometimes both, proclaiming loyalty to a brand
of insecticide. But the incongruous kit is fast becoming a symbol of the
past. For despite appearances, farmers harvesting irrigated rice are learning
how to rid their crops of pests without resorting to chemicals.

Over the past two years, many of these ‘wet rice’ farmers have cut the
amount of insecticide they use by up to 75 per cent, a feat that has helped
to persuade their governments to think seriously about banning those chemicals
they consider to be the most environmentally and medically damaging.

In the past, chemical fertilisers and insecticides were seen as essential
for managing the high-yielding strains of rice developed for irrigated farmland,
and government bans on them would have been almost unthinkable in a region
where food production struggles to keep pace with population growth (see
‘Searching for another strain’ for a summary of how chemicals became part
of traditional farming practices).

This agricultural philosophy is changing however as the benefits of
chemical-free farming become apparent. Yields have increased as farmers
have learnt how to cultivate their irrigated crops more carefully and as
the natural predators of the rice pests, which insecticides wiped out along
with the pests, have been able to re-establish themselves.

Chemicals reaction

But there’s too much at stake for the big chemicals companies to give
up without a fight. Asia accounts for more than 90 per cent of the world’s
rice production, and about three-quarters of its harvests come from paddy
fields. So the companies continue to mount aggressive marketing campaigns
and insist that their chemicals will always have a place in efficient farming.
They are also lobbying hard to overturn government bans on their products.

Reversing this agricultural revolution looks like it could be a formidable
task, however. A network of demonstration projects, sponsored by local and
internat-ional development agencies, is helping to spread the word among
Asia’s small-scale farmers that the strains of rice they’re using are naturally
resilient to most insects, and may even produce a greater yield if spraying
is cut out, particularly in the early part of the growing season.

‘For over 40 years farmers in Asia have relied on chemical pesticides
as though they’re medicines,’ says Kong Luen Heong, an entomologist at the
world’s largest rice research establishment, the International Rice Research
Institute in the Filipino capital of Manila. ‘But under normal situations
where pests are low, pesticide applications are wasteful.’

The IRRI ran one of the most successful demonstration projects last
year in Nueva Ecija, a province in central Luzon, the largest Filipino island.
The province is known as ‘the rice bowl of the Philippines’, not least
because farmers can grow two crops a year, one in the dry season from December
to May, and another in the wet season from June to October.

ÐÓ°ÉÔ­´´s at the institute faced a tough task. Their research had shown
that rice plants left untreated for the first 40 days of the growing season
developed more leaves and produced more grain. But out in the fields, farmers
were often spraying more than they needed to, encouraged by the chemicals
giants.

Companies such as Zeneca, Ciba-Geigy, Bayer and Hoechst would organise
half-day training courses, which could include sessions run under the slogan
‘Our product will kill them all’. At the end of the course, farmers were
given T-shirts, caps, cigarette lighters, pens and penknives embellished
with the corporate logo. And every day the farmers faced a continued assault
by the multinationals in the shape of intensive radio and billboard advertising
campaigns. ‘The companies are usually better organised and have more money
than government services to get their message across,’ says Paul Teng, a
pathologist at IRRI.

In 1992, the institute, working with the UN Food and Agriculture Organization
(FAO), the Department of Agriculture of the Philippines and local organisations,
asked 90 farmers from three villages (barangays) in the province, to take
part in a study into how insecticides affected their crops. These farmers
represented nearly a quarter of all rice farmers in these barangays. Their
farms range in size from 0.5 hectares to 10 hectares, the average being
just over 2 hectares.

After a pilot phase, which concluded in November 1992 that ‘grain yield
did not differ between untreated and insecticide-treated plots’, the main
study began in earnest at the start of the wet season in June last year.
(The pilot phase was also scheduled to coincide with the wet season because
farmers had expressed some reluctance to take part if it ran during the
dry season when they felt pests were more likely to attack crops not sprayed
with insecticide.) In the village of La Torre, scientists asked 30 farmers
not to apply insecticides for at least 40 days after planting their crop
– the normal growing season lasts 110 to 120 days.

In the nearby barangay of Matingkis, a second group of 30 farmers willingly
agreed to put into practice the ideas they had learnt on a training course
organised by the FAO. The course, which runs one day a week for 17 weeks,
taught them about integrated pest management (IPM) techniques. As well as
cutting down on insecticides, the techniques include returning to more traditional
cultivation practices such as crop rotation, fallow periods, tilling the
soil and weeding regularly.

Over the past forty years, say proponents of IPM, farmers have seen
insecticides as a short cut to these ‘good’ practices. The researchers counter
with evidence that the reduction in chemicals allows the natural enemies
of rice pests, such as spiders and beetles, to thrive. ‘The farmers trained
in IPM were very strong in their convictions that there are friendly insects
which are killed when they spray their plants,’ says IRRI scientist Filomeno
Medrano.

Control experiment

Finally, in the barangay of Santo Rosario, 30 farmers stuck to their
normal pest control methods: and thus provided a benchmark, or control experiment,
against which the effect of the new practices at the other farms could be
gauged. They sprayed their crops two, three or more times during each season,
mostly during the first 40 days after planting to control insects such as
green leaf-hoppers (Nephotettix, mostly N. virescens), zigzag leaf-hoppers
(Recilia dorsalis) and the brown plant-hopper (Nilaparvata lugens), which
eats the crop. Farmers also sprayed to control snails – in particular the
golden apple snail, which consumes young rice plants.

When the rice was harvested four months later, farmers in all three
groups reported yields averaging around 4.5 tonnes per hectare. IPM-trained
farmers in Matingkis had a slight edge on the others by producing an average
of nearly 5 tonnes. Farmers in Santo Rosario who sprayed insecticide fared
no better than those who spent nothing on insecticide. But some farmers
in La Torre and Matingkis who did not spray enjoyed increased yields: others
were pleased they maintained yields while not spending as much on insecticide.
‘At first we didn’t believe that no spraying was possible without losing
30 per cent of our yields,’ said a Matingkis farmer.

The results did not surprise the scientists. Nor did the fact that untrained
farmers enjoyed similar yields as those who had been trained. ‘We found
that inviting farmers to experiment and not spray for 40 days had much the
same result as 17 weeks of IPM training,’ says Heong.

By not using insecticides, farmers saved between 1200 and 1500 pesos
over the four-month season (about £30 to £37). This is a significant
amount: their average income per hectare each season is about 4000 pesos.
The extra output meant they had more rice to eat or to sell. And many were
persuaded beyond the confines of the project says Heong. ‘Many of the farmers
stopped spraying altogether, not just in the first 40 days but over the
entire growing season.’

So far there has been no great plague of pests in the villages but the
chemicals companies warn against dropping insecticides completely, arguing
that they still form an important part of crop management because the resistance
of the rice strains to pests normally covers only one type of pest.

A spokesperson for Zeneca says the insecticides they sell in the Philippines
‘are targeted primarily at green leaf-hoppers and leaf-feeding Lepidoptera,
pests for which many (rice strains), have little or no resistance’. Hoechst
agrees: ‘Resistances are often not 100 per cent. Another problem is that
bred resistances are normally overcome by the pest in two or three years.’

While IPM techniques do not advocate totally dropping insecticides,
sales slumped so heavily in La Torre and Matingkis after the project that
cooperatives have now reduced their stocks. In these two barangays, farmers
say they’ve noticed an increase in the number of native snails (Pila), shellfish,
crabs, frogs and fish in rice paddies and irrigation canals. These are harmless.

Peter Kenmore, the manager of FAO’s Intercountry Programme for pest
control in south and southeast Asia, says a similar drop in the use of insecticides
is now happening in many parts of Asia. He says that the IPM programme has
encouraged rice farmers in 8000 villages across nine countries, including
Vietnam, Indonesia and Bangladesh, to cut back drastically on insecticides
over the past six years. Kenmore says yields have increased by an average
of 10 per cent.

Some governments have banned certain insecticides, so far without an
increase in pests. In Indonesia, 57 varieties were banned in 1987. Since
then, the use of insecticides has dropped by over 50 per cent, rice output
has increased by 12 per cent and only about 20 000 hectares, instead of
the original 200 000 hectares, are infested by the brown plant-hopper as
the pest’s natural predators have reasserted themselves.

Chemicals companies are now facing action by other Asian governments.
In January, the Filipino government banned two pesticides made by Hoechst,
declaring that they posed unacceptable environmental and health risks. One
was the insecticide endosulfan, sold under the name Thiodan, the most widely
used by the country’s farmers, and the other was an organotin fungicide,
sold under the name Brestan. Hoescht is appealing to the government to reverse
its decision, claiming that none of the company’s products poses any such
risks.

Over half a million Asian rice farmers are now skilled in IPM, estimates
Kenmore. The message that indiscriminate use of insecticides does not produce
higher yields seems to be getting through. The rise in awareness is providing
small-scale farmers with higher returns at the expense of com-pany sales,
giving rice output on the continent a useful breathing space.

The only problem is that the T-shirts and baseball caps are beginning
to fray.

John Madeley is the author of Trade and the Poor: The Impact of International
Trade on Developing Countries (1992), published by Intermediate Technology,
London, £10.95.

* * *

Searching for another strain

In the 1960s, scientists from the International Rice Research Institute
in Manila encouraged the use of fertilisers and pesticides. They developed
a high-yielding strain of rice, known as IR8, to make the most of the two
growing seasons every year, and told farmers that chemicals would help to
ensure bumper harvests.

At first, the recipe seemed to be working well. IR8 produced annual
yields of up to 6 tonnes per hectare, against the 2 to 2.5 tonnes that farmers
had come to expect from their traditional strains. By 1982, however, it
was a different story.

Test plots at the institute were yielding smaller harvests of the IR8
variety of rice, down every year from the mid-1960s by an average of 0.2
tonnes per hectare in the wet season and by more in the dry season. ‘The
most commonly attributed cause of this decline is the greatly increased
insect and disease pressure to which IR8 is not resistant,’ says Prabhu
Pingali, an agricultural economist at the IRRI.

The institute responded by developing resilient new strains, including
IR64, which is now one of the most commonly used by local farmers. Yields
have continued to decline, however.

Ten years on, scientists have found they need around 40 per cent more
nitrogen fertiliser to produce the same amount of rice as when IR64 was
first introduced. To make matters worse, the institute calculates that
rice output in Asia will need to increase by 70 per cent over the next 25
years to keep pace with the continent’s growing population.

The IRRI is now trying to develop a new rice plant to cope with the
reduced amount of nitrogen in the soil, but this is unlikely to reach the
farmers’ fields this century. This is why the institute’s scientists are
looking at current working practices to see how, in the meantime, farmers
can get more from their fields with existing varieties.