Priorities for Rice Research - A View from Developing Countries

by Vo-Tong Xuan

During the past three decades, much scientific progress has been generated by both international and national agricultural research organizations. Rice farmers have been trying to adopt some of these technical innovations to produce more food for mankind and to some extent improve our meager income. In some countries like my own, Vietnam, we have high-yielding lowland rice varieties developed by the International Rice Research Institute, and upland rice varieties developed with the assistance of ORSTOM. With appropriate encouragements by government policies, farmers have been producing enough rice not only for our own consumption, but also a surplus to share with other countries of the world.

However, even with bountiful rice production in some regions, the biggest problem of rice farmers remains to be solved: poverty. The root cause of our rice farmers' poverty is their limited capability in managing their resources for sustainable development. In some countries, the trend in food security is declining. The movement of rice from one country to another during the last few years has upset the supply as well as the price, resulting in an adverse effect on the poor city dwellers.

The poverty in the rural areas of Asia, Africa and Latin America can be attributed to the very fact that a majority of our farmers are not the best entrepreneurs of their own human and physical resources. Therefore, they cannot integrate fully and successfully the various technologies generated by many specialized research institutes in their respective countries. Looking beyond our countries we find the various international agricultural research centers trying their best to develop new technologies for us, but they are all too specialized to help us integrate their various components into our household farming systems.

Our poorest rice farmers are living in remote upland or mountainous regions, or in remote coastal regions. If transport is no longer a problem, we need not grow any rice at all in these regions. But in the next two decades, while our population continues to grow, we are not sure whether our respective governments can afford to develop sufficient infrastructure to eradicate our "being remote" status. Therefore, we will continue to grow rice with whatever amount of water the rains give us, and we will need to clear more forests and mangroves for new rice lands as our old rice lands become less productive.

Our more fortunate rice farmers in irrigated areas are trying to make the maximum out of the irrigation facilities by intensifying production with modern inputs. At the present time, intensified rice cultivation is costly because we are still using fertilizers and pesticides ineffectively-- knowing that we will continue to pollute our soil and water but we cannot avoid it..

Rice farmers in developing countries wish that more and genuine scientific attention would be given to less favorable areas to improve our livelihood through sustainable rice-based farming systems in each of our diverse agroecoregions.

In rainfed areas we wish to have:

• better rice varieties yielding 5 to 8 t/ha/year; having better eating quality which can tolerate drought, soil acidity or salinity, soil deficiency in phosphorus and some minor elements, land with deep water, requent infestation of major insect pests and rice diseases.
• better ways of establishing our crop stand during its early stages in order to withstand the erratic rainfalls;
• innovative ways to make optimum use of rain water for our crop production;
• better and sustainable ways to keep our rice soils forever fertile and keep soil erosion at minimum;
• more environmentally sound procedures to manage our pest situation in the rice fields;
• post harvest assistance for harvesting and drying our crops.

In irrigated areas we wish to have:

• high quality rice varieties having yields of 10 to 12 t/ha/year that will be resistant to most common insects and diseases in various rice growing areas in our respective countries;
• efficient techniques for using irrigation water resources in order to avoid salinity or acid water pollution;
• better and more sustainable ways to keep our rice soils forever fertile in order to increase crop production with less input uses;
• more efficient ways to manage the pests in our fields in order to attain higher yields while minimizing the pollution of our soils and water;
• post harvest technologies for harvesting and drying in rainy season.

Overall, we are dreaming of the day the scientific communities could engage in more realistic research into the root cause of low income resulting from rice growing, particularly by the monoculture rice farmers. We hope your research results can soon show us how to earn more income with rice production. We are feeding billions of people at a great sacrifice since rice cannot be sold at high price. Are there farming systems that integrate well the best results from each disciplinary research to help poor farmers how to maximize our resources sustainably? We hope rice research in the future will fit well into our farming enterprises, not just another period of rice monoculture.

Vo-Tong Xuan, University of Cantho, Viet Nam.
Paper presented at the Festival of Rice, Montpellier, France, Oct. 6-8, 1995.

Return to Table of Contents