Author: Robert Hijmans

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SRI: does it work or what?

The System of Rice Intensification (SRI) strikes again, now on Java and Bali:

Farmers across Indonesia have bumper rice harvests thanks to a revolutionary method: 50 percent increase in yield with just one 10th of the seed, virtually no chemical fertilizers and little water.

SRI is a system which consists of transplanting widely spaced very young individual rice plants, using organic fertilizers, and not permanently saturating the fields with water. The method was developed — on the basis of existing farmer practices — by a priest in Madagascar in the 1980s, and it has since found a prophet in Norman Uphoff. It is still used in Madagascar, but mainly by larger farmers, as it is too labor intensive for the smaller farmers (who do the work for the large farmers). Or so I was told when I visited there earlier this year.

The BBC reported a doubling of yields in Nepal. George Bush was briefed about it during his visit to India. Luigi wrote about it a year ago. And now the reports of bumper crops in Indonesia.

All is for the best then? Not really: the whole thing is rather controversial. Tom Sinclair said this about it in 2004:

SRI appears to be only the latest in a family of unconfirmed field observations (UFOs) (…). While there is an abundance of “sightings,” they are anecdotal and reported by people who have minimum understanding of the basic scientific principles being challenged by such reports. In many cases, mysterious circumstances are invoked to explain the miraculous.

In a rather thorough review, in 2006, McDonald, Hobbs and Riha found that it sometimes works (in Madagascar), but that generally yields are 11% lower with SRI, not higher.

What is one to think then? Do newspapers blindly follow NGOs, and do farmers say what is scripted? Another case of overselling? Or is this a true farmer/priest led breakthrough, which scientist at fancy universities and research institutes just do not get?

There certainly has been overselling, with claims of unrealistically high rice yields (e.g., 15 tons per hectare). However, there could be circumstances where SRI does have benefits, for example on some problem soils (with iron toxicity), and perhaps in other low potential situations as well.

When SRI ‘works’, it is hard to know what farmers really did. Perhaps planting density was not quite that low, and organic fertilizer were applied at very high. What is SRI being compared with anyway? A degenerate farm, or a fully optimized ‘modern’ farm?

More field trials are planned. I am not optimisitic, but let’s hope that they will provide some clarity about the conditions under which SRI increases yields (or not). The dispute would be settled, and we’d have more rice for less resources.

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Nature with a capital N

The Prince of Wales is at it again. In The Times he writes about our need to reconnect with Nature.

You may believe that I have some reactionary obsession with returning to a kind of mock medieval, forelock-tugging past. All I am saying is that we simply cannot contend with the global environmental crises we face by relying on clever technological “fixes” on their own.

His enemy is Modernism. His answer is Harmony. “In denying the invisible ‘grammar of harmony’ we create cacophony and dissonance.”

Complexity is key to life. The diversity that made up this complexity was bulldozed in the pursuit of simplicity and convenience, creating an appeal that continues to fuel the conspicuous consumption and throwaway societies we see everywhere.

Not a Darwinistic struggle but a community effort, then: “Biology shows that (…) life seeks balance. Every organism works together to produce a harmonic whole.” Well, I try.

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Neocolonial land grab?

Sue Branford writes in The Guardian that:

China, South Korea, Japan, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and other nations have been buying and leasing huge quantities of foreign land for the production of food or biofuels.



A couple of days ago, Luigi mentioned in a footnote of a post on Malagasy coffee, that Daewoo is to lease 1.3 million ha in Madagascar. Apparently to produce maize. The Financial Times reported:

“It is totally undeveloped land which has been left untouched. And we will provide jobs for them by farming it, which is good for Madagascar,” said Mr Hong [of Dawoo]. The 1.3m hectares of leased land is almost half the African country’s current arable land of 2.5m hectares.

There might be some scope for agricultural expansion on the Malagasy high plateau, but 1.3 million ha of good arable land that is untouched? Except by the local population, of course.

Not quite, and not so fast, responded the government:

The contract (…) concerns only the facilitation of a land search. We are talking about a search for 100,000 hectares … It is only after this stage that the rest of the process will continue.

Grain has a report, and a Google notebook with clippings.

FAO’s Jacques Diouf talks about neo-colonialism. There is also this Guardian article on resentment in Laos. Expect more of that to come.

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Truth or consequences?

According to John Ioannidis, most published research findings are false ((Ioannidis is likely of Greek extraction, perhaps even of Cretan blood?)). This is because of the Winner’s Curse: scientists need to oversell to get heard, published and funded ((Young, Ioannidis & Al-Ubaydli in PLoS Medicine; and discussed in The Economist.)).

Does this affect agrobiodiversity research?

Yes, it does.

Take this press release that came in today: “Research finds way to double rice crops in drought-stricken areas.” Right. Perhaps there were some extreme experimental conditions where this is true, but I find it hard to believe there is a magic set of markers that will let you select for double rice yield under normal drought conditions relevant for farmers. I think that’s a bit much. Perhaps the typical benefit might be as high as 10%, but that does not make for a good headline (even though it would be a staggering result, really) ((The paper’s abstract speaks of an effect of 40% in the extreme case, that’s more reasonable. I wonder if 40% means doubling to the person who wrote the press release )) .

If only, then we could also throw in the Hardy gene, for another 50% boost.

Here’s another example of overselling, say Stuart Orr and colleagues ((Stuart Orr, James Sumberg, Olaf Erenstein & Andreas Oswald. 2008. Funding international agricultural research and the need to be noticed. A case study of NERICA rice. Outlook on Agriculture 37:159-168.)) in a recent review article on NERICA — “New Rice for Africa”.

NERICA is a group of rice varieties produced at the Africa Rice Center (WARDA). They have been produced after a breakthrough in rice genetics, the use of embryo rescue to cross Asian (Oryza sativa) with West African (O. glaberrima) rice. The offspring of these crosses has been back-crossed a number of times with sativa parents such as IR64.

NERICA varieties have been referred to as “miracle rice” and are said to be higher yielding, have higher quality, compete better with weeds, be more stress resistant, etc. etc. etc. This has created a lot of interest, enthusiasm and funding for their continued development and dissemination. Orr says that all the hoopla about NERICA is not backed up by the (published) facts. This perhaps explains why adoption of NERICA varieties is not what was hoped for.

Wopereis and colleagues ((MCS Wopereis, A Diagne, J Rodenburg, M Sié & EA Somado. 2008. Why NERICA is a successful innovation for African farmers. A response to Orr et al. from the Africa Rice Center. Outlook on Agriculture 37:169-176.)) defend WARDA and NERICA saying that NERICAs perform well, that there are new published data, that the outlandish claims were made by others, and that there is nothing wrong with enthusiasm.

I do not know how good NERICAs are, but some farmers like them, which is good. And WARDA definitely has created a renewed interest in breeding rice varieties for Africa, where many, it seems, had given up. That’s good too. Better still would be to move beyond the NERICA brand, and try and disseminate a broad and diverse set of varieties. Let the farmers decide.

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Yes, maybe, no, yes: Transgenes in Mexican maize, after all

Update: The link below was behind a paywall. A new one, via SciDev.net, seems to be open access.
Elena Álvarez-Buylla and co-workers have found transgenes from genetically modified maize in landraces in Mexico. Their paper is to be published in Molecular Ecology, but for now we have this news article in Nature.

The evolving story has multiple layers, including the science ethics controversy. Quist and Chapela published the same finding in Nature in 2001, but their methods were questioned, and the journal made an unprecedented statement saying there had been insufficient evidence to justify the publication. Some saw the hand (and money) of Big Biotech in this ((Conflicts around a study of Mexican crops)), and in the subsequent denial of tenure to Chapela at the University of California, Berkeley (that was later overturned). Now Nature reports that the Álvarez-Buylla paper was not published in the prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) because the journal’s editor-in-chief Randy Schekman, also at Berkeley, considered that “the report could gain undue exposure in the press due to a political or other environmental agenda.”

We’ll see if the current paper settles the scientific controversy. Ortiz-García and colleagues did not find any transgenes in a large sample in 2003/4; a result that was found worthy of publication in PNAS. The Nature news article suggests that Álvarez-Buylla found the transgenes in only one field (out of more than 100 sampled), and that this field was also sampled by Quist and Chapela. So are we talking about a single farmer with a cousin in Iowa sending seed remittances? Or about a relatively small fraction of maize plants across the country?

It seems entirely obvious that if there are transgenes in U.S. maize, these will spread down to Mexico. Someone needs to find them first, for sure, but the more relevant question is not if transgenes spread, but rather: which, where, what mechanism(s) (long versus short distance dispersal), how fast, how much, how persistent, and what are the consequences, if any? The term “pollution” is used a lot in this debate. Me, I do not believe in pure races.