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More to rice intensification than meets the SRI

We’ve written a fair bit about the System of Rice Intensification, or SRI, and our most recent little piece sparked what passes for a vociferous debate over at Facebook (which of course I cannot now link to). As I recall it all seemed to hinge on whether there was one SRI or several different systems, plus the fact that no-one had directly compared any kind of SRI with the alternatives. And some weird stuff about organics crept in too. Anyway, shortly after that, a piece came through the People, Land Management and Ecosystem Conservation (PLEC) News and Views listserv that reported on a close look at two different interventions to improve rice production in Timor Leste. With PLEC editor Harold Brookfield’s permission, we are pleased to repost it here.

Since East Timor’s independence as Timor Leste, the new nation has experienced an unparalleled concentration of ‘development industry’ specialists and donors determined to shape the country according to differing ideas of how development should proceed (PLECserv 118, Oct 05, 2010). Underlying this variety of styles is a familiar distinction between approaches that seek to impose change from without versus ones that foster change from within. But if this distinction is to be instructive, we need to see how each is produced in practice.

ResearchBlogging.org In a recent paper, Australian National University anthropologists Chris Shepherd and Andrew McWilliam contrast two examples of rice development from Timor Leste. 1 The first scheme, initiated in 2008-2009, trialed and promoted the adoption of a technology package based on hybrid rice, mechanization, and chemical inputs within a development enclosure in the village of Tapo-Memo. The second focuses on the ‘Seeds of Life’ (SoL) programme led by the Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research, which has been testing open-pollinated rice varieties in a large number of on-farm demonstration trials across six districts between 2006 and 2010. Both interventions have been managed by the national government. Each deployed technologies that were ‘external’ to the farmers’ world, relied extensively on scientific networks and were executed via a clear demarcation of roles between extension agents and participating farmers. Yet the way the various elements of the interventions were assembled has produced markedly contrasting farmer engagements.

Using three different anthropological perspectives Shepherd and McWilliam lead the reader through a nuanced account of the two interventions. The Tapo-Memo project is a joint initiative of the East Timorese and Indonesian Ministries of Agriculture, and is directed to the market-oriented food production sector. The project drew on advanced hybrid technologies and high input management techniques supervised by Indonesian extension experts. In its first year, farmers were offered USD100 incentive payments to work collectively and ensure regular weeding and crop protection. An area of 200 hectares of demonstration gardens was carefully fenced, tilled, fertilized, sown, weeded and sprayed with pesticides. The resulting harvest produced more than three times that of local varieties and, with much enthusiasm, the local media highlighted the prospects of an expanded farmer uptake in the following year, with generalised yields as high as 8 and 12 tons/ha. These expectations did not eventuate and the project has struggled to reproduce its initial success.

Following a period of adaptive trials under Timorese conditions of seed germplasm sourced from IRRI, the Seeds of Life initiative consciously limited its technological input to on-farm trials of high yielding open pollinated rice varieties and actively encouraged participating farmers to maintain their existing farming practices. Accompanying technological improvements were downplayed in the face of reported farmer resistance to fertilizers and pesticides, as well as unreliable extension and input supply chains. With yields approaching 5 tonnes/ha and preferred Timorese eating qualities of softness, oiliness, and fragrance, the new ‘nakroma’ seed was well received by local farmers. Women reported that the new rice variety required no additional preparation time for family meals. Nakroma has subsequently become a prominent feature of local rice production especially in areas where agroecological conditions have proved particularly favourable.

These comparative interventions draw attention to the distinctive approaches and technologies deployed. The point is not that SoL was inherently successful whereas the Tapo-Memo project was not. Each intervention presented its own range of possibilities and constraints. The Tapo-Memo project required more radical adjustment of existing farming practice, including group farming methods, highly capitalized inputs and chemical agents, tractor tillage, monetary incentives and an openness to specialized extension. In contrast, SoL’s approach was delinked from a complex technological package, relied minimally on outside expertise, availed itself of existing networks, sought not to create new groups, offered no incentives, and presented no more than a few square meters of risk to farmers. This meant that there was considerably less scope for conflict, untoward appropriation, or subsequent discontent. In fact, by limiting the very range of what had to be negotiated and/or appropriated, the SoL approach generated conditions that 1) enabled farmers to trial seed as part of a data-collection regime, and 2) left farmers free to adopt the trialed seed if they felt like it.

As well as exploring rice intervention from three anthropological perspectives, the authors introduce some conceptual material from science studies. Central to their analysis is the idea of ‘boundary objects’. These at once material and conceptual objects, they say, are negotiated across social worlds (development actors and farmers) and have the qualities of both flexibility and robustness such that cooperative work can take place even if the participants have different approaches. The SoL program, it appears, had plasticity and robustness in all the right places allowing for cooperation among the parties and a relatively successful farmer appropriation. While the Tapo-Memo scheme also had qualities of plasticity and robustness, it had too much flexibility in some places (use of money incentives was inappropriate) and too much robustness in others (the technological packages required disciplined implementation in order to work). These weaknesses jeopardized the success of the project. The authors conclude that analysis of boundary objects may prove to be a useful conceptual tool in understanding the dynamics of different types of necessarily standardized interventions and how these interventions are appropriated by farmers whose agricultural practices are highly heterogeneous.

Thanks again to Harold Brookfield and PLEC. SoL has a website, and photos on Flickr, but they reserve all rights and haven’t been active for over a year, so we haven’t tried to ask permission. The Tapo-Memo project is all but invisible on the internet. Any additional information would be welcome.

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Brainfood: Genetic isolation and climate change, Not a Sicilian grape variety, Sicilian oregano, Good wine and climate, Italian landraces, Amazonian isolation, Judging livestock, Endosymbionts and CCD, Herbal barcodes, Finnish barley, Wild pigeonpea, Protected areas, Tree hybrids

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How grafting a plum tree led to an obsession

Joseph Needham is known as the Man Who Put the S in Unesco. And he did indeed successfully lobby Julian Huxley for the inclusion of science in the mandate of that new-fangled UN organization. More importantly, however, he is also known for his monumental work Science and Civilization in China. Eventually stretching over 27 volumes and comprising more than three million words, Needham worked on the project for the best part of fifty years, from the Caius College, Cambridge room which is now inhabited by Stephen Hawking, as it happens. And the volumes have continued coming out after Needham’s death in 1995.

But what possessed him to set off on such a journey, a journey which would consume his whole life? Well, it’s a fascinating story, and beautifully recounted by Simon Winchester, who wrote a recent biography of Needham, in a podcast in TVO’s Big Ideas series. If you’ve got an hour spare, listen to the whole thing. If you don’t, skip to 38 minutes in, and just listen to Winchester’s description of the epiphany Needham had in 1942 in a Kunming garden, a matter of only hours into his first visit to China, after five years of obsessively studying the language back in Cambridge at the knee 2 of his remarkable Chinese biochemist mistress. Needham had an interesting, complicated private life. Anyway, he was there on a mission from the British government to report on the needs of Chinese universities during the difficult years of the Japanese occupation, when they had in effect migrated west, trying desperately to continue functioning under siege.

That epiphany has to do with agricultural biodiversity, and is the reason why I’m talking about this here. Although of course Needham’s work includes huge accounts of botany, agriculture and agroindustries, forestry, cooking and food sciences, and one of these days I’ll have to delve into them to see what they say about numbers of varieties in the past. But one thing at a time, what Needham saw in that wartime garden was an…

…old Chinese gardener in ragged blue coat and trousers with a wispy white beard who potters around smoking one of these long pipes with a tiny bowl — and a mongol cap, periodically performing elaborate grafting techniques on the plum tree. 3

Comparing that technique to what he remembered his father doing in their London SW11 garden many years before brought home to him how differently they did things in China. But there was something else. Here’s Winchester:

Perhaps the Chinese not only did their grafting differently but may have done this different kind of grafting very much earlier than anyone in Europe had done anything like it. Perhaps this old man’s technique was thousands of years old. Further still, quite possibly Needham could prove it was thousands of years old by researching old Chinese books on botany — which of course he could now read with ease.

He did research the problem of course — for fifty years. And it’s true, he did prove the antiquity of the grafting techniques that he saw. And of many other Chinese inventions too, thousands of them. That was the project of Science and Civilization in China. It changed the West’s perception of the Middle Kingdom forever, and the idea of it was born watching an old man top graft a plum tree in a Kunming garden.

There’s a coda to the story. The ashes of Joseph Needham and his two wives (both interesting characters in their own right), whom he outlived, were commingled on his death and spread under a Chinese plum tree growing in the gardens of the institute named after him in Cambridge, and which continues his work.

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Ecological intensification at IBC18

Doyle McKey‘s presentation at IBC18 sounds like a doozy. I was alerted to it by Eve Emshwiller on Twitter, who said, among other things:

McKey: ecological intensification, not just green revolution model “intensification” of ag needed. #ibc18

Music to our ears, of course. Here’s a summary from the (very large) Abstract Book of the congress.

The evolutionary ecology of plant chemical defenses in agroecosystems: past, present and future.

McKey, Gleadow, Cavagnaro

Plant chemical defenses mediate interactions between plants, their herbivores and pathogens, and the naturalenemies of these plant parasites. In domesticated plants, farmers are added to this web of interactions. Plant defenses have been subjected to complex selection pressures under domestication, leading both to decreases and to increases in their concentration, and to shifts in their intra-plant distribution. This complexity is explained partly by variation in the kinds of plants farmers chose to domesticate, and partly by the kinds of environments that nature and farmers combined to create in agroecosystems. Today, the interactions mediated by plant defenses are affected by changing climate, rising temperature and increased atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide. These changes can threaten food security by lowering not only the production of food but also its nutritional quality. The strategies proposed to counter these threats envisage a wide range of ways, not mutually exclusive, to manage biotic interactions in agroecosystems. These include modifying crop plants’ natural constitutive and induced defenses and other sources of resistance; engineering crop plants to express novel defenses; and increasing the effectiveness of ‘integrated pest management’ (through natural enemies, other components of agrobiodiversity and pesticides) by modifying the structure and functioning of agroecosystems. In this presentation, we examine these proposed solutions through the evolutionary ecologist’s lens: What are their respective costs and benefits, and how do these affect the ecological situations in which each could help farmers produce sufficient amounts of high-quality food? How can the coevolutionary dynamics of interactions between crop plants and their biotic environment be managed to avert catastrophic fluctuation of yield?