Strengthening ties with Indonesia

Over the past decade, the Irrigated Rice Research Consortium (IRRC) has developed strong partnerships with national agricultural research and extension systems (NARES) in Indonesia. It currently has collaborative research on postproduction, nutrient management, crop establishment, and ecologically based management of weeds and rodents. Research on water management is planned to begin in 2008.

The development of mature technologies in site- specific nutrient management (SSNM), postproduction, and rodent management formed the foundation for the development of an IRRC Country Outreach Program (ICOP) in December 2006. The ICOP is a national initiative led by the Indonesian Center for Agricultural Technology and Development (ICATAD; has national mandate for validation and subsequent extension of new agricultural technologies) and the Indonesian Center for Rice Research (ICRR; has national mandate for research and knowledge management on rice). The ICOP has provided a focal point for the IRRC to respond to, and link with, initiatives by the government of Indonesia such as the development of agricultural business units at district levels throughout Indonesia as an entry point for demonstrations of new technologies (Prima Tani) and the national Rice Production Increase Program (P2BN).

The IRRC has played a pivotal role in two national initiatives developed in 2007. The first is on the dissemination of SSNM through the development of a technical team with a mandate for facilitating the dissemination of SSNM for rice within the framework of integrated crop management. This is an exciting initiative that includes ICRR and ICATAD with the IRRC Productivity and Sustainability Work Group leader, Dr. Roland Buresh, as an advisor. It builds on a Ministry of Agriculture decree for the national extension of site-specific fertilization of rice announced in 2006. The technical team will oversee the following activities:

(i) development of promotional materials in the local language for a standard SSNM recommendation for rice;
(ii) demonstration and elaboration of the SSNM approach in major rice-growing provinces (especially West Java, Central Java, East Java, North Sumatra, and South Sulawesi) through the Prima Tani initiative;
(iii) working through the Assessment Institutes for Agricultural Technologies (AIAT) at the provincial and district levels, and the local agricultural government agencies (e.g., Dinas Pertanian) in all major rice-growing provinces to develop guidelines and training materials harmonized to province- and district-level needs.

The second initiative was the holding of a national workshop on hermetic storage, which led to the development of an expert team with a national focus. The IRRC Postproduction Work Group leader Martin Gummert is an advisor to this expert team.

In addition to these national initiatives, provincial initiatives that have an adaptive research focus have been established. This is a bottom-up approach, in which researchers and extension agencies have developed a program of activities based on the important needs of and constraints to rice production identified by farmer groups. New projects in South Sumatera, South Sulawesi, and Southeast Sulawesi facilitate learning and adaptive management for irrigated rice. The IRRC aims to increase efficiency of rice production by 10% through matching crop management technologies with farmers’ needs.

Given the variability in the biophysical and social environment across the provinces, a necessary precursor to adoption is that the adaptive integrated crop management package be flexible enough to meet the needs and requirements of local farmers, but still general enough to allow future scaling out for sustainable and widespread adoption. Using a social anthropological platform, we will develop a strong understanding of the economic, social, and cultural factors that influence the farm-level adoption process. An important output of these studies will be the identification of technological limitations that affect the adoption and adaptation of technologies.
This approach has required the assembly of multistakeholder teams that span research to extension at the provincial level, to extension and outreach at the subdistrict or kabupaten level. The team includes researchers from the ICRR, IRRI, and local universities, extension specialists from AIATs and Dinas Pertanian in each of the provincial headquarters, and extension staff at the district and subdistrict levels.

The lead technologies are direct seeding, nutrient management, hermetic grain storage to reduce postharvest losses and maintain grain quality, and ecologically based weed and rodent management. Water management technologies such as alternate wetting and drying are in their infancy in Indonesia. Plans are in place to develop field trials to validate this technology in those provinces where water availability is a major constraint.

Ecologically based rodent management—Indonesia is a leader in SE Asia
Rodents are the number- one preharvest pest in Indonesia. Losses on average are 17% per year. To put this into perspective, a loss of 17% amounts to enough rice to feed 25 million people for a year. The ICRR rodent laboratory is a leader in rodent management in Southeast Asia. Through linkages with IRRI and scientists in Australia, they have developed a good understanding of the population ecology of specific rodent species, leading to effective community methods of control that are simple to apply and environment-friendly. Village-scale field trials in the lowland irrigated rice crops in Java in Indonesia resulted in a 50% reduction in the use of chemical rodenticides and increased yields by about 0.5 ton/hectare. The ICRR rodent specialists are linking with the IRRC in the adaptive research projects in Sumatra and Sulawesi.

Story and photos
by Grant Singleton (g.singleton@cgiar.org)

Country Outreach Programs archive