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Irrigated Rice Research Consortium

Ecological rodent management workshop in Vietnam

A planning workshop of the project on Sustainable Implementation of Ecological Rodent Management (SIERM) in Vietnam was held in Ho Chi Minh City on 14-15 February 2006. This new 3.5-year project, funded by the Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research (ACIAR), builds on previous ACIAR projects in Vietnam on ecologically based rodent management. It focuses on developing effective pathways for delivery of integrated ecologically based methods for rodent management to poor farmers in the Red and Mekong river deltas of Vietnam.

The main counterpart agencies in Vietnam are the Plant Protection Department (PPD), the provincial sub-PPDs, the National Institute for Plant Protection, and World Vision. Later this year, the project will also be implemented in South Sulawesi, Indonesia.

In irrigated rice crops, rodent pests are the number-one preharvest pest in Indonesia and among the top three pests in Vietnam. Rodent pests directly affect the lives of poor farmers in these countries—damaging the growing crops, causing postharvest losses, transmitting diseases to people and livestock, contaminating food and water, and damaging buildings and other possessions.

Rodent impacts are greatest among the poorer communities, who lack the capacity to absorb either the chronic losses or the occasional acute losses associated with periodic rodent population eruptions.

(Left to right) Dr. Peter Roebeling, a resource economist, Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO); Dr. Emma Jakku, a sociologist, CSIRO; Dr. Florencia Palis; Dr. Peter Brown, a wildlife biologist, CSIRO; and Dr. Grant Singleton.