IRRI's achievements & successes

One of IRRI's most important roles is to develop new technologies that will help improve the lives of poor rice farmers and consumers. These technologies are then offered--as international public goods--to IRRI's partners in the rice-producing and -consuming nations of the world for them to:

Reports in this section identify and explain technologies developed by IRRI and its partners that already are achieving substantial impact in a number of countries as a result of this capacity-building process.

Please take a look at the archive.

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Live and let live (Vietnam, Thailand, Laos)
This chapter excerpt from the new book, Sharing rice for peace and prosperity in the Greater Mekong Subregion, by Peter Fredenburg and Bob Hill, documents that spraying insecticides on young crops is worse than useless and how scientists have borrowed mass media techniques to convey this information to farmers.

(pdf version)

Rice farmers are like most people, observes K.L. Heong, deputy head of the Entomology and Plant Pathology Division of the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI). They instinctively abhor bugs, especially in their fields. This makes them easy targets for unscrupulous insecticide marketers who exploit their fears.

“We found that farmers wildly overestimate their real or potential losses to insect pests, usually by a power of 10,” he reports. “And most of their insecticide applications are ineffective or even counterproductive, needlessly threatening their health, reducing their income, and polluting the environment.”

Heong first started documenting this in 1994, in collaboration with national scientists in Vietnam and elsewhere. The researchers found that many Asian rice farmers apply insecticides at the wrong time and target insects whose feeding has no effect on yield. “What appeared to motivate farmers to spray insecticides during the early stages were misconceptions, lack of knowledge, and biased estimations of losses due to pests,” Heong explained.

Worse, these sprays disrupt natural biological control and thereby create an environment that can favor more destructive pest species. These secondary infestations prompt farmers to spray even more late in the season. Many of the chemicals used are highly hazardous to human health and the environment and so are banned in the developed world.

To convey their findings to Asian farmers, the partners distilled the complex scientific details into a simple rule of thumb—“No early insecticide spray”—and launched in 2000 an award-winning popular media campaign that used short radio skits supported by leaflets and posters to encourage farmers in the Mekong Delta to stop spraying insecticides early in the cropping cycle.

“We had actors perform a series of brief comedies, mixing solid scientific facts with rustic situations that would make the audience laugh,” Heong explained. “We were pleasantly surprised to find that these simple, humorous messages fixed themselves in the minds of farmers.”

The campaign in the Mekong Delta persuaded almost 2 million rice farmers to sharply curtail their insecticide use, saving input costs and protecting the environment without harming rice yield. On World Environment Day in June 2001, the researchers launched a similar campaign in the Thai province of Singburi, on the central plain 150 kilometers north of Bangkok.

Singburi is in the heart of Thailand’s rice bowl, where crop follows crop in an endless cycle. The No Early Spray campaign chanced to coincide with a series of farmer field schools conducted by the Thai Department of Agricultural Extension with support from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. The aim was to train local extension officers in community-based integrated pest management. This training and the No Early Spray campaign worked so well together that delighted extension personnel are unwilling to attribute success to either project without mentioning the other.

 

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