154 | Agricultural Innovation in Developing East Asia
BOX D.4
Sustainable rice production practices A broad array of production, natural resource, and farm management techniques can help reduce or eliminate the adverse environmental impacts of rice. The Sustainable Rice Platform brings many stakeholders together to develop guidelines and strategies that will be broadly applicable. Input use efficiency. Initiatives promoting input use efficiency have had major benefits for farmers. In 1986, the president of Indonesia abolished subsidies for pesticide use in rice production and established an integrated pest management (IPM) program. These changes led to fewer pest outbreaks, higher rice yields, less money spent by farmers on pesticides, and more than $1 billion saved by the Indonesian government over 10 years. Although IPM has faced challenges in scaling up (small farm size, knowledge-intensive approach), the approach has empowered some farmers to reduce the use of pesticides, especially the most toxic ones, by using them as a last resort and favoring reliance on prevention, biological controls, and, when necessary, lower-toxicity, lower-residue, and high- efficiency pesticides. IPM has also contributed to reduced pesticide use in the Philippines. Nutrient management tools. In various parts of the region, nutrient management tools, including ones that bypass soil testing, have proven effective at reducing fertilizer use, along with waste and imbalances. An example of this is the q uestionnaire-based Rice Nutrient Manager tool developed by the International Rice Research Institute for use by farmers and extension workers via mobile devices (Buresh et al. 2012). Alternate wetting and drying (AWD). Rice requires improving water productivity, and water-saving irrigation technologies have been adopted, such as AWD irrigation, which has widely been implemented in many areas in China. In AWD, alternating flood and nonflood conditions are practiced in the field. The depth of standing water will gradually decrease after irrigation, and when it drops 15 centimeters below the surface of the soil, the field is irrigated to a depth of approximately 5 centimeters. AWD has been shown to reduce water requirements by up to 40 percent and greenhouse gas emissions by 20–90 percent (Lampayan et al. 2015; Linquist, Snyder, and Anderson 2015). However,
according to a recent meta-analysis, AWD adoption remains limited because of its negative effects on rice yield (Carrijo, Lundy, and Linquist 2016). Climate-smart agriculture (CSA) practices. In Vietnam, the main two CSA practices for rice include a system of rice intensification (adoption rate less than 30 percent) and use of flood-tolerant rice varieties (adoption rate 30–60 percent). Changes in fertilizer use, together with AWD (a technique that uses less water than the more conventional permanent flooding), have in some instances more than halved emissions of carbon dioxide equivalent while saving water and improving yields (Thu et al. 2016). Methane emissions from rice paddies can also be lessened using improved rice cultivars and fertilization techniques, including ones that use rice straw, thereby averting burning (Adhya et al. 2014; Thu et al. 2016). In the Philippines, given the different growing conditions, CSA for rice covers a different set of practices, such as water harvesting and use of site-specific nutrient management and pest management practices. In China, the CSA in rice production concerns adjustment of cropping regions, dense planting, use of nonflooded irrigation, and use of superior rice cultivars. For years China has pursued breeding of super rice varieties and has adopted improved nursery practices and use of AWD in rice fields (similar to SRI). Hillier and colder regions in China have also adopted so-called fixed-film rice production, that is, maintenance of saturated—not flooded—fields covered with a plastic film, which can reduce more than half of emissions. Landscape initiatives. Landscape-scale rice initiatives are less common. In one Cambodian example, farmers living on or adjacent to protected areas received higher rice prices in exchange for protecting species such as the endangered giant ibis. Farmers who agreed to limit their hunting and forest clearing practices were able to sell their output through the Wildlife Friendly™ brand. The project succeeded in decreasing habitat clearing by 50 percent among participating farmers (Nielsen, Ashish, and Clements 2015). In the Philippines, small-scale communal irrigation schemes created better-paying jobs that continued
