Climate-adaptive rice varieties are empowering farmers in South and Southeast Asia. The new breeds of rice, which are tolerant of water stress, combined with water-conserving crop management techniques, will mean bigger harvests and higher incomes for farmers, and perhaps contribute to food security in the Asia and Pacific region.
Thousands of rice farmers tilling rainfed and drought-stricken lands in South and Southeast Asia can now claim the productivity of their lands back. This was after climate-ready rice varieties and technology were tested and distributed to thousands of farmers in these regions.
Rice is the staple food for most countries in Asia, or for more than 50% of the world’s population, and plays a vital role in achieving food security in the region. In Asia, where most of the world’s rice is grown, the average rice farmer is considered a smallholder, working an average of a hectare of land. Most farmers live in rural communities and don’t have safety nets or crop loss insurance. As if these are not bad enough, climate change adds another layer of challenges to rice farmers.
When climate change-related weather scenarios like prolonged drought or monsoons hit, rice paddies in marginal areas in South Asia and Southeast Asia become unproductive due to flooding, drought, or high saline levels because of seawater encroachment. Taken at a broader view, since global food demand is expected to increase by 60% by 2050, climate change is posing a serious threat to the food security of Asia. If mitigation and adaptation measures are not undertaken, climate change will strain the global food supply, and push Asia’s vulnerable population deeper into poverty.
Interventions
To help rice farmers in South Asia and Southeast Asia adapt to the effects of climate change, a research and development technical assistance was developed and funded by the Asian Development Bank and the Government of Finland. The grant, requested by national rice research institutions in India, Bangladesh, Nepal, Cambodia, and Lao PDR, supports the dissemination of climate-ready rice varieties and rice growing technologies.
Building upon the research of the project implementing partner, the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI), on varietal improvement and production technologies, the technical assistance sought to develop new rice varieties tolerant of water stress. These new varieties benefit farmers tilling the roughly 46% of the rice area in the world, which are rainfed, or without irrigation infrastructure. This amounts to about 23 million hectares of rainfed rice paddies that are prone to water deficit.
IRRI worked with its national research and development (R&D) partners in the participating countries to breed and screen rice varieties, multiply country-specific seeds, disseminate and evaluate new varieties, analyse soil nutrients, study crop diversification, and assess outcomes. Coordination among the multiple participating countries were done through workshops where national breeders and seed multiplication and dissemination experts came up with strategies to scale up these technologies.
Results
Rice varieties. IRRI and its national R&D partners developed 12 high-yielding rice varieties that yielded more than 5 tons per hectare. Thousands of farmers are now planting climate-ready rice varieties after government and private seed producers distributed these seeds to farmer-beneficiaries. In Bangladesh, 1,326 tons of seeds were distributed to more than 110,000 farmers while India produced and distributed 5.6 tons of seeds to 1,156 farmers in Odisha, and 400 kilograms (kg) to 100 farmers in Haryana. In Nepal, 600 tons of seeds were distributed to 6,150 farmers. In Southeast Asia, Cambodia produced 23 kg of seeds and Lao PDR, distributed about 5 tons of seeds to 60 farmers.
Crop management. For farmers tending to rainfed fields, it is important to maintain good amount of harvest even when there is less water to use. A technology developed by IRRI─the alternate wetting and drying (AWD) technique─has been proven to help conserve water without affecting the rice yield. Thousands of farmers who received the climate-ready varieties in the participating countries have been trained on the proper use of AWD.
AWD is a water-flooding scheduling technique that reduces a farmer’s water use by 20-25%. AWD not only helps conserve valuable resources like water, it also mitigates global warming by reducing greenhouse gas from paddy rice fields by as much as 50%. AWD as a water-saving technology, combined with improved varieties, has been disseminated on a large scale through this technical assistance.
The combined use of the climate-ready varieties and AWD enabled farmers to plant a third non-rice crop in between two rice cropping in an annual planting cycle. This provided farmers with another opportunity to earn more from their farms.