Up to now, amidst the crisis of rice prices, PH rice farmer leaders continue to blame the government, and continue to ignore looking for how they can help solve the national rice problem.
These farmer leaders are repeating exactly the same mistake of looking at the problems of rice production as largely environmental and not technical, not in the manner of growing the crop, not even in the harvesting of the panicles and processing of the grains after harvest – exactly as foresters looked at it more than 12 years ago.
In the first paper presented in the book (image above from the book cover), Felino P Lansigan, Rex Victor O Cruz & Rodel D Lasco say in "Linkages Of Forest And Water Resource Use And Management To Sustainable Rice Production In The Philippines," page 11:
Much of the country's land resources exhibit various degrees and nature of degradation, largely due to adverse topography; climate factors, particularly excessive rainfall; soils that are prone to erosion; and inadequate land use policies. The obsolete policy framework for land use allocation and planning has aggravated the fragmented, inefficient, inequitable, and unsustainable use of land resources, with serious impacts on ecosystems, soil, water, biodiversity, and the poor and other marginalized sectors of... society.
To summarize the above and use it on the problem of rice production:
The problem with rice production is a combination of landscape, climate (especially lack of or excessive rains), eroding soils, and lack of land use policies.
No Sir! Landscape? The ricelands are there and there is nothing we can do about their locations. Climate: There is hardly anything we can do with the climate directly, but we can anticipate either the drought or the excessive rains. Let the Forest Management Bureau, take care of our forests – in the meantime, our farmers have to accept what the watersheds yield in terms of irrigation water.
And our farmers have to learn how to be efficient users of water.
On page 41 of the book, it is stated:
Lowland rice farmers continuously immerse rice fields in water throughout the season in their belief that rice thrives best under continuously flooded conditions.
The farmers are wrong in believing that rice thrives best when the field is continuously flooded. Flooding is disproved in the practice called System of Rice Intensification, SRI, developed by Jesuit priest Fr Henri de Laulanie. Having discovered Fr Laulanie's SRI in his research in Madagascar, Norman Uphoff has been inspiring the Cornell Institute for Food, Agriculture and Development, USA to propagate the method throughout the world.
With SRI, "Rice Does Not Need Water[1]" according to an article by V Vinod Goud in DownToEarth. Actually, that needs editing; it should read, "Rice Does Not Need Flooding Water." Flooding is for controlling weeds; instead, if you rotavate them into surface mulch, you enrich your soil.
Under SRI, the yields are "almost double that of the conventional crops." (inset image above from Mother Nature Network[2].) What else do our rice farmers want?!@517
[1] https://www.downtoearth.org.in/coverage/rice-does-not-need-water-10108
[2] https://www.mnn.com/leaderboard/stories/how-small-scale-farmers-are-growing-more-rice-with-less-water-and-fewer
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