“Forget Swarna! Go for Swarna-Sub1!” is the advice of Basant Kumar Rao, a rice farmer who took part in trials of a new variety of flood-tolerant rice on his farm in India’s coastal state of Orissa. “I trust Swarna-Sub1. I’ll keep growing it. I got good money for it in 2007,” he says.
In 2007, two floods hit Basant’s farm. One lasted 11 days, and the other seven days. The Swarna-Sub1 rice, a flood-tolerant version of the widely grown Swarna rice variety, recovered well after both floods. Although he was able to salvage a little of his regular Swarna crop, it yielded nowhere near as much.
“Better yielding is better living,” says another Orissa farmer, Bidhu Bhusan Raut. During the 2008 wet season, Bidhu grew both Gayatri (a popular Indian variety of rice) and Swarna-Sub1 on his entire one-hectare farm. After a 10-day flood, the Sub1 plants recovered well, while the Gayatri plants perished.
Similar trial successes have been recorded in Bangladesh.
Fighting the floods
Every year, four million tons of rice are wiped out by floods in India and Bangladesh. Devastated farmers cannot do anything to prevent the rains from coming, but by adopting Warna-Sub1, it is expected that they will be able to grow enough extra rice to feed 30 million people. In India alone, farmers responsible for 12 million hectares of land in flood-prone areas are planting the scuba rice at unprecedented rates, thanks to faster seed multiplication, targeted dissemination, and the linking of partners.
“Swarna-Sub1 incorporates the SUB1 gene into the Indian mega-variety Swarna, making it resilient to flooding of up to 17 days while retaining the desirable traits of the original variety,“ said Dr. David Mackill, senior scientist at the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI), who identified the SUB1 gene and developed Sub1 varieties.
Multiplying and distributing
Dr. Umesh Singh, an IRRI senior scientist, said, “Earlier, we only provided and field-tested IRRI rice lines that were tolerant of flooding. Now, we assist government agencies and private seed companies to multiply and distribute seeds to farmers at a faster pace.”
Field-testing a rice variety normally takes four to five years before it is released and another two to three years before it reaches farmers. Through targeted dissemination, IRRI is helping state governments in India to identify specific flood-prone areas where seeds of the submergence-tolerant variety can be distributed, without having to wait until it is multiplied and distributed en masse. The Center is leading this initiative through the Stress-Tolerant Rice for Poor Farmers in Africa and South Asia project, funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
To date, 70,000 IRRI minikits (5kg packets of seeds) have been distributed to more than 100,000 farmers. Dr. Singh feels that the flood-tolerant rice could entirely replace Swarna and spread to other flood-prone areas in the country.
“Swarna-Sub1, which was released in August 2009, is the first submergence-tolerant, high-yielding rice variety in India,” says Dr. Singh. “It was released in record time and is spreading at an unprecedented speed.”
Photo credit: Adam Barclay CPS, IRRI
Further reading:
Rice Today: Scuba rice–stemming the tide in flood-prone South Asia
Stress-Tolerant Rice for Poor Farmers in Africa and South Asia (STRASA)
Photos: Submergence-tolerant rice
Video: Time-lapse video of submergence-tolerant rice
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