Bangladeshi Farmers Take on Role of Scientists and Banish Insecticides

Imagine 2,000 poor rice farmers in Dhaka, whose average farm income is around US$100 per year, suddenly taking on the role of agricultural scientists. Over the course of 2 years - or 4 cropping seasons - they prove that insecticides are a complete waste of time and money, and that they can significantly reduce the amount of nitrogen fertilizer they use. They save, on average, $17 per year. It might not sound like much, but it's a 17% pay rise for people who struggle to provide sufficient food for themselves and their families, and enough to help put children through school or buy grain to tide over to the next harvest.

LITE farmer from Bangladesh, Joinal Ahmad, is pioneering new approaches that reduce insecticide use in paddy farms.

Over the last 2 years, the IRRI-led Livelihood Improvement Through Ecology (LITE) project has trained 2,000 farmers to perform experiments in their own fields which demonstrate that insecticide can be eliminated and applications of nitrogen fertilizer (urea) reduced without lowering yields. And 4,000 more farmers are currently receiving training. What's more, if LITE continues on this positive trend, in less than a decade, most of Bangladesh's 11.8 million rice farmers - almost 1/12th of the country's population of 141 million, according to the Bangladesh Rice Research Institute, a key project partner - will have eliminated insecticides and optimized their fertilizer use.

The LITE project, funded by UK's Department for International Development, set out to discover the exact cause of an assumed drop in rice yield when farmers stop spraying insecticide. The ultimate aim, explains LITE principal investigator and IRRI senior entomologist Gary C. Jahn, was to identify safe alternatives to insecticides.

"To my surprise," reported Dr. Jahn, "when people stopped spraying, yields didn't drop -- and this was across 600 fields in two different districts over 4 seasons. I'm convinced that the vast majority of insecticides that rice farmers use are a complete waste of time and money.

"We quickly realized the most important thing to focus on was scaling up the successes of the LITE project," he explained. "We've already trained 2,000 farmers. We've reduced insecticide use among participating farmers by 99%, and by 90% among nonparticipating farmers in the same villages. Even in the control villages, where no farmers conducted the experiments, insecticide use dropped from 80% to 55%, and much of this beneficial drop is attributable to farmer-to-farmer interactions."