Sticking with Rice

Farmers in the uplands of Southeast Asia may climb out of poverty by diversifying into cash crops, but many continue to grow rice as well for home consumption.

In isolated mountain communities in Southeast Asia, upland rice (a dry field crop like wheat) is traditionally grown on sloping fields, yielding barely enough grain to feed the family that grows it. As soil nutrients are exhausted in successive cropping seasons, rice yields dwindle and weeds and pests multiply. Eventually, farmers shift cultivation to another area, intending to return to the original field after its fertility has been restored by a period of fallow.

But, as populations grew, governments forbade further forest encroachment, and fallows consequently became shorter, many upland rice fields became badly degraded, undermining communities' food security.

In response, the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) leads a project called "Rice landscape management for raising water productivity, conserving resources, and improving livelihoods in upper catchments of the Mekong and Red River basins." The project, which receives support from the Challenge Program on Water and Food, operates in Laos, northern Thailand and northern Vietnam, and a parallel project supported by the International Fund for Agricultural Development works in India and Nepal.

Aiming to help poor upland farmers develop livelihood options, the project stresses managing rice landscapes as a whole. Its strategies range from introducing new higher-yielding rice varieties to improving the way farmers use land and water resources. The project further coordinates regional scientific efforts and studies the success of one community that may be applicable in neighboring communities.

An example of success is a remote community in the Mae Suk watershed of northern Thailand, where the poverty and food insecurity of 2 decades ago have been defeated by new roads, access to markets, and long official and scientific effort. Here, many upland farmers have prospered as commercial vegetable gardeners. Yet, in the midst of this abundance, many of them have continued to grow upland rice.

"This is not something I have observed in other places," says Sushil Pandey, a senior agricultural economist at IRRI and the leader of the project. "Farmers either grow upland rice [as a subsistence crop] and a very small area of cash crops or forego rice altogether and grow commercial crops only," using the cash to buy rice and other household necessities.

Farmer Seng Yang receives a good income from cash crops but still reserves patches of his field to grow high-quality upland rice. Photo: IRRI.

One local farmer is Seng Yang, 45, who cultivates shallots, cabbages, maize and rice on 16 hectares of hillsides. "I earn well from shallots," he says. "I can harvest 100,000 kilograms of shallots from one crop and sell them at 10 baht [US$0.30] per kilogram." However, as Seng Yang explains, he wants to offer to his ancestors rice that he grew himself. He does not mind that he could earn three times as much by growing vegetables on the land. "I know it's easier to buy rice, but it's not good quality," he adds. "It's better to grow it myself." Another farmer, Daecha Kulsawatmongkol, 32, sets aside a sizable plot for upland rice every season. He grows upland rice because it supplies food during the "hungry months" of September and October, when lowland rice has not been harvested and market rice prices are high.

In his community of about 18 families, five or six have opted not to grow rice and concentrate solely on cash crops.

If the upland farmers of the Mae Suk watershed provide a window on the future for mountain communities elsewhere in Southeast Asia, then one of its most surprising aspects is how tenaciously farmers cling to growing upland rice, despite their progress in escaping poverty. For project researchers, this demonstrates that there is still a need in the uplands of Southeast Asia for their project to reinforce income generation by further improving local rice cultivation.

In the uplands of Laos and Vietnam, the IRRI-led project is seeking to improve farming technologies, introducing improved rice varieties, purer seed stocks of traditional rice varieties, and better management of soil fertility and, in particular, of water. The improved varieties, better suited to upland conditions as well as to lowland areas in valley bottoms and on terraces, are being validated in farmers' fields. Improved methods of irrigating rice, such as alternate wetting and drying, seek to use water resources more effectively. Producing more rice with less water, land and labor enables farmers to use these inputs for cash crops.

However, no matter how prosperous farmers of uplands in Southeast Asia may become, the Thailand experience suggests that they will most likely continue to grow upland rice, providing scope for applying improved technologies in their rice landscapes.