BSS, Philippines :
Agriculture officials and experts here yesterday called for remaining ready towards climate change, innovating and adopting effective technologies to keep rice production increasing in ensuring future food security.
They were addressing a farmers’ day organised by International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) at its headquarters with the theme of ‘Technologies for a changing climate’ to showcase rice-based technologies designed to help the farmers cope with climate change.
The exhibited technologies included climate-resilient rice varieties, web-enabled tools for better rice crop management, latest good practices in agronomy and conservation of traditional rice to enable the framers in learning about and sharing their thoughts on these technologies.
Undersecretary of the Philippines Department of Agriculture (DA) Fred Serrano attended the farmers’ day as the chief guest and narrating the possible effects of global climate change and necessary preparations right from now.
Deputy Director General for Communications and Partnerships of IRRI Dr V. Bruce J. Tolentino delivered welcome speech on the occasion participated by around 400 farmers of the Philippines and two renowned farmers from India, one farmer and a journalist from Bangladesh.
Fred Serrano called for remaining ready for new challenges to agriculture mentioning that the seasons are becoming less predictable under the changing climate.
He commended work of IRRI on developing climate-smart technologies specifically citing its ‘climate-smart’ collection-rice varieties that can withstand and survive flooding, drought and salty soil those were developed and disseminated under the Philippines-IRRI partnership.
Dr V. Bruce J. Tolentino said that farm-level rice yields in the Philippines have grown in the last decade without significant increase in inputs.
“This can be attributed, in part, to the Philippines DA-IRRI collaboration, which includes making smart and sustainable crop management practices available to farmers,” he added. He also mentioned, as an example, the Rice Crop Manager, a web-enabled tool that offers site-specific crop management advice.
“Based on our studies on the ground, the Rice Crop Manager has helped farmers tremendously in increasing their income by about Philippines Peso of 4,700 per hectare,” he added.
“Farmers are IRRI’s number one client. If, in the end, farmers do not like the output of the institute’s research, then there’s no point in doing any of it,” Tolentino furthered. Jimmy Lingayo, an heirloom-rice farmer of the Philippines, called Farmers’ Day as an “effective learning experience.”
He was especially grateful for the exhibited technologies that he can use in his upland rice farm and is hopeful that specialty products such as heirloom rice can be the focus of a future farmers’ day.
Mr. Lingayo is also President of the Rice Terraces Farmers’ Cooperative (RTFC) based in the mountainous Cordillera region in the northern Philippines.
The DA of the Philippines and IRRI are implementing the Food Staples Sufficiency Programme (FSSP), a set of projects that supports the Philippines’ rice sufficiency efforts.
The programme also seeks to strengthen national resilience against the effects of climate change. Three pioneering farmers from India and Bangladesh also came to IRRI farmers’ day and traveled all the way to IRRI to dialogue with Filipino farmers on their common experiences and practices, as well as to learn from one another.
One of them is Nekkanti Subba Rao, the first farmer who planted and widely shared seeds of IR8 in India in 1967. IR8 is IRRI’s first modern high-yielding rice variety and became known as “miracle rice” as it effectively staved off looming famine during that period in India.
Subba Rao is affectionately called “IR8” in his community, due to his huge success in multiplying IR8 seeds.
Mohammad Janab Ali, a Bangladeshi farmer, has successfully saved his livelihood from annual flooding in his rice farm using the flood-tolerant Swarna-Sub1 (BRRI dhan51), a variety developed at IRRI and now used by millions of farmers in Asia.
Janab is now producing Swarna-Sub1 seeds for distribution among the farmers in Bangladesh, through the IRRI-led Stress-Tolerant Rice for Africa and South Asia (STRASA) project.
Each participating farmer was given a kilogram of high-quality rice seeds as a symbolic gift for their crucial contributions to food security. Undersecretary Serrano called on those who received the seeds to properly multiply and share the high-quality rice seeds with fellow farmers in their communities.
The two-day biennial event will conclude with a Farmers’ Forum today on October 2.
