Camarines Sur, The Philippines
July 9, 2010
The Department of Agriculture (DA) and Philippine Rice Research Institute (PhilRice) are arming farmers in flood-prone areas of Bicol with submergence-tolerant rice varieties to combat the negative effects on rice production in the region of the looming La Niña phenomenon.
Government weathermen have forecast that a prolonged wet season would prevail over the archipelago starting by the third quarter of this year as an aftermath of the drought which recently hit most parts of the country.
The expected La Niña will certainly cause floods that would once again submerge vast rice fields in low-lying areas particularly those within the Bicol River Basin (BRB), a 312,164-hectare wetland covering 41 municipalities of Camarines Sur, Camarines Norte and Albay, Marilyn Sta. Catalina, DA's regional executive director for Bicol on Monday said.
Under normal condition, Sta. Catalina said this area accounts for about 40 percent of the region's rice production but this output is reduced significantly during incidents of extensive rainfalls as the rice paddies go down under water destroying rice crops.
In most instances, floodwaters that end up in ricefields from swollen rivers with depth of about one meter submerge for a week or longer hence, transplanted seedlings are already rotten when the water subsides, she said.
Prone to the floods are low-lying areas in at least 30 towns of Camarines Sur, five in Albay and four in Camarines Norte and the DA Bicol chief, farmers in these areas may avail of the Submarino 1 seeds.
Submergence of rice fields in these areas have been a problem and yet, Sta. Catalina said farmers are left with no choice but plant rice during the wet season, hoping that they will be able to harvest something for their own consumption. In the very low-lying areas, farmers have to wait for the dry season to produce a successful crop.
She said "the low-lying rice areas are not productive with any crop as they are fully submerged during seasons with heavy rains. In low-lying areas with poor drainage, flooding with heavy rain starts in June or July and extends to November, but may vary from September to October when typhoons and floods usually occur.
"With two to three days of heavy rain or three to four days of moderate rainfall, fields remain submerged in August to October. With heavy rain and flood, water remains up to one month in the very low-lying areas. Sometimes, the very low-lying areas are submerged in December to January with very deep water, over a person's height. The floodwater with mud called banlig is the most damaging to the crop," the DA chief said.
Sta. Catalina said that farmers in the low-lying areas generally produce one successful crop in the dry season with a yield of 4-4.5 tons a hectare. Those who attempt to raise a wet season crop usually transplant several times during the submergence-risk period until a good crop is established in time with the recession of flood water.
When the paddies are submerged early in the wet season, farmers wait until the water recedes, and as soon as the soil becomes visible, they transplant rice even if it is already a month late, resulting in a late harvest in November, she said.
Sta. Catalina said that during cropping seasons starting 2008 until this year, the DA and PhilRice have expanded the area allotted for the propagation of the submergence-tolerant rice varieties called Submarino 1, Samba Mahsuri-Sub, Sub 1 lines Swarna and IR49830-7-1-2-3.
Submarino 1 is a common rice variety called IR64 that is infused with submergence tolerance gene (Sub 1) which the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) and the University of California-Davis have discovered from an Indian rice variety called FR13A.
"Submarino 1 is a non-genetically engineered rice plant that can survive, grow and develop even after 10 days of complete submergence at vegetative stage," according to Dr. Nenita Desamero, PhilRice plant breeder and team leader of the on farm testing of submergence rice here.
Normally, she said, rice submerged at tillering stage can only survive for one week, while seedling can only last for three to five days.
First introduced to farmers in flood prone San Antonio, Nueva Ecija during the 2007 wet season under a project called Implementation Plans to Disseminate Submergence-Tolerant Rice Varieties and Associated New Production Plans Practices to Southeast Asia, Submarino l showed the same yield performance of IR64 under favorable condition.
The project implemented by PhilRice and IRRI and was funded by Japan's Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
According to Desamero, the discovery has paved the way for the development of the submergence-tolerant rice lines such as IR64-Sub 1.
The situation in the Philippine's low-lying areas however, is not an isolated case. Similar cases are found in Indonesia. Cambodia, Vietnam, Thailand and Laos drawing IRRI scientists into an experiment that led to the breeding of a variety that can survive, grow and develop even after 10 days of complete submergence in murky and cloudy water.
Starting in the 2007 wet season, IRRI and PhilRice initiated collaborative efforts to test IR64-Sub 1 and three other submergence-tolerant cultivars at the PhilRice central experiment station in Maligaya, Munoz and in Barangay Papaya, San Antonio, both in Nueva Ecija.
"When we introduced the IR64-Sub 1 variety in our first consultation meeting and consultation on August 9 and 10,2007 in San Antonio, farmers, municipal agricultural officer and agricultural technicians got excited as they saw hope in turning their idle, less productive, and always-submerged paddies into productive paddies," Desamero said.
Robert Ziegler, IRRI director general said he is excited about the dissemination of submergence-tolerant rice. "If these technologies get deployed, they can be our strongest weapons in our battle against food security," he said.
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