Manila, Philippines
October 30, 2002

Filipino researchers have won the world's most prestigious award for a scientific support team in publicly funded agricultural research. Their research - praised by The New York Times as a "stunning success" - allows farmers to boost their income while controlling a major rice disease with fewer applications of polluting chemicals.

The award was announced today at the annual general meeting in Manila of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research, which each year presents the CGIAR Excellence in Science Awards. The Filipino researchers work at the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) in Los Baños,
Laguna. Their project - which has operated mainly in China but is now expanding into other countries - is called Exploiting Biodiversity for Sustainable Pest Management.

This makes two years in a row that a Filipino support team at IRRI has won the CGIAR Outstanding Scientific Support Team Award, which last year went to the institute's hybrid rice breeding team. It is also the second year running that the CGIAR has cited the biodiversity project, whose paper Genetic diversity and disease control in rice in the journal Nature won the 2001 CGIAR Outstanding Scientific Article Award.

In total, the CGIAR presents eight awards to scientists and science communicators during its annual general meeting, which is being held this year on 30 October-1 November, for the first time outside of Washington, D.C.

The winning biodiversity project team is helping rice farmers improve yields and incomes - while reducing pesticide use - through the innovative mixed planting of rice varieties. Cooperating farmers interplant one row of traditional glutinous rice varieties - which fetch high prices but are susceptible to the yield-damaging fungal disease blast - between four to six rows of blast-resistant hybrid rice in a repeating pattern.

Interplanting results in a 94 percent reduction in disease severity. Glutinous rice yields on mixture farms is 84 percent higher than on monoculture farms, allowing farmers to earn an average additional profit of US$281 per hectare per cropping season.

While improved profit is the main force driving rapid farmer adoption of the mixed planting technique, the project's broader and longer-term benefit may be its contribution to restoring biodiversity to modern agriculture.

"What is unique about the project is that it conserves traditional varieties in farmers' fields where modern varieties are also grown," says Nancy Castilla, an epidemiologist on the 10-member scientific support team. "We call it in situ germplasm conservation. The technique has provided farmers with an economic incentive to go back to planting the traditional varieties they had stopped planting because of their susceptibility to disease and low yields.

"Some people ask why we don't just incorporate resistance genes into the traditional varieties," she adds. "But it's better to keep them as they are. Conserving traditional varieties ensures the continued availability of genetic resources that are essential for developing varieties that can resist pests and environmental stresses. And we've seen for ourselves that farmers can plant traditional varieties side by side with modern varieties with very favorable results."

Isabelita Oña, a plant pathologist who studies resistant varieties' effects on pathogen populations in farmers' fields, points out that interplanting provides multiple avenues toward achieving higher yields and profits. "Yield is higher not only because of the crops' good stand, or growth in the fields," she says. "Traditional varieties grown in mixture also lodge, or fall over, less than they do when grown in monoculture. This also improves yield."

Ms. Oña adds that farmers can interplant modern varieties with various types of resistance. The rows of resistant varieties serve as a physical barrier between susceptible plants, which inhibits the spread of the disease. "A pathogen can quickly overcome a single type of resistance," she notes, "but it can't so quickly overcome different types of resistance. This keeps the crop-protection strategy effective for a longer period."

The biodiversity project, which is funded by the Asian Development Bank, has focused so far on lowland rice-growing areas mostly in the southwestern Chinese province of Yunnan. The team's social scientist, Imelda Revilla, who spends about half of her time in China, highlights the scale of farmer
adoption in Yunnan and the higher income the technique allows farmers to earn.

Following the launch of the project in 1997, farmers' eagerness to participate in the trials led to such wide adoption of interplanting that The New York Times described the project in August 2000 as "one of the largest agricultural experiments ever." From the original two counties in which the project operated in 1997, the technology had spread by the end of 2001 to about 60 percent of rice farm households in the indica rice area of Yunnan, and the area under mixtures had expanded to 106,000 hectares. This year, rice interplanting covers an area of more than 200,000 hectares in 101 counties of Yunnan.

Because the rows of traditional glutinous varieties are taller than the rows of hybrid rice between which they are interplanted, the spread of the technique is visibly altering the rural landscape of southwestern China; rice fields that were once uniform monocultures now wear the stripes of biodiversified planting.

"When we did the impact survey in 2000, the farmers literally queued up for the chance to air their views on how the mixture system affected pest management and income," recalls Ms. Revilla. "Many said that, with the rice mixture system, they were now earning enough to diversify their diets, to renovate their homes, and to travel locally."

Tom Mew, the IRRI plant pathologist who leads the project and supervises the support team, reports that adopters of mixture planting spray fungicide to control blast only once per crop on average, sharply less than the average of three applications for non-adopters. Thus, in addition to other benefits, the technique reduces environmental pollution and saves farmers money.

Dr. Mew adds that the project has inspired researchers and farmers to experiment with other approaches to varietal diversification in Yunnan and adjacent Sichuan Province, using dozens of traditional varieties interplanted in different proportions with resistant hybrid cultivars.

With expansion to Indonesia, the project is beginning to explore the technique's potential for protecting crops and improving incomes in fragile upland environments. The encouraging results in China have also jumpstarted a separate project in the Philippine province of Iloilo designed to explore the effectiveness of mixing seeds from agronomically similar but genetically different varieties to produce a single crop that is resistant to the tungro virus.

"The success of the project has depended on many people," comments Dr. Mew. "The original idea for mixture planting came from farmers. The science we used to refine the idea has emerged from decades of research at IRRI and our partners in other advanced institutes and national agriculture research and extension systems.

"In China," he adds, "a systematic extension campaign involving county and village officials, researchers, and extension workers has ensured that farmers are trained and that sufficient seeds are available at planting time. And, finally, essential to keeping the project on track over the years have been the enthusiasm, professionalism and dedication of the scientific support team."

In addition to Mss. Revilla, Castilla and Oña, the team includes Alicia Bordeos, Marietta Baraoidan, Veritas Salazar, Maximino Banasihan, Florencio Balenson, Flavio Maghirang and Crisanta Culala. That seven of the 10 team members are women almost mirrors the project's impact survey in 2000, Ms. Revilla observes.

"About 80 percent of the interviewees were women," she recalls. "That's because, like here in the Philippines, most of the men are employed off the farm except during land preparation, harvesting and threshing. In China, we get a lot of help from women when we're collecting data for our field experiments.

"I like working with the people in China - both with collaborating partners and cooperating farmers - because they are very committed and enthusiastic," says Ms. Revilla, adding that over the past year she has taken advantage of her time in China to study Mandarin, the national language. "When we do the follow-up impact survey next year, I hope to be able to interview the farmers in Chinese."

IRRI is the world's leading international rice research and training center. Based in the Philippines and with offices in 11 other countries, it is an autonomous, nonprofit institution focused on improving the well-being of present and future generations of rice farmers and consumers, particularly those with low incomes, while preserving natural resources. IRRI is one of 16 Future Harvest centers funded by the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR), an association of public and private donor agencies.

For more information, visit the websites of the CGIAR or Future Harvest. Future Harvest is a nonprofit organization that builds awareness and supports food and environmental research for a world with less poverty, a healthier human family, well-nourished children, and a better environment. Future Harvest supports research, promotes partnerships and sponsors projects that bring the results of agricultural
research to rural communities, farmers and families in Africa, Latin America and Asia.