Hanoi, Vietnam
June 4, 2003

An innovative, award-winning campaign that promises to help protect a million rice farmers in the Red River Delta from the harmful effects of dangerous insecticides has been formally inaugurated in Vietnam.

Launched as part of World Environment Day 2004 activities in Asia, the campaign - which will be jointly advanced by a team of Vietnamese, Philippine and Malaysian scientists - will build on a groundbreaking effort that has already sharply reduced pesticide misuse in Vietnam's Mekong Delta.

"Without doubt these research activities have been some of the most successful undertaken by IRRI in recent years," Ronald P. Cantrell, director general of the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI), said in a special message to the launch ceremony. "However, such success - and most importantly, the positive impact on farmers - would not have been possible without the vision, hard work and commitment of our many Vietnamese partners and collaborators. In short, the project has been Vietnam's success, not IRRI's, and is clear evidence of the impressive progress made by Vietnamese agriculture in recent years."

The team's long-running collaborative effort in Vietnam has been led by K.L. Heong from Malaysia, a senior entomologist at IRRI; M.M. Escalada, a communications professor at the Philippine's Leyte State University; and  Nguyen Huu Huan, the vice director general of Vietnam's Plant Protection
Department. Last year, the team won the $25,000 Saint Andrews' Prize for Environment in recognition of their success, and immediately pledged to use the money to extend their pesticide-reduction effort to the Red River Delta.

First launched in 1994 in the Mekong Delta - long one of the great rice bowls of Asia - the research and subsequent campaign marked a milestone in rice production for two reasons. Firstly, it clearly identified the damage caused by the overuse of insecticides, which kills off friendly insects and so encourages the pests they would otherwise help control, and it also developed a completely new way of communicating important information to farmers.

After testing their campaign in the Mekong Delta, where almost 2 million rice growers were persuaded to cut back on using harmful and unnecessary farm chemicals, the research partners launched, on World Environment Day 2001, a similar, on-going campaign in central Thailand's Sing Buri Province.

In announcing the pesticide reduction team as the winners of the St. Andrews' prize, Sir Crispin Tickell, the chairman of the St Andrews' Prize Board of Trustees, said: "In the end we decided to give the prize to a proposal of obvious and lasting benefit to millions of people which could and should be a model for others: the cultivation of rice by methods which combine the benefits of the old and the new, and avoid the hazards which have so damaged rice and other cultivation of grains worldwide."

Research has found that many insecticide sprays applied by Asian rice farmers are unnecessary because they are applied at the wrong time and to the wrong targets. In addition, many of the chemicals used, such as methyl parathion, monocrotophos and metamidophos, are highly hazardous to human health and so are banned in the developed world.

These sprays disrupt natural biological control mechanisms and thereby create an environment that can favor the worst pest species. This prompts farmers to spray even more late in the season. Not only can farmers become victims of pesticide poisoning, but sprays can damage aquatic fauna, reducing fish and prawn cultures, and cause broad damage to the local environment.

The research team found that most farmers in Vietnam and elsewhere spray in the early crop stages because of highly visible but yield-neutral leaf damage caused by caterpillars, beetles and grasshoppers. Also, many of the modern rice varieties farmers grow today are bred for insect resistance and generally do not require pest control.

The project team realized that this overuse and incorrect spraying of insecticides was due to years of aggressive pesticide advertising and marketing that played to farmers' often misplaced fears.

"What appeared to motivate farmers to spray insecticides during the early stages were misconceptions, lack of knowledge and biased estimations of losses due to pests," Dr. Heong explained. "But we found that the amount rice farmers expected to lose if no insecticides were applied was about 13 times higher than the actual losses.

"So we set out to find ways to change the attitudes of farmers and motivate them to spray less," Dr. Heong said.

The research group quickly realized that a primary source of information for farmers was local radio broadcasts. From then on, the ever-present farmer radios were at the heart of a media campaign that, in its first 6 years, had a profound impact on the use of insecticides in the Mekong Delta.

"We got a group of actors to play out a series of brief comedies, using rustic situations and solid scientific facts to make the audience laugh," Dr. Heong explained. "We were then very pleasantly surprised to find these simple, humorous messages fixed themselves in the minds of thousands of
farmers."

Such was the success of the campaign that 15 provincial administrations throughout the Mekong Delta and beyond adopted the radio and poster strategy. "It was all based on the premise that farmers' perceptions, rather than economic rationale, were used in most pest-management decisions," Dr. Heong said.

The radio dramas, supported by leaflets and posters, were first aired in Long An Province in 1994. Research had shown that spraying in the first 40 days after sowing was not necessary, so farmers were told it was a waste of money. They were encouraged to see for themselves with a simple experiment, spraying only part of their crop and comparing the yield from the sprayed and unsprayed portions.

The effects were soon obvious, and by 1997 the campaign had been picked up by 11 other provincial governments and was reaching about 92 percent of the Mekong Delta's 2.3 million farm households. The results became clear with the analysis in 1999 of intensive surveys.

Insecticide use had fallen from an average of 3.4 applications per farmer per season, to just one - a decrease of 72 percent. The number of farmers who believed that insecticides would bring higher yields had fallen from 83 percent to 13 percent. The number who realized that insecticides killed the natural enemies of rice pests, as well as the pests themselves, had risen from 29 percent to 79 percent.

At the same time, the gross paddy output of the Mekong Delta increased from 11 million to 14 million tons per year. Dr. Heong believes that insecticide use can be further reduced by half without affecting rice production. But he and his research partners also fear that insecticide use will creep up again
if the campaign is allowed to lapse.

"The only information most farmers get is advice from chemical companies to use more sprays," Dr. Heong says. "They think that every dollar they spend on insecticide is going to mean about $13 in their pockets at harvest time. In fact, that far exceeds reality. Even in a worst-case scenario - a seriously damaging pest infestation - they might benefit by only $4 from $1 spent, and the worst-case scenario is a rare event.

"We should be training people to communicate, to deliver information to the farmers and motivate them to evaluate the new information objectively," Dr. Heong asserted. "In this way, they can improve their knowledge and, at the same time, learn new values. And, with the money we have received from the St. Andrews Environmental Prize, we will now be able to not only continue this important work but also extend its impact to the benefit of many more rice farmers."

"On behalf of IRRI, I salute the rice researchers and farmers of Vietnam," concluded Dr. Cantrell's message to the launch ceremony. "They are not only world class in terms of ability and productivity, but their determination to achieve impact and improve their lives and the lives of their countrymen is an example to us all. Congratulations on the implementation of the Red River project. IRRI and its scientists look forward to many more years of such successful and innovative collaboration.

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 the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR), an association of public and private donor agencies.

For more information, visit the websites of 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.