Cambodia-National Rescue Party

A Cambodian farmer, plows in the rice paddy at Prey Kla village, Kampong Speu province, some 35 kilometers (22 miles) south of Phnom Penh, Cambodia, Friday, Aug. 28, 2009. (AP Photo/Heng Sinith)

Friday, 28 August 2009
Written by Michele Cempaka
Asia Sentinel

A Jesuit priest transforms centuries-old growing practices

The traditional methods that Asian farmers have used for hundreds of years to grow rice are beginning to give way to what its supporters say are new, environmentally healthier and more productive practices developed in Madagascar by Henri de Laulanie, a Jesuit priest, in the 1980s.

SRI – the universal acronym for what de Laulanie called System of Rice Intensification – didn't begin to spread out of Madagascar until about 1999. But in the past 10 years, farmers from China to India to Indonesia and the Philippines have begun to shift to the new method, which paradoxically involves planting fewer and younger seedlings, spaced wider apart, and using less water than Asian farmers have used for centuries.

The new method is not without its critics, who say it is difficult to replicate dramatically higher yields outside the original plantings in Madagascar. Nonetheless, SRI is estimated to have spread across 400,000 hectares of Tamil Nadu in India. Some 30,000 farmers in Indonesia now practice SRI, more than 100,000 in Cambodia; over 50,000 in Myanmar; 223,000 last year in Vietnam and around 5,000 in Laos. Some 20,000 farmers in the Philippines are estimated to be using SRI.

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