Farmer-oriented rice research ensures sustainability

By Gamini WARUSHAMANA

Rice research in Sri Lanka is now more farmer-oriented and today research is based on addressing the issues faced by farmers and achieving national targets, said the Deputy Director, Research of the Rice Research and Development Institute (RRDI), S.W. Abeysekara.

“The greatest success of the Department of Agriculture during the past 100 years is in achieving self-sufficiency in rice. Today we produce 15 percent more than our requirement and the RRDI has contributed to this achievement by introducing high yield rice varieties and modern farming practices,” he said.

Abeysekara said that the challenge today is how to handle this excess supply. “We have two options; export the excess production and produce alternative food items such as bread and noodles using rice flour. The issue we faced was non-availability of machinery and technology to produce rice flour that is similar to wheat flour. We need flour with small particles of around 100 microns for bakery products. The Government provided tax concessions to import machinery that met this requirement and as a result we can now produce rice flour that can be used in bakery products.” The Deputy Director said that maintaining this excess rice production is also a challenge.

Climate change, drought and floods may affect production and this Yala season, rice production will be lower due to the prevailing drought. “Population increase is another factor and we have a population of 20 million today and we produce around 3.65 million tonnes of paddy per year.

We expect a significant increase in population by 2020 and to meet the demand we have to increase paddy production to 4.56 million tonnes. However, the land extent or acreage of cultivation is not increasing, in fact, it is decreasing.

We have to increase land productivity or increase yield per acre and this is a challenge.”

The main paddy cultivation area in Sri Lanka is in the Dry Zone and today our attention is focused on the low country Wet Zone, specially in the Western and Southern provinces, where the annual rainfall is above 2,500 mm. This Zone accounts for 20 percent of the rice-producing land in the country. “We have developed new rice varieties for the low country Wet Zone with yields around three tonnes per hectare compared to around 4.3 tonnes per hectare in the Dry Zone. However, rice production in the Wet Zone is important as a buffer stock to face production fluctuation in the Dry Zone due to climatic reasons,” Abeysekara said.

“We are doing research to increase productivity in the Wet Zone lands and the Government has increased fund allocation for 2013 to address these issues and other related social problems,” he said. Abeysekara said that the high cost of production is a major issue in rice production in Sri Lanka and the RRDI has introduced new low cost cultivation methods. Seedling broadcasting or the parachute method is one that has become popular. This method reduces seed cost by 75 percent and increases yield by around 20 percent. Low water consumption, resistance to pests and low cost on weeding are other advantages of this method. Dry farming machines imported from India will be introduced to the Dry Zone areas to increase productivity. “Water management is another aspect we need to improve.

Today 30 percent of the water is used for weed control in paddy farming and as a result 70 percent of the fertiliser used in paddy fields is wasted,” the Deputy Director said.

Rice can be successfully cultivated under saturated water conditions. “We have also introduced a leaf colour chart so that farmers can apply fertiliser. Using this chart, farmers can decide on the fertiliser variety and quantity needed by looking at the leaf colour of the plants. We have developed new rice varieties using traditional rice varieties. Our attitude towards traditional rice varieties were wrong in the past and we ignored the good properties in them. As a result farmers are now using weedy rice as traditional rice and it has posed a threat to paddy cultivation,” he said.

Abeysekara said that Sri Lanka should produce high quality rice if we are to export the excess. The RRDI has introduced three rice varieties that meet these quality requirements. They are BG 360, BG 357 and BG 352.