Naogaon, 6. september, 2010 (IRIN)
– Som så mange andre landmænd i Bangladesh må Abdul Aziz fra Naogaon distriktet i det nordvestlige Bangladesh forsøge at tilpasse sine dyrkningsmetoder til forandringerne i klimaet.
“Twenty years ago we had a rainy season at this time. Now we don’t even know when the seasons come…Twenty years ago we experienced five months of monsoon, now it’s only 15-20 days in two or three months.”
To adjust to the unreliable rains, local farmers for the past 20 years have been using ‘pariza’, an indigenous rice that requires less irrigation and can be harvested off-season, from May to August, between the dry season `boro’ rice and the monsoon ‘aman’ rice.
To adjust to the unreliable rains, local farmers for the past 20 years have been using ‘pariza’, an indigenous rice that requires less irrigation and can be harvested off-season, from May to August, between the dry season `boro’ rice and the monsoon ‘aman’ rice.
Aziz and his friends are now also using new varieties developed by the Bangladesh Rice Research Institute (BRRI) and the Philippines-based International Rice Research Institute (IRRI). They are drought-tolerant, dry season varieties – dubbed BRRI dhan 6, 28, 29 and 33 – and harvested in April.
Bangladesh is seen as one of the country’s most susceptible to climate change and is seriously affected by droughts and flooding.
With a population of 160 million, growing at about 1.4 percent per year, Bangladesh produces about 30 million tons of rice each year – 2.5 million less than it needs to feed itself. As arable land decreases by about 1 percent a year, more productive crops are urgently needed.
“The population pressure on land resources is the key driving force for the use of the new technologies,” said Mahabub Hossain, executive director of the Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee (BRAC) and former head of IRRI’s social sciences division.
Rice race
Bangladesh’s population boom in the 1950s led to farmers cultivating two crops a year instead of one. The 1960s saw increased yields thanks to modern inputs like chemical fertilizers. IRRI, set up in 1959, sought new ways of feeding growing populations.
“In the 1960s, one rice variety was developed called IR8. It’s a semi-dwarf variety.
They introduced a dwarfing gene, which reduces the rice plant from tall to small,” Hossain said.
The idea was that if the plant was smaller, it could absorb more nutrients.
“They improved the yield from about four tons per hectare to 10 tons per hectare as a result of that discovery,” he said.
Since BRRI was set up in 1970, work by IRRI has been passed on to BRRI to test in Bangladesh and see which varieties make the grade.
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