Provided

Norman and Marguerite Uphoff.

Norman Uphoff, professor of government and international agriculture, and acting director of the Cornell Institute for Public Affairs, was given the International Society of Paddy and Water Environment Engineering Review Award for 2011 at its annual meeting Oct. 28 to "acknowledge significant editorial contributions to the international journal Paddy and Water Environment."

He shared the award with his co-guest editor, Amir Kassam of University of Reading, United Kingdom; they edited a special issue of the journal on the System of Rice Intensification (SRI).

Uphoff, who has been actively involved with SRI evaluation and dissemination for more than a decade, said SRI has been successfully demonstrated in 44 countries in Asia, Africa and the Americas. The method involves growing rice in such nontraditional ways as planting very young single seedlings at a wide spacing and keeping soil moist but not flooded.

"Initially, I felt daunted by the task, but the very willing cooperation of colleagues from around the world -- from Japan to Panama -- to provide solid manuscripts with substantial data sets, made the work much easier. The combination of research papers from rice scientists in China, India, Indonesia, Thailand and Madagascar, complemented by well-documented reports from countries as diverse as Afghanistan, Iraq and Mali, made working on this issue very gratifying," Uphoff said.

Uphoff presented the keynote talk on the SRI at the meeting's opening session Oct. 27. On the trip to Taiwan, he also presented invited lectures on SRI to the Department of Landscape Architecture, Chinese Culture University in Taipei and to the Department of Post-Modern Agriculture, Mingdao University, Changhua.