The Rockefeller Foundation has given a two-year, $35,000 grant to the Cornell International Institute for Food, Agriculture and Development (CIIFAD) to assist institutional partners in Madagascar to evaluate methods for boosting rice yields in that country and to assess what limits farmers' adoption of newer agricultural practices.

Since 1994, CIIFAD has been working with Association Tefy Saina, a Malagasy non-governmental organization which had been promoting a system of rice intensification known as SRI. The system, developed at the initiative of Henri de Laulaine, a Catholic priest, in the early 1980s, has enabled small-scale farmers there to increase rice yields on their land holdings by multiples rather than increments, by changing plant, soil, water and nutrient management practices. It does not require new seeds or input of chemical fertilizers.

Joining CIIFAD and Tefy Saina in evaluating these methods are the Faculty of Agriculture at the University of Antananarivo and the Madagascar government's agricultural research and extension agency, FoFiFa.

Rice, the main staple food in Madagascar, provides more than half the nation's daily calories. The heavy consumption of rice indicates Madagascar's poverty, says Norman Uphoff, director of CIIFAD and Cornell professor of international agriculture. "There is chronic shortage of rice there, forcing poorer households to practice slash-and-burn agriculture and encroach on the forests. Farmers cut back rainforest ecosystems to grow rice, because they cannot produce enough food to meet their needs from the limited lowland irrigated areas available," he says.

The U.S. Agency for International Development invited CIIFAD to develop sustainable agricultural practices for Malagasy rural households, without which forests will continue to be destroyed. After four years of using these new agricultural management practices, rice yields in the area around Ranomafana National Park have increased several-fold. Fields that once

produced only 2 tons of rice per hectare have averaged over 8 tons, and some farmers have reached double this level. Tefy Saina and other agencies working with farmers in Madagascar have achieved similar increases elsewhere in the country.

The agricultural research community in Madagascar, and elsewhere, has been slow to show interest in this approach to boosting rice production "perhaps because it differs so much from the prevailing approach," says Uphoff. "More research needs to be done to evaluate SRI, but mechanisms that can explain yield increase with SRI practices have some foundation in the literature."

Uphoff says that components of SRI -- transplanting very young seedlings, transplanting them singularly rather than in clumps, planting sparsely rather than densely with no standing water in the field during the vegetative growth period, and the increased work initially required -- appear to Malagasy farmers as risky. With the efforts of partner institutions, CIIFAD expects to establish a better understanding of how this new technology, which Uphoff says is better suited to small rather than larger farms, can be more widely disseminated.