AGRICULTURE-BANGLADESH: HYBRIDS HIT BY FARMER ...

OTC 19.12.98 04:48

TANGAIL, Bangladesh, (Dec. 18) IPS - Abdul Rahim is grateful for the micro-credit he received to cultivate hybrid rice in Bangladesh. The money, he says, will come in handy for his daughter Romesha's marriage.
"I don't trust hybrid seeds," he says stretching out a palm full of the golden grain from a one kilogram pack left him by the monolithic non-governmental organization (NGO) Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee (BRAC).
As for repaying the 5,000 takas ($110) and the 22 percent interest it carries, Rahim is certain that he can do it better by sticking to traditional seeds, rather than switching to hybrids newly introduced in post-flood Bangladesh.
"I will just tell the BRAC agent that the hybrids did not work," Rahim said, adding that he would not have entered into the deal at all except that he had just fixed Romesha's marriage.
Rahim made a quick decision on an issue which the government has been dithering over -- whether or not to allow large-scale introduction of imported hybrids to tide over seed and grain shortages following this year's devastating floods.
"The corporate NGOs are unethically taking advantage of the floods to pushing in hybrids as part of flood relief packages," said Khushi Kabir, coordinator of Nijera Kori, a leading NGO advocating the rights of grassroots groups.
Farmers in Tangail, a major rice-growing region, are a savvy lot and not likely to fall for slick promotional talk from the corporate NGOs or fall prey to their micro-credit packages. But most are marginal and the times are hard.
"About half of Bangladesh's 120 million people are now ensnared by large micro-credit dispensing organizations like BRAC and Grameen and vulnerable to pressure from them," Kabir said.
Gulab Jan from the Delduar area who approached BRAC for a 3,000 taka loan to repair her leaky house was given 2,700 taka in cash and the rest in hybrid seeds.
"When I protested that I had no land to cultivate it on they asked me to find someone who has - but nobody wants hybrid seeds around here," she said.
The government, despite warnings from agricultural scientists, recently allowed private companies to market hybrids in the country -- fulfilling the long-held wish of seed transnationals.
Protests were heard after Agriculture Minister Begum Motia Choudhury said the country had no option but to go in for hybrids. "Coming from her this is surprising because she was always an outspoken critic of non-sustainable farming methods -- she is definitely being manipulated," Kabir said.
But the government and the NGOs never reckoned with fierce farmer resistance. With less than an acre of land to play around with, Rahim is in no mood for potentially disastrous experiments -- never mind the promises of fertilizer and advice from BRAC.
Rahim's neighbor, Abu Bakr, says farmers here are wary of hybrid seeds from sheer experience. "With hybrids I know I cannot set aside a portion of crops for seeds and I will be forced to buy them at whatever prices the market dictates."
At 75, what Abu Bakr does not know about paddy cultivation is not worth knowing. "I have seen it all including the havoc created during the sixties and seventies by the so-called green revolution with all its hybrids, artificial fertilizers and pesticides."
"There may be a smaller yield with local varieties but I would be spending much less on costly and poisonous chemicals -- my body too feels much healthier."
Abu Bakr said the pesticides and fertilizers also killed off the fish that flourish in the wet paddy and in the many ponds that dot the patchwork quilt landscape of smallholdings that make up most of deltaic Bangladesh.
Farmers in Tangail consider themselves lucky that located in their district is a branch of the privately-run research organization UBINIG which provides expertise in sustainable farming methods, particularly in efficient storage and exchange of seeds.
Although UBINIG's program is called Naya Krishi (new farming), it builds on the traditional wisdom that farming interfaces human beings with nature.
Abu Bakr, for example, would never dream of allowing a tractor onto his land. "Unlike a bullock-drawn plough, tractors kill off worms and other microorganisms that keep the soil in condition -- tractors are costly and don't produced dung."
Mixed cropping and crop rotation on UBINIG's plots demonstrate to farmers in the area how up to 12 different crops can be interspersed to form a small system in which each plant helps the other.
"Legumes take care of nitrogen fixation eliminating the need for fertilizers while marigolds take care of pests and bring in extra cash," says UBINIG coordinator Jahangir Alam Jony.
"The idea is to maintain as much crop diversity as possible so that farmers have ready and affordable options at all times rather than the perilous monocultures that seed companies are trying to introduce," Jony said.
One of the important activities of the UBINIG center is the maintenance of a seed exchange from which farmers can borrow free on the condition that after harvest they return twice what they took.
The system takes care of the increasing demand for seed each year, Jony said adding that farmers are also encouraged to store their own seed in simple, mud-sealed earthen pots.
So successful has UBINIG's work been that the government has stopped scoffing at its "retrograde" farming and now pays money to learn from its expertise, Jony said.
The Bangladesh Rural Development Board (BRDB) now sends batches of women from around the country to UBINIG's farms to learn how they can augment their incomes and the diets of their families through simple and sustainable methods.
"We want the seed in our hands and not in the 'pricey' and undependable markets," says Begum Hasina who has come to UBINIG from nearby Ferozepur district for a week long course in kitchen gardening, medicinal plants and keeping livestock and poultry.
UBINIG Executive Director Farida Akhtar says the government has no right to allow private seed companies to freely bring in seeds to make up for supposed shortages.
"There are no shortages and the stories appearing in the press about farmers eating up their seeds because of the unusually prolonged floods are motivated," she said.
The agriculture minister has announced that the private companies are being allowed to import seeds on the condition that they develop varieties specifically suited to the country.
However, many argue that by the time hybrid seed companies get to that stage of research they would have gained firm commercial control over farming in this country and perhaps changed it forever.
Agricultural scientist Dr S.M.H. Zaman says the imported hybrids would rapidly deplete soil fertility and cause new problems beyond the means of farmers to tackle.
Dr Zaman said multi-national pesticide companies which were rapidly losing their business around the world and switching over to the lucrative seed and genetic engineering business were looking to developing countries like Bangladesh for markets.
According to Dr S.S. Virmani, a world expert on rice hybrids, this country has neither the technology nor the infrastructure to handle delicate hybrid farming. For a start less than 20 percent of Bangladesh is irrigated.
If the country goes in for hybrids in a big way it should be with seeds developed by the country's own well-developed facilities at the Bangladesh Rice Research Institute (BRRI), most experts are agreed.
But that option poses another problem. Bangladesh's best agricultural brains have long since left for greener pastures in Australia and New Zealand.
Copyright 1998

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