Former IRRI soil scientist shares insights at young researchers’ lunch

Yasukazu Hosen from the Ministry of Agriculture Forestry and Fisheries of Japan hosted the IRRI Young Researchers’ Lunch on January 23. Dr. Hosen, a former soil scientist at IRRI and Japan International Research Center for Agricultural Sciences, shared his expertise on greenhouse gases with San Hla Htwe, Mark Jeffrey Morete, Marilou Barrios, Alexandre Grondin, and Zilhas Ahmed Jewel. One of the important lessons he shared with the group is that nitrogen fertilizer application right before draining the field will cause higher amounts of nitrates to be released as greenhouse gases.

The Young Researchers Lunch is a monthly meeting for NRS and AFSTRI scientists who are in the early stages of their career. The purpose is to provide an opportunity for discussions with senior scientists on a range of topics including career paths. For more information, please contact Joy Sagabay (M.Sagabay@irri.org) or Amelia Henry (A.Henry@irri.org).


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Philippines: IRRI participates in 4th PhilRAA convention

More than eighty members of the Philippine-Rural Development Administration (Korea) Alumni Association (PhilRAA) attended the 4th PhilRAA convention, Revitalizing Linkages and Partnerships on S&T Innovations Towards Improving Livelihood of Farmers, at Traders’ Hotel in Pasay City on 24-25 January 2013. The convention featured technical presentations on the implementation of past and current RDA-PhilRAA-funded projects that showcased technologies suitable to some areas in the Philippines. PhilRAA members also elected its new board of directors and officers for 2013 to 2014. Mr. Julian Lapitan, senior manager of NPR-IRRI and a charter member of the association, was elected as the organization’s new President.

Hon. Min Kyong Ho, Consul General and Minister, gave the keynote speech at the convention on behalf of His Excellency Hyuk Lee, Ambassador of the Republic of Korea to the Philippines.

Dr. Bruce Tolentino, IRRI deputy director general for communications and partnerships, challenged participants to follow the example of Saemul Undong (New Village Movement) of Korea. The movement catalyzed the transformation of Korea to reach its current state though a unified and focused effort towards national development.

Sang-Hwa Kim, head of the International Training of the International Technical Cooperation Center (ITCC) represented Dr. Sae-Jung Suh, Director of ITCC, RDA. Mr. Kim, who also handles the alumni affairs at RDA, assured participants of their continued support to the association in its drive to further improving the livelihood of the farmers in the Philippines.

Organized in Los Banos, Laguna in 2003, PhilRAA is composed of fellows and officers from national agricultural research and extension agencies, state universities and colleges, and other entities who attended training at or officially visited the Rural Development Administration (RDA) of Korea.

PhilRAA aims to forge liaison among its members through conferences, seminars, dialogues, and civic and non-civic activities; provides venue for information exchange related to agriculture and natural resources; and, promotes and encourages collaborative activities that demonstrate suitable technologies that will uplift the livelihood of Filipino farmers.



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Philippines: IRRI holds workshops on greenhouse gas emissions from rice production

IRRI hosted three workshops on greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from rice production on 21-24 January 2013. Scientists from Japan, China, India, and Southeast Asia as well as from various universities and the Climate Change, Agriculture, and Food Security program of the CGIAR attended the events to discuss GHG emission inventories and mitigation assessments.

The MIRSA Project

The first of the three workshops marked the launch of the GHG Mitigation in Irrigated Rice Systems: Guidelines from Measurement, Reporting, and Verification (MIRSA) project. The project assesses the feasibility of GHG mitigation through alternate wetting and drying (AWD) technology in different rice-growing regions of Vietnam and the Philippines. AWD is a water-saving technology that lowland rice farmers can use to reduce their water use in irrigated fields.

The MIRSA project, funded by the Japanese Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries for one year, will use GHG emissions data from other IRRI activities. This project is composed of IRRI, as the lead organization; the National Institute of Agro-Environmental Science, Japan; and Hue University of Agriculture and Forestry, Vietnam.

Global Research Alliance

The second workshop was a meeting of the Paddy Rice Group of the Global Research Alliance (GRA) on Agricultural Greenhouse Gases on its ongoing activities and action plan. GRA has more than 30 member countries from all regions of the world.

The GRA Paddy Rice Group, co-chaired by Japan and Uruguay, aims to reduce emissions of paddy rice cultivation systems while improving overall production efficiency. Several IRRI scientists described new trends in crop management at the event. Participants visited IRRI’s farms to see different experiments on ecological intensification; work on the Impact on Carbon, Nitrogen and Water Budgets project; straw burning. They also visited the field sites of a new IRRI-PhilRice collaborative project on GHG emissions and AWD technology adoption in the Angat-Maasim Rivers Irrigation System in Bulacan province.

Assessment Group

The third workshop, Assessment Group for a Rice Emission Decision Support Tool, capped off the workshop series. The Group is part of a broader initiative, The Agricultural Synergies Project: Guidance for Integrating REDD+ and Agriculture. Among its objectives is the development of a decision support tool outline to evaluate the costs and practical issues involved in potential emission changes due to crop management. The meeting was co-chaired by Dr. Reiner Wassmann, IRRI’s climate change expert and coordinator of its climate change research program; Dr. Timothy Searchinger of Princeton University; and T.K. Adhya of Kalinga Institute in India.




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Philippine president declares 2013 as National Year of Rice

The year 2013 has been declared as the National Year of Rice in the Philippines by President Benigno S. Aquino III through a proclamation in anticipation of attaining rice self-sufficiency this year.

“The month of November of every year is also affirmed as National Rice Awareness Month,” the proclamation further stated.

With the theme Sapat na Bigas, Kaya ng Pinas (The Philippines can be rice sufficient), the National Year of Rice was proclaimed to raise public awareness on responsible rice consumption. Farmers were also encouraged to adopt modern technologies to improve farm productivity.

“President Aquino's declaration of 2013 as the National Year of Rice underlines the Philippine Government's renewed and intensified focus on strengthening the food security status of population, principally by promoting the productivity of the agricultural sector in general, and of the rice industry in particular. IRRI provides strong technical support for the Philippines' Food Staples Sufficiency Program (FSSP), enabling the host country to readily access the results of IRRI's research,” says V. Bruce J. Tolentino, deputy director general for communication and partnerships.

IRRI and the Philippine government had earlier signed an agreement to support, extend, and fast-track the delivery of the Philippines’ FSSP. Food Staples Sufficiency Program.

IRRI also has a range of activities planned in the Philippines for 2013 to align with the National Year of Rice, including:

• 30th Global Young Leaders Program (14-25 January) 
• BigAs2 Hack (24-25 August) (Read about BigAs Hackathon 2012) 
• 7th International Rice Genetics Symposium (5-8 November)

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Philippines: ADB-funded project links postharvest actors with finance sector

More than 50 representatives from various sectors attended a forum, Emerging opportunities for postharvest technologies and entrepreneurship, which aims to increase awareness among microfinance institutions, banks, and policymakers, of improved technologies and entrepreneurial enterprise opportunities.

The forum, held on 15 January in Butuan City, Agusan del Norte, also provided farmers who have tested these new options, to present sustainable business cases for adopting hermetic storage and business plans for pursuing contract drying services.


The forum was an activity of the Philippine Postharvest Learning Alliance, a multi-stakeholder platform that works to reduce postharvest losses and increase incomes of farmers and other postharvest actors. Learning alliances have also been established in Cambodia and Vietnam by the Asian Development Bank-funded Postharvest Project, with complementary support from the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation.

Alfred Schmidley, IRRI business model and value chain specialist, explains, “We hope that this event will inspire and allow these new stakeholders to establish better linkages to loan products and other services to technologies and enterprise pilot for scaling out further with Learning Alliance actors.”

Several business cases for adopting hermetic storage and mechanical drying services were presented by local farmers. Mr. Schmidley and Raquel Dacanay from Caraga State University provided guidance for the farmers in developing business cases.

Several financial institutions then presented a range of activities, products, and services available to the farmers who want funding for their business plans.

The participants also discussed issues on finance and policy and next steps for future learning activities.

The event culminated with a demonstration of the reversible airflow flatbed dryer by Dexter Ona and Caesar Tado from the Philippine Rice Research Institute (PhilRice); and the IRRI Super Bag by Jose Gomos, vice-president of GrainPro, Inc. (makers of the Super Bag), at the PhilRice Agusan del Norte station.



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Indonesia: Training series helps Asian countries use SAR data for rice apps

The Indonesian Centre for Agricultural Land Resources Research and Development (ICALRD), one of the research and management units of the Indonesian Agency for Agricultural Research and Development, hosted the first of three training courses by SARMAP on the use of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data for rice applications.

The training series is held as part of the Remote sensing-based information and Insurance for Crops in Emerging economies (RIICE, http://www.riice.org) project, funded by the Swiss Development Cooperation.

This focus of the first course is on generation of key products—rice area mapping, phenological monitoring, and retrieval of selected bio-physical parameters—on the national level using SAR data acquired from old (ENVISAT ASAR and ALOS PALSAR-1) and current spaceborne systems (Cosmo-SkyMed and Radarsat-2).

The 10 participants were also introduced to the characteristics and use of forthcoming SAR sensors, in particular, Sentinel-1. All data processing was performed using RICEscape, a dedicated SAR processing chain developed by SARMAP.

Other courses will be conducted by IRRI on crop growth simulation modelling using ORYZA2000 and the combination of ORYZA2000 with SAR-based products, to soon provide precise information on rice production at national level.

The RIICE project—which includes Indonesia, the Philippines, Vietnam, Thailand, Cambodia, Bangladesh, and India—aims to reduce the vulnerability of smallholders in rice production by helping set up better and cheaper information systems, thus opening the way to rural advisory services

Although the main beneficiaries of the intervention are smallholder rice farmers in Asia, it also seeks to involve all actors in the value chain. The current project aims to help about 5 million farmers.

Key stakeholders of the program are national governments, national agricultural institutes, cooperatives/banks/farmer unions/other aggregators, and individual farmers.



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Bangladesh: Short-duration rice varieties help increase farmers' income

Farmers in the Sathkira District of Bangladesh have found that the tandem of short-duration rice and mustard varieties has helped increase their income, as it enables them to plant the boro rice on time in their rice-mustard-rice cropping system.

This was the highlight of a field day held on 15 January attended by 170 farmers from six villages. In the demo village, farmers grow either just two rice crops or a mustard crop (using a traditional mustard variety, Tori 7) between two rice crops.


Some farmers who saw the performance of short-duration rice (BRRI dhan39 and BINA dhan7) planted alternately with mustard varieties (BARI mustard14 and BARI mustard15) in 2011 began using the short-duration varieties in 2012. The results are encouraging yet more farmers to use the short-duration varieties in their traditional cropping system.

The field day was organized by Thengamara Mohila Sabuj Sangha, a NGO partner of the Cereals System Initiative for South Asia in Bangladesh (CSISA-BD).



Md. Harunur Rashid, cropping system specialist, and Debabrata Mahalder, agriculture development officer of CSISA-BD's Khulna Hub, facilitated the event.


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Young global leaders to promote apps for rice farmers

The mobile version of the IRRI-developed tool,
Nutrient Manager for Rice

Twenty-four young professionals from 9 countries come together this week in Hong Kong to decide how to best promote mobile and web-based agricultural tools among farmers.

The participants of the 30th Global Young Leaders Programme (YLP), which starts on 14 January 2013, belong to 15 companies and organizations—a wide range of contexts that are expected to feed into an effective marketing plan for the new tools.

Specifically, their ideas will be used to help promote the use of Nutrient Manager for Rice—a mobile and web-based tool that gives farmers site-specific advice on fertilizer use—and to develop an integrated platform  that will connect various players in the rice supply chain and optimize rice productivity and returns.

NM Rice was developed by IRRI and has been promoted for farmers’ use in the Philippines, Indonesia, and Bangladesh.

“IRRI is excited to work with the participants, who represent the best of young entrepreneurs and business managers from across Asia,” said V. Bruce J. Tolentino, IRRI’s deputy director general for communication and partnerships. “We are eager to examine their proposals for business models for digital tools developed at IRRI and anticipate that these will greatly benefit rice farmers and countries in strengthening food security."

"We are also happy to partner in this innovative endeavor with the Global Institute For Tomorrow (GIFT) Hongkong,” Dr. Tolentino said.

During the YLP—which has the theme, Empowering rice farmers through mobile technology, the participants will spend a week on classroom-based sessions to discuss and debate issues pertaining to the roles of business, governments, and civil society; the  impacts of globalization; and Asia’s economic growth and increasing global presence.

The participants will then travel to the Philippines for a week as field exposure to some of the realities surrounding businesses. The group will meet stakeholders from corporate, government, and research sectors to consolidate their platform. 

The group's outputs will be translated into a business plan and strategic recommendations for corporate partnerships and will then be presented  at a culmination event to be held at the Asian Institute of Management (AIM) Conference Centre on 25 January.

“Through the program, the participants hope to provide IRRI with several new ideas for creating a blueprint for new business models to help link rice farmers and rice resources to commercial partners," said Eric Stryson, director of GIFT.  “The output of the program offers far-reaching social impact to both key stakeholders and regional farming communities at large.”

"We need to fuel that engine with innovations that will not only make the sector more competitive, but may also increase the number of jobs and returns to our farmers. Market-based innovations could be a game-changer in that respect,” said Ronald Mendoza, AIM policy center executive director.

“AIM is privileged to partner with IRRI. Innovation is what fueled our Asian neighbors’ economic rise; now, hopefully, it’s our turn,” he said.

The YLP is sponsored by GIFT, in partnership with IRRI and AIM.


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Bangladesh Agricultural University turns 50

Bangladesh Agricultural University (BAU), an IRRI partner, is celebrating its 50th year in a 3-day event.

The Bangladeshi Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina came on the first day to take part in the celebrations, held at the BAU campus in Mymensingh.

Activities included an agro-technology fair, in which the stall put up by the IRRI Bangladesh office won first prize in the international category.

IRRI's participation in the event advances communication efforts with Bangladesh's academe and local agriculture and research systems and draws focus on IRRI's work in the country, which was instrumental in the development of flood-tolerant rice varieties that are now widely planted by farmers in the region. 



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Yujiro Hayami, former IRRI agricultural economist, dies

(Photo from Fukuoka City)

Yujiro Hayami, agricultural economist at IRRI (1974-77) under Randy Barker, passed away on 24 December 2012 in Tokyo. A large part of the achievements of Yujiro, an internationally recognized agricultural economist, came from his experience at IRRI, including his intensive investigation over four decades of one village in eastern Laguna.

Among his many works is the classic A Rice Village Saga: Three Decades of Green Revolution in the Philippines co-authored with Masao Kikuchi. He also wrote Anatomy of a Peasant Economy.

A funeral mass was held on 29 December in Tokyo as well as in Los Baños, by his friends in the Philippines. 


Words from IFPRI DG


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Dennis Greenland, former IRRI deputy director, dies

Dennis J. Greenland, former IRRI deputy director (1979-87), passed away on 23 December 2012 in the UK. He was an internationally renowned soil scientist.

The scope of Dr. Greenland’s research and contributions to the field of soil science extended over nearly a half-century and four continents. After earning his master’s and Ph.D. degrees at the University of Oxford in 1954, he served as lecturer at the University of Ghana in West Africa, where he began studying the effects of cultivation on soil dynamics.


His research led to the 1960 publication of The Soil Under Shifting Cultivation, considered a classic in the field. Then, as a researcher in soil science at the University of Adelaide, he worked in southern Australia identifying strategies for sustainable management of soil and water resources, especially in tropical climates. His research over the years encompassed a wide range of topics, including the Green Revolution, rice production, efficient fertilizer use, soil structural stability, soil conditioners, soil organic matter effects and degradation of tropical soils.

In 1974, he was named director of research at the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA) in Nigeria. His service as a sought-after scientific administrator continued when he was named deputy director general at IRRI in 1979. In 1987, he was named director of scientific services at the Commonwealth Agricultural Bureau (CAB) International in England. He rejoined the University of Reading faculty in 1988.

Dr. Greenland contributed more than 180 papers to scientific journals and written three books, including Cherish the Earth (1994) and the IRRI book, The Sustainability of Rice Farming (1997). In addition, he edited seven more volumes on soil management.

He had long served as a consultant to commercial, government, and United Nations agencies on tropical agricultural development and sustainability of farming practices.

He was a member of the Committee on International Programs and the Committee on Statutes and Structures of the International Society of Soil Science. He was a past president of the British Society of Soil Science and a past chair of the Scientific Advisory Panel of the Commonwealth Development Corporation, U.K. His many honors included fellowships in the Royal Society of London, U.K., the World Academy of Arts and Science, and the Institute of Biology, U.K.


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Nepal: Women farmers empowered with community-based seed system

The introduction of a community-based seed system, or what locals call the “seed producers’ group,” in the mid-hills of Nepal has brought remarkable improvements in the lives of women farmers in the area. 

This was what members of the Mahjuwa Ladies Seed Producers’ Group and the Harrabot Ladies Seed Producers’ Group, both of Lamjung, Nepal, said to the team from the Consortium for Unfavorable Rice Environments (CURE) that came to document the groups' experiences in early December 2012. 


“We can now speak; we know many things now,” Devi Shrestra of the Harrabot group said.

“Our confidence in raising productivity in our own farms has developed,” added Kalpana Sapkota of the Mahjuwa group.

The team from CURE—Digna Manzanilla (IRRI social scientist and CURE associate coordinator) and Annette Tobias (CURE assistant scientist), went to Lamjung to document the experience of women farmers in the area and the gender-disaggregated division of labor per community.

“We want to analyze the role of women in community-based seed systems and their growing participation in rice farming activities,” Manzanilla said. “We also want to assess the immediate benefits derived by women farmers from their participation in local seed systems and how they contribute to the dispersion of new stress-tolerant varieties developed by the partner-institutions in Nepal.”

The documentation was supported by Bhaba Tripathi (IRRI-Nepal representative) and NARES partners Bishnu Adikhari and Hari Panta, both from the Institute of Agriculture and Animal Sciences (IAAS) in Lamjung, Nepal, and Devendra Gauchan of the Nepal Agricultural Research Council (NARC). 



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Bangladesh: CSISA holds training on rice and sunflower production for partners

The Cereal Systems Initiative for South Asia (CSISA) conducted a 'training of trainers' on rice and sunflower production to strengthen the capacity of partner NGO field staff and enable smooth implementation of CSISA-Bangladesh activities in the Khulna Hub.

Twenty-nine field-level staff and a local coordinator participated in the training course, in which were discussed rice varieties (high-yielding, salt-tolerant, and submergence- and drought-tolerant); sunflower and rice production packages; postharvest management of rice; and key topics on growing mustard and sesame, such as fertilizer, water, and pest and disease management.


Participants also discussed ways to overcome the knowledge gap between modern technology and farmers’ knowledge base.

M.A. Aziz, deputy director of agricultural extension in Khulna District, encouraged participants to continue serving the community through their new knowledge.

 Md. Harunur Rashid, cropping system specialist of CSISA-BD, was course coordinator and facilitator; his associates Md. Kahirul Islam Rony, Debabrata Mahalder, and Shama Nasrin were trainers.

The workshop was organized by the IRRI team of CSISA-BD's Khulna Hub with the assistance of partner NGOs and was held on 12-13 December 2012. 


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Bangladesh: IRRI names new country rep

Timothy Russell is the new IRRI representative to Bangladesh starting 14 January 2013 and will also be chief of party for the Cereal Systems Initiative for South Asia or CSISA.

Timothy's has worked on agricultural projects funded by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), Department for International Development (DFID), World Bank, International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), and the European Union.

These projects were carried out in Nepal, Indonesia, Lesotho, Uganda, Mozambique, Bangladesh, and Angola.

Timothy brings to IRRI his extensive experience in project management, farmer participatory research and extension, rural income generation, and community development.

He will be supported in his work by Loreta Hempsall, corporate services manager, who will oversee all administrative functions and teams in the IRRI Bangladesh Office. 



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Young programmer wins UPLB best undergrad paper award

Roven Rommel "Arvie" Fuentes, a young programmer working with the informatics team in IRRI, won the best paper award during the Student-Faculty Research Conference of the Mathematics, Statistics, and Computer Science Cluster of U.P. Los Baños.

Arvie's winning paper was on his special topics problem, Suffix tree-based pattern discovery of biological motifs. His advisors were Jaime Samaniego, professor at the UPLB Institute of Computer Science, and Kenneth McNally, senior scientist (computational biology) at IRRI.

The team with which Arvie works is implementing BioHDF5 for storing and querying large-scale data without the need for a relational database.


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IRRN to cease publication on 31 January

The International Rice Research Notes (IRRN) will cease publication effective 31 January 2013. Since its first issue (as the International Rice Research Newsletter) in October 1976, IRRN, for more than 36 years, expedited communication among scientists concerned with development of improved technology for rice and rice-based cropping systems. It was a mechanism to help scientists keep each other informed of current rice research findings.


In its heyday in the late 1970s through the early 1990s, six issues per year were printed and distributed. It became a quarterly in 1993. In 2008, IRRN became an online-only publication. Since there are now more mechanisms and channels to disseminate important rice research information (such as the open-access journal Rice, published by Springer), the decision was made to cease publication.

Submitted articles received after 31 January will be returned. However, all articles already in the pipeline and accepted for publication will be placed online. All past IRRN issues dating back to 1976 are archived here and will continue to be available to rice researchers worldwide. 


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