Weekly SPI inches down
KARACHI: The Sensitive price
indicator (SPI) for the week ended August 22 decreased 0.08 percent over the
previous week; however, the poorest quintile that earns only up to
Rs8,000/month registered an increase of 0.04 percent in SPI inflation, official
data showed on Friday.
Pakistan Bureau of Statistics (PBS)
data showed that weekly inflation for the combined income group declined to
271.83 points against 272.05 points recorded in the week ended on August 16.
But it increased a whopping 18.91 percent as compared to weekly inflation in
the corresponding period last year.
SPI for income group of up to
Rs8,000 increased 0.04 percent during the week under review as compared to the
preceding week, while registering 15.63 percent increase compared to weekly
inflation in the corresponding period last year.
Weekly inflation for the group
earning Rs8,001 to Rs12,000 decreased 0.02 percent. The SPI for the people
earning between Rs12,001 and Rs18,000 declined 0.02; and for those making
Rs18,001 and Rs35,000 it fell 0.10 percent.
The income group earning above
Rs35,000 recorded the most decline in inflation at 0.12 percent; however, the
weekly SPI increased a whopping 21.81 percent for this quintile compared to the
weekly inflation in the corresponding period last year. PBS computes weekly
price trend of 53 essential items from 17 urban centres. Average prices of only
seven commodities declined during the week ended on August 22 over the previous
week.
Items that recorded the highest
decrease in prices were tomatoes, down 8.85 percent to Rs52.04/kg, and chicken,
down 7.93 percent to Rs193.62/kg. Other items were garlic, LPG cylinder,
potatoes, and red and yellow lentils. During the week, prices of 24 goods
increased, including onions, soap, plain bread, vegetable ghee and oil, gur,
sugar, pulse gram and mash, eggs, wheat and wheat flour, red chilli powder,
mutton and beef, mustard oil, basmati rice, milk and curd, kerosene oil, and
firewood.
Average prices of 22 items remained
unchanged during the week under review, which included cloth, shoes, utility
charges, salt, tea, rice irri-6, powdered milk, petrol, high speed diesel, and
telephone charges
Vietnam steps up work to help longan enter
Australian market
Illustrative image (Photo: VNA)Sydney (VNA) – The Vietnam Trade Office in Australia is working to help Vietnamese longan exporters to obtain an import licence from the Australian Government as soon as possible.
The information was released at a Vietnam - Australia business connection conference held in Sydney last weekend, which gathered leaders of 7 Vietnamese localities – Tuyen Quang, Hai Duong, Quang Binh, Khanh Hoa, Dak Lak, Dong Thap, and Can Tho – and representatives from over 40 Australian firms, investment funds, and business associations.
Nguyen Phu Hoa, head of the office, said following the Australian Department of Agriculture’s recent announcement of import requirements for fresh longan from Vietnam, his office has held discussions with Vietnamese localities that grow the fruit and businesses from both sides.
Vietnam has so far exported lychee, mango, and dragon fruit to the Australian market.
According to Hoa, the office will support exporters of Vietnamese farm produce in completing related paperwork and liaison between agencies and businesses of the two countries, while carrying out a series of activities to promote Vietnamese longan in the Oceania country.
The official unveiled that the office has built new plans to provide practical aid for Vietnam’s export, which include the establishment of a customer support hotline for consumers of Vietnamese products in Australia and a Vietnamese club that offers information to Australian firms.
He also informed the conference that the SunRice Australia, which consumes 5 percent of Vietnam’s total rice exports, has completed its assistance plan for Vietnam under a sustainable rice production programme. The plan aims to help Vietnamese rice meet international standards, thus allowing the group to purchase more Japonica and Indica rice from Vietnam in the next 10 years.
At the conference, Tom Robb, CEO of The Robb Group, an Australian company that specialises in corporate and capital advisory services, said better-than-ever cooperation opportunities are opening up for Vietnamese and Australian enterprises.
Graham Kinder, Vice President of the Australia Vietnam Business Council, said strong collaboration has been recorded between localities of both nations across all fields from trade to culture and education.-VNA
Cheap glutinous rice planned to battle high prices
The
government has banned hoarding of glutinous rice and will sell discounted packs
as prices soar amid shortages. Government spokesperson Narumon Pinyosinwat said
on Monday that Prime Minister Prayut Chan-o-cha had ordered the Commerce
Ministry to prevent hoarding and to launch discounted packs in the wake of the
all-time high price of glutinous rice. Deputy Prime Minister and Commerce
Minister Jurin Laksanawisit ordered the Internal Trade Department to impose the
ban immediately since the grain is on the ministry's price control list, Mrs
Narumon said.
"There
will be discussions with millers, traders and cooperatives so they can quickly
produce packed glutinous rice at a special price to relieve people's
trouble," she said. Mrs Narumon attributed the expensive glutinous rice to
drought that caused its low yield. The situation should improve when the new
yield comes out in October, she said.
Glutinous
rice now sells for 50,000 baht a tonne while Hom Mali fragrant rice costs
35,000 baht.
Local
retail prices were nearly 50 baht per kilogramme and a smallest bag of steamed
glutinous rice is now 10 baht, double recent prices.
Exporters
seek Iraq deal
Rice
exporters have urged the government to revive government-to-government (G2G)
rice deals with Iraq, which suspended its rice purchases from Thailand on
concerns about quality in 2016. Charoen Laothammatas, president of the Thai
Rice Exporters Association, said the government should speed up its efforts to
regain the confidence of Iraq concerning Thai rice. A deal with the Iraqi
government would pave the way for other purchases by Iraqi buyers, he said.
Iraq used to buy 700,000-800,000 tonnes a year during 2011-13, dropping to
111,500 in 2014 and 83,350 in 2015.
Iraq
has not bought any Thai rice since 2016, as the country was concerned after
finding that the 100% white rice delivered from Thailand during the Yingluck
Shinawatra government was of poor quality. In 2018, the Iraq Grain Board of the
Trade Ministry imported 735,516 tonnes of rice, mainly from Vietnam, Uruguay, the
US, Argentina and Paraguay. Last year Iraq imported 320,235 tonnes from
Vietnam, followed by 185,707 tonnes from Uruguay, 126,131 tonnes from the US,
63,081 tonnes from Argentina and 30,362 tonnes from Paraguay.
"A
G2G deal with certified quality will help restore Iraq's trust, and the private
sector can follow up to secure purchase orders later," Mr Charoen said. He
urged the commerce minister to visit Japan and the Philippines to boost rice
exports. Mr Charoen also suggested the government focus more on development of
rice seeds to increase the country's competitiveness and exports. The
government should promote more soft-textured rice seeds rather than the
hard-textured ones pushed now, he said. The association is maintaining its rice
export forecast at 9 million tonnes this year. "With shipments constantly
declining since January, our best performance would be 9 million tonnes this
year," Mr Charoen said. The target is about 20% less than the 11.2 million
tonnes in 2018.
Ambassador
hopes Cambodia listens to EU’s concerns to avoid EBA cancellation
Outgoing European Union Ambassador
to Cambodia George Edgar on Friday said he hopes the Cambodian government will
address the concerns raised by the EU regarding compliance with conventions of
the International Labour Organisation (ILO) and the United Nations.
Speaking
to reporters in Phnom Penh on Friday, Mr Edgar said he expects positive results
for Cambodia if the EU’s concerns are taken seriously, adding that he doesn’t
want to see Cambodia lose the trade preferences it enjoys under the
Everything-but-arms (EBA) scheme. “The EU takes about 50 percent of all
Cambodian exports, so the EU is the biggest export market for Cambodia,” the
ambassador said. “We hope that something will continue to develop.
“Everybody
knows that a procedure has been launched that could potentially lead to the
suspension of Cambodia’s trade preferences. We have underlined repeatedly that
[the suspension of the EBA] is not the necessary outcome of the procedure and
it is not the outcome the European Union wants to see. “The procedure has been
launched because of concerns about a number of developments in Cambodia that
have raised questions regarding Cambodia’s compliance with international conventions,
particularly the ILO and the UN conventions which are required to access EBA
preferences,” Mr Edgar said. “Our sincere hope is that the Cambodian
authorities will address the issue in an effective way and that there is no
need for Cambodia’s access to EBA to be called into question,” the outgoing
ambassador said, adding that he hopes the relation between Cambodia and the EU
will be “very good” and that it will benefit the people. In February, the
European Union started a six-month process of intense monitoring and engagement
that could lead to the temporary suspension of Cambodia’s preferential access
to the bloc’s market under the EBA trade scheme. With duty-free access under
the EBA, EU is Cambodia’s biggest market for textile and garment products,
bicycles and agricultural products. The Cambodian Rice Federation (CRF) on
Thursday asked the European Union to save the livelihoods of half a million
families by halting the process to withdraw the Everything-but-arms scheme.
In
a statement issued yesterday, CRF said cancelling the trade scheme would be a
“painful” addition to the duties that the bloc imposed on Cambodia rice earlier
this year to protect European producers. As a result of the new levies, during
the first half of 2019, Cambodia’s milled rice exports to the EU fell by almost
50 percent compared to the first half of 2018, CRF pointed out. “This year the
EU imposed duties on Cambodian rice in order to protect domestic producers.
This has been acutely felt by most of the 500,000 families in Cambodia who eke
out a living farming jasmine and fragrant long-grain rice, even though these
varieties are geographically specific and do not compete directly with products
grown in the EU,” CRF said in the statement. “Without the EBA, these efforts will
come to naught. The CRF appeals to the EU to save the livelihoods of half a
million families and to save the work that we have done to earn your respect,
that of consumers and that of those we serve.” The Garment Manufacturers
Association in Cambodia (GMAC) has also joined calls to halt the EBA removal
process. In a recent statement, it said the livelihood of 750,000 workers and
the welfare of some 3 million Cambodians are at stake. “GMAC again wishes to
stress to EU legislators, officials and all interested stakeholders that a
suspension of EBA benefits for our sector will result in significant job losses
in the garment, footwear and travel goods industries and would not serve the
EBA programme objectives of poverty eradication and sustainable development.
“It
would prove to be a sad and regrettable outcome for GMAC and its workforce
which have done so much to cooperate with the ILO and in effect to promote its
role in monitoring workers’ rights in Cambodia, as well as in other nations,”
GMAC said.
EU tariffs on Cambodian rice damage 500,000 farmers
To protect its producers, the EU has imposed tariffs for three
years on Cambodian and Myanmar rice. In just six months, exports to Europe have
been halved. For Cambodia, the measure penalises producers of “jasmine and
fragrant long grain rice” who “do not compete directly with products grown in
the EU”. China is ready to support Cambodia’s economy and agriculture.
Phnom Penh (AsiaNews/Agencies) – Some 500,000 farming families
face serious economic disruption because of tariffs imposed by the European
Union (EU) on Cambodian rice, this according to the Cambodian Rice Federation
(CRF). European tariffs and the consequent decline in exports weigh heavily on
Cambodian agriculture, already penalised by a severe drought in the
first months of the year. EU-Cambodian economic relations could also be
affected by changes to Cambodia’s privileged trading status. The EU in January
imposed tariffs for three years on rice from Cambodia and Myanmar, in order to
protect EU producers following a surge in imports from the two Asian countries.
For the first six months of this year, Cambodian rice exports to the EU fell by
half compared with the same period last year, to 93,000 tonnes, the CRF
reports. “This has been acutely felt by most of the 500,000 families who eke
out a living farming jasmine and fragrant long grain rice, in spite of the fact
that these varieties are geographically specific and do not compete directly
with products grown in the EU,” the CRF said in a statement. The EU in February
also started an 18-month process that could lead to the suspension of Cambodia’s
special Everything but Arms (EBA)
access, which gives almost developing 50 countries duty free access for all
exports to the EU, except arms. That process is separate from the rice tariffs
and is due to European concerns over Cambodia’s human rights record.
The EU takes more than a third of Cambodia’s exports, including garments,
footwear and bicycles. In April, Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen said that
China, his closest ally, would help Cambodia if the EU withdrew the EBA. China
had also agreed to import 400,000 tonnes of Cambodian rice, according to a Hun
Sen’s posting online. Meanwhile, according to data from the Secretariat of One
Window Service for Rice Export Formality, a joint private-government working
group, rice exports to China have already risen 66 per cent in the first half
of 2019 to 118,401 tonnes.
Villar
says rice tarrification law meant to comply with WTO deal obligations
August 25, 2019, 3:19 PM
By Hannah Torregoza
Senator Cynthia Villar on Sunday
clarified misconceptions on the Rice Tariffication Law, saying it was passed
due to the Philippines’ failure to meet with its obligations with the World
Trade Organization (WTO).
Senator Cynthia Villar
(Senate of the Philippines / File Photo / MANILA BULLETIN)
(Senate of the Philippines / File Photo / MANILA BULLETIN)
Villar, one of the senators who
pushed for the law, said this amid concerns that the law has dealt a huge blow
on farmers affected by the influx of cheaper rice imports.
The law, which removed the
quantitative restrictions on rice while imposing a 35-percent tariff on imports
from neighboring Southeast Asian nations, was actually a result of the
country’s failure to meet its obligations under a 1995 agreement with the WTO to
make the country’s rice farmers more competitive.
“We (lawmakers) did not decide on
the importation of rice. We signed an agreement in 1995 with WTO, they will
allow us to control the importation of rice for 22 years to prepare our farmers
to become competitive to the imported rice, and this expired in 2017,” Villar
said.
“Of course, this is an agreement
with the WTO. Our President can’t do anything but conform to the agreement,
that’s why he sent a rice tariffication bill to Congress that he certified as urgent
because he doesn’t want to import rice without tariff so that our small rice
farmers will not be affected,” she pointed out.
Had the government succeeded in
making Filipino farmers competitive while the WTO agreement was in effect,
there would have been no need for the government to impose the liberalization
of rice.
“We should have, since 1995, have
helped our rice farmers to compete with those imported rice. There are
mechanisms for them to be competitive with imported rice,” she said.
“We cannot do anything about it
because that is part of our agreement with the WTO. We can’t disregard it. We
had our shortcomings, so now we are trying to correct our mistakes,” she added.
But she said the Rice Tariffication
Law can help farmers improve their livelihood by providing them funds to
mechanize through the P10-billion Rice Competitiveness Enhancement Fund (RCEF).
As such, Villar reiterated that the
price of palay would not go down to as low as P7 per kilo due to the effects of
the Rice Tariffication law.
“How can that drop to P7, when in
Vietnam, it’s P6? Then you add tariff, that would be P9. So how can that drop
so low?,” she pointed out.
“If rice from Vietnam enters into
the market that would be P20 per kilo of rice, so how will it go down to P7?
That’s already false information,” she stressed.
Plants Absolutely Love Listening to Music, Here
Are Some Interesting Findings
BY , EPOCH TIMES
August 24, 2019 Updated: August 24, 2019 
Plants love music, but not just any
music. They have a taste for classical. Not only have researchers proven that
crop yields increase, but growth is enhanced when plants are
exposed to classical music.
You may need a
little convincing, so here are some interesting findings to broaden your
horizons. After you’re done with this article, you may opt for some more Mozart
while at home.
Italian winemaker says his
vines are “more robust” thanks to Mozart
Winemaker Giancarlo
Cignozzi plays Mozart to his grape vines because he knows they like it.
When he first
treated them to “Il Paradiso di Frassina,” he found the grapes growing closest
to the speaker not only grew toward the speaker—but grew bigger too.
“The plants
seem more robust. The grapes closer to the speaker have the higher sugar
content, so we believe in this idea,” Ulisse, Giancarlo’s son, who makes wine
with pops, told CBS News.
Illustration – Shutterstock | Lukasz Szwaj
Interestingly,
whilst his vines spend their days leisurely soaking up the sun on the hills of
Montalcino in Tuscany and listening to classical pieces, they have become less
susceptible to insect attacks, which is why Giancarlo does not use
pesticide anymore.
Plants love classical music and
seemingly detest rock music
In 1973, Dorothy Retallack, who
authored The Sound of Music and Plants,
tested groups of plants by exposing one group to rock music and another group
to classical music.
The group of
plants exposed to Brahms, Schubert, Beethoven, and Hayden grew towards the
speaker, and even intertwined around the speaker. They obviously couldn’t
get enough it.
The group
exposed to rock music, however, grew away from the speaker and up the glass
enclosure wall in what is believed to be an attempt to escape the sound. Even
by turning the plants around, they continued to grow away from the speaker
emanating rock music.
Moreover, the
group of plants exposed to rock music grew abnormally and produced smaller
leaves. This group died in two weeks.
Enhanced growth and increased
yield for a field of crops
Dr. T. C.
Singh, head of the Botany Department at India’s Annamalai University, found
that the growth rate of balsam plants accelerated by 20 percent in height and
72 percent in biomass after being exposed to classical music performed by
flute, violin, harmonium, and a “reena,” an Indian instrument.
Illustration
– Shutterstock | CHALERMPHON SRISANG
Moreover,
seeds that were exposed to classical music and later germinated produced a
healthier plant of greater size and with more leaves.
In another
experiment, he used loudspeakers to play classical Indian music to a rice
paddy. These crops ended up growing 25–60 percent larger than India’s
regional average.
He did the
same for peanuts and musically provoked them to yield 50 percent more.
Dr. Singh also
noted that in the experiments he conducted, plants were most receptive to
violin sounds.
Beethoven aids rice crop growth
In an
experiment conducted by Mi-Jeong Jeong of the National Institute of Agricultural
Biotechnology in Suwon, South Korea, and his colleagues, Beethoven’s “Moonlight
Sonata” was played to a few lucky rice fields.
The
researchers monitored the gene expression of the crop and determined that not
only Beethoven but classical music in general stimulates the crops’ growth.
They played 14 different classical pieces, which all produced similar positive
results.
The same
effect can also encourage buds to flower, producing more fruit, or a greater
harvest.
Jeong’s
research is backed up by Canadian engineer Eugene Canby, who exposed wheat to
J.S. Bach’s violin sonata. His findings show that the wheat crop yield
increased by 66 percent thanks to Bach.
Illustration
– Shutterstock | Jozef Klopacka
Perhaps you
may wonder how plants “hear” the music. Well, one needs to think more in terms
of vibrations and frequencies from harmonious sound waves, which is what’s
understood to stimulate plant growth.
The above few
experiments are only a teeny tiny portion of what has been discovered. It’s
interesting to say the least.
Yeah, maybe
you should get back to Bach… Your plants will thank you for it. Your own body
may too!
One-third killed by elephants in north Bengal were
drunk: Study
KOLKATA , AUGUST 24,
2019 22:57 IST
Jumbo woes: Experts emphasise that the
increasing human settlements should also be regulated. | Photo
Credit: Dipanjan Naha
Survey
confined to north Bengal, 476 died between 2006-16
One-third of the people killed by elephants in
north Bengal between 2006 and 2016 happened to be drunk and chasing the animal, a study has found.
During this period, a total of 476 persons died
and 1646 injured in elephant attacks in the four districts of the region:
Darjeeling, Jalpaiguri, Alipurduar, and Cooch Behar.
The study was published earlier this year in
science journal Plos One. It analysed the age, profession and identity
of the victims and found that 36% were drunk (on local rice beer called handia) and
were chasing away elephants from their fields or the vicinity of their homes.
The study also suggested that awareness
campaigns about the dangers of alcohol and basic behaviour of elephants should
be organised regularly to educate marginalised farmers and tea estate workers.
Titled Assessment and prediction of spatial patterns
of human-elephant conflicts in changing land cover scenarios of a
human-dominated landscape in north Bengal, the paper looks at seasonal and temporal
variation of elephant attacks, major land uses, hotspots of conflicts and age,
profession and activity/behaviour of victims.
“74% of the elephant attack victims were males.
30% were farmers, 19% were daily labours and 17% were tea workers. Among the
victims, 20% were returning home in dark, 7% had gone to collect firewood and
8% were defecating in the open,” said Dipanjan Naha and S. Sathyakumar, the
lead authors of the publication who are associated with the Wildlife Institute of India. Only
in 8% of the cases were the victims sleeping inside their homes, their study
found.
A high seasonal variation has been observed in
terms of attacks, according to the study, which is based on field visits to
conflict sites. As many as 54 % of elephant attacks occurred between May and
July and 30 % between August and October. The frequency of the conflict
increases during the rainy season, which also coincides with the harvest of
major agricultural crops such as wheat, maize and paddy.
The study also found major changes in land-use
pattern in the region: forest cover increased by 446 sq km, the area under
agriculture reduced by 128 sq km, while tea gardens declined by 307 sq km. The
area under human settlement increased by 61 sq km in the past 10 years.
The researchers also pointed out that elephants
need access to water and thus encroachment of riverine patches should be
regulated immediately. The experts emphasised that the increase in area of
human settlements should also be regulated, particularly along major elephant
corridors such as Jaldapara, Buxa, Gorumara and Mahananda sanctuaries.
The study also pointed that the estimated elephant
population in north Bengal is 488, which is only 1.8 % of the elephant
population of India, but the number of human deaths due to elephant attacks
stood at 12 % of all such deaths in the country.
Suggestions from the researchers include
discouraging of paddy cultivation in areas adjacent to protected areas, where
the risk of human-elephant conflict is the highest. Unpalatable crops such as
ginger, chillis, tamarind, etc. should be grown to discourage visitation by
elephants, they said.
Hybrid seeds key to achieving rice self-sufficiency
Despite
the World Bank’s estimate that the Philippines has 18.2-percent arable land,
well above the global average of 10.6 percent and more than adequate annual
rainfall, the country remains dependent on rice imports.
Like
most Asian countries, 90 percent of domestic rice comes from smallholder
farmers. The good news is that through the efforts of the government, in
partnership with companies such as Bayer Philippines, Filipino farmers are
gradually shifting to hybrid seeds and adopting the modern methods needed to
maximize their potential.
One
success story is that of Myrna Perez-Villa. Using hybrid seeds and
techniques she learned by attending various training courses on updated farming
methods, Perez-Villa, a rice farmer from Bago City, Negros Occidental, has
consistently been able to get yields of 180 eighty cavans of rice per hectare.
Myrna
Perez-Villa beams with pride at her Arize Bigante Plus and mechanized farm in
Barangay Taloc, Bago City, Negros Occidental
In
2004, using Bayer’s hybrid variety Arize Bigante Plus, Perez-Villa instructed
her farmers to ground this seed on one hectare of land through broadcast or
direct seeding. She also received technical support from field
technicians.
“People
in our community laughed at me. They said this method would never work because
of the huge planting distance; they were skeptical that this would produce a
good plant,” recalled Perez-Villa.
Going
against the status quo, Perez-Villa pressed on with crop protection products
and nutrients. Come harvest time, her one-hectare hybrid rice farm produced 180
cavans, far more than the typical 80 cavans that inbred seeds and traditional
methods yield on the average: “People were suddenly taking pictures in my rice
farm. They could not believe it. I couldn’t too, but I am happy with the
results,” expressed Perez-Villa.
Following
her success, in March 2009, Perez-Villa founded the Newton-Camingawan-Para
Farmers’ Association. NECAPA gave farmers the platform to reach out to
the government by seeking support on seeds, farm inputs and most importantly,
mechanization.
Starting
with only 30 members, she said: “It was very difficult to convince farmers
initially, I had to really take time to talk to them and give motivation. I
told them they need to unite to have a solid voice to speak as one to the
government”.
Membership
grew and to date, they have 145 active member-farmers. Through NECAPA, Barangay
Taloc was selected as the pilot beneficiary of the Department of Agriculture’s
Farm Mechanization Program that aims to increase farmer’s productivity and
efficiency through machines.
The
program is a step towards attaining rice self-sufficiency within the province.
On the 200 hectares of rice model farms, 80 percent grounded Arize Bigante-Plus
hybrid seeds. Combined with the use of a mechanical transplanter and
combine harvester, each hectare produced a consistent average yield of more
than 180 cavans.
In
the coming season, NECAPA will not only be a recipient of seeds, inputs and
mechanization support but will also expand to become a service provider to
nearby farm communities with their experience from the previous season.
Paddy conundrum farmer loses out in Odisha government’s data
crunching
Despite widespread
distress sale, crop-loss caused by truant weather triggering farmer
suicide, he State has been reporting bumper harvest of paddy which is
followed by rising procurement.
Published: 25th August 2019 07:13
AM | Last Updated: 25th August 2019 07:13 AM |
Paddy farmers in Odisha
Express News Service
BHUBANESWAR: In Odisha, paddy comes with a
problem of plenty. Come drought or flood, the State has been reporting bumper
harvest of paddy which is followed by rising procurement by the Government.
Yet, there is widespread distress sale,
crop-loss caused by truant weather triggering farmer suicide induced by rising
cost of production and agricultural indebtedness. In fact, there is too much
paddy everywhere - with farmers, millers and even with the Government which
procures it. Paradoxical as it may seem, paddy production of the State is on
the rise but the area under cultivation is gradually declining because farmers
are shying away as it increasingly becomes non-remunerative.
Numbers don’t lie. The declining interest of
farmers from agriculture is evident from the fact that the area under
cultivation is progressively shrinking. The net sown area of the State for all
the crops was 58.29 lakh hectare in 2000-01 which reduced to 53.56 lakh hectare
in 2017-18.
There is a progressive shrinkage of area
under paddy cultivation too, the most favourite crop among the farmers. From
41.80 lakh hectare in 2013-14 to 37.06 lakh hectare in 2018-19, a net decline
of 4.74 lakh hectare has been recorded in the last five years.
A recipient of Krishi Karman Award four times -
including three consecutive years from 2012-13 to 2014-15 for being the best
State in overall food grains production - not a single year has passed without
political parties raising the bogey of distress sale despite the fact that the
State has been procuring paddy much more than what the farmers produce. So,
where is so ‘much’ paddy coming from in Odisha?
Bumper story
Sample this. The State had a bumper harvest of
paddy of 149.16 lakh tonne (rice equivalent of 101 lakh tonne) in 2014-15,
according to Agriculture Department estimates. The Food Supplies and Consumer
Welfare Department put the total rice production at 98.45 lakh tonne with a
marketable surplus of 33.97 lakh tonne after meeting the requirement towards
feed and seed.
When the Food and Procurement Policy for kharif
marketing season (KMS) 2014-15 was announced, the Government targeted to
procure 30 lakh tonne of rice keeping the option open for District Collectors
to revise the numbers if they felt necessary. The actual procurement of rice
that year was 35.46 lakh tonne which is nearly 1.5 lakh tonne more than the
marketable surplus.
The next year, keeping in view possible crop
damage due to scanty rainfall in the State, the Government fixed a procurement
target of 30 lakh tonne of rice for 2015-16 kharif season. The target was
subsequently reduced by around 5.5 lakh tonne basing on Agriculture Department’s
forecast of less production due to rainfall deficit.
As expected, rice production dropped to 58.75
lakh tonne, a steep fall of around 40 lakh tonne from 2014-15 as 23 out of 30
districts experienced a drought like situation. A concerned State Government
pitched in for a demand for special Central assistance of Rs 3,000 crore to
mitigate the dry-spell situation that resulted in crop loss in about 5.23 lakh
hectare.
Baffling as it may sound, in a drought year
having rice deficit of about 6.58 lakh tonne after meeting its requirement (see
graphics), the State could procure 34.43 lakh tonne rice. As political leaders
across party lines made a hue and cry over crop loss, the Government released
an interim assistance of Rs 1,000 crore before raising its demand for a special
package for the drought-hit State.
The big question is, where did all the rice
come from? Was it grown by the farmers? Or was it produced on paper only? A
politically sensitive issue, no one dares question where did the marketing
surplus paddy come amidst huge crop loss that led to increasing number of
farmers’ suicides.Though the Central Government questioned the duplicity of the
State Government by ignoring the special package demand at first, it
subsequently reimbursed the rice procurement bill of the State under the
decentralised procurement system ostensibly under political consideration.
Farmer Suicides
The year 2015 was a ‘black year’ for farming
community in the State as it reported maximum number of farmer suicides. On
October 29, 2015, Odisha’s Special Relief Commissioner informed that the
Government had received 41 reports of farmer suicides but refused to recognise
crop failure as trigger for these extreme steps taken by the hapless farmers.An
inquiry into the suicides blamed it on “mainly family disputes” and even
“excessive liquor consumption” behind the deaths and the Government even
refused to see its own failure.
By mid-March 2016, the official number of
farmer suicides since the kharif season of 2015 had gone past 170. However, the
Government continued to insist that none of the suicide was linked to crop-loss
and attributed them to illness, heart attack, mental disturbance, drug
addiction and family quarrel.
As farmers’ suicides continued unabated, the
State recorded yet another bumper crop in 2016-17 kharif season with a rice
production of 97.94 lakh tonne. The 2017-18 kharif marketing season witnessed a
situation similar to 2015-16 reporting huge crop loss due to combination of
natural calamities, including drought, unseasonal rains and pest attack. The
extent of crop damage could be gauged from the crop loss claims of Rs1,625
crore settled by insurance companies to 18.99 lakh farmers under Pradhan Mantri
Fasal Bima Yojana (PMFBY).
Even after recording a deficit production of
about 1.55 lakh tonne (total rice production 65.51 lakh tonne against the total
requirement 67.06 lakh tonne), the State Government procured 49 lakh tonnes of
paddy (rice equivalent of 33.32 lakh tonne). Well, who produced all this paddy
again? There is no answer to it.
The 2018-19 kharif season has been no different
either. As per advance estimates of the Food Supplies and Consumer Welfare
Department, marketable surplus of rice will be stand at 5.13 lakh tonne after
meeting the consumption and seeds requirement of 67.98 lakh tonne. And, defying
logic, the State Government’s paddy procurement by June 2019 end crossed 65
lakh tonne (rice equivalent of 44 lakh tonne) against the annual target of 55
lakh tonne. The farmers, clearly, are not impressed. In Kalahandi, farmers took
to streets staging blockades on National Highways urging the Government to
purchase their surplus paddy stocks.
Faced with a ballooning expenditure (Rs 11,375
crore at the rate of Rs 1,750 per quintal) on paddy procurement and acute shortage
of storage capacity, the Government had to backtrack from its pronouncement of
purchasing all surplus paddy coming to the mandis (paddy procurement centres).
In the Budget Session of the Assembly, when the matter came in for heated debate by Opposition BJP and Congress, Agriculture Minister Arun Sahoo had a tough time defending the Government when he said 10 lakh tonne paddy above the target fixed had been procured and there is no surplus paddy with the farmers.
In the Budget Session of the Assembly, when the matter came in for heated debate by Opposition BJP and Congress, Agriculture Minister Arun Sahoo had a tough time defending the Government when he said 10 lakh tonne paddy above the target fixed had been procured and there is no surplus paddy with the farmers.
Production, Productivity and Procurement
It gets intriguing if one gets into the
details. As it is, there is a complete mismatch between the official figures
produced by Government departments on production and productivity basing on
which the food procurement policy is decided. As per the advance estimate for
2018-19 KMS, the average yield per hectare was 29.88 quintal. The Government
decided to procure 19 quintal per acre (which comes to 47 quintal per hectare)
from irrigated land and 12 quintal per acre (30 quintal per hectare) from non-irrigated
land.
How can the State procure 47 quintal when the
average paddy production is about 30 quintals? This makes little sense. Barring
a few farmers from Western Odisha districts of Kalahandi and Bargarh -
considered to be the rice bowl of the State, average paddy production (per
acre) in irrigated area stands at about 18 quintal and less than 10 quintal in
non-irrigated land.
Biswanth Panda, a farmer of Kalahandi district
with 10 acre of land says he produced about 250 quintal paddy during last
kharif. The rabi production was, however, 30 quintal per acre. That is
primarily because productivity goes to 28-30 quintal under Systematic Rice
Intensification (SRI) system under which transplantation is made in lines.
However, the cost of production jumps under SRI method.
Senior Congress leader Narasingh Mishra differs
with the Government estimate on yield per acre on the ground that production
has gone up with farm mechanisation, increasing rate of seed replacement with
the use of more and more high yielding variety of seeds and better soil
management.
Claiming that rice production has increased to
over 40 quintal in irrigated areas and 30 quintal in non-irrigated areas using
SRI method, he says, the per acre limit for procurement set by the Government
is too small. “This is the prime reason of distress sale of paddy,” the
Congress veteran says.
Mishra, who headed the departmentally-related
standing committee on Food Supplies and Consumer Welfare and Cooperation
Department, had recommended the Government to do away with the limit imposed
for procurement to enable farmers sell their harvest to enhance their economic
strength.
Paper Transaction
People familiar with the paddy procurement
business say actual procurement is very less compared to what is revealed on records.
The age-old practice of ‘paper transaction’ is very much in the trade and it is
an open secret.“With big money involved in the trade, it is very difficult to
break the nexus between officials of the Food Supplies and Consumer Welfare
Department, Food Corporation of India and rice millers,” asserts senior BJP
leader and former MLA from Padmpur Pradip Purohit.
Purohit, who belongs to a district which
produces maximum paddy in the State, points to Palsada Primary Agriculture
Cooperative Society under Pikamal block of Bargarh district which is under
investigation for procuring 10,000 quintal of rabi paddy from farmers who are
either non-existent or have not transacted any business at all.
This is only the tip of an iceberg. A thorough
investigation can only reveal the real picture about actual transaction taken
place. Despite Paddy Procurement Automation System (P-PAS), a IT initiative to
bring transparency in paddy procurement, the BJP leader says there exists a
‘nexus’ which the entire administration is aware of since everyone has a share
in the pie.
Modus Operandi
The actual production of paddy in a particular
KMS is much less than average production projected by Agriculture Department.
The gap in the projected and actual production is adjusted by pumping paddy
into the system by a section of rice millers who already have huge stock at
their disposal. Since the number of small and marginal farmers is large
and they have hardly any surplus paddy to sell, their accounts in the
cooperative banks are used under P-PAS system for the illicit transaction of
funds.
As paddy is procured only from farmers who have
registered with PACS and the cost of paddy sold is directly sent to their
accounts, these gullible farmers offer assistance to officials and rice millers
involved in the illegal trade by allowing them to transact through their
accounts with a cost.
Sources say, the prevailing rate for using the
account of a farmer is Rs 10 per quintal. Once proceeds of the paddy sold are
transferred to accounts these farmers, they withdraw the money and share it
with rice millers who are willing to be a part. Officials who are hand-in-glove
get their share from these millers, said an insider of the trade.
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TAGS
Americans have a whole grain problem. Here's how to fix it
Written By: Jenna Birch / Special to The Washington Post | Aug 26th 2019 - 12am.
The government has
been promoting whole grains as part of a healthy diet since the 2000 Dietary
Guidelines for Americans, but a study from the Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention suggests we aren't following that advice. In fact, we're consuming
less than half of the recommended amount of whole grains, which can be found in
foods such as brown rice, whole wheat bread and even popcorn.
According to the Department of
Health and Human Services' Dietary Guidelines for 2015-2020, adults should
consume six servings of grains daily, at least 50 percent of which should be
made up of whole grains. The recent CDC report reveals, however, that whole
grains are just 15.8 percent of total grain intake for the average American
adult. So what are whole grains, and how can Americans get more of them?
Grains include oat, wheat, rice,
barley, rye, bulgur, buckwheat, amaranth, farro, quinoa, millet, sorghum, teff,
triticale, farro and spelt. In their whole form, they contain three parts: The
bran, the endosperm and the germ.
Most of the products on grocery
store shelves, however - think bread, pasta, white rice, bagels, cookies and
pastries - are made of refined grains rather than whole grains. "Refined
grains are grains in which the bran and germ have been removed to help extend
shelf life and vary texture and flavor," says Kelly Hogan, a registered
dietitian and clinical nutrition and wellness manager of Mount Sinai's Dubin
Breast Center of the Tisch Cancer Institute.
The downside is that by removing
the bran and germ, processing also removes most of the fiber and nutrients
found in a grain. The bran, for example, is rich in fiber, B vitamins and
antioxidants. The germ is loaded with vitamins, minerals, proteins and
phytochemicals, or plant-based nutrients such as phenolic and flavonoids. The
endosperm contains starchy carbs, with only a little bit of nutrient content.
Consuming whole grains is a good
way to ensure you're getting fiber and important nutrients that support
"countless body processes that regulate our day-to-day function,"
says Jessica Cording, a registered dietitian and integrative nutrition coach.
Fiber keeps you fuller for longer so you don't overeat. Fiber also lowers the
risk of long-term health conditions such as cardiovascular disease, Type 2
diabetes and obesity. "Fiber found in whole grains, especially soluble
fiber, has been shown to reduce cholesterol levels by increasing excretion of
cholesterol from the body," Hogan says. "It also slows down digestion
to help keep blood sugar steady and helps keep bowels moving regularly."
The B vitamins in whole grains,
including thiamine, niacin and riboflavin, are crucial metabolism aids. They
help the body use the energy found in protein, fat and carbs. Folate, another B
vitamin, assists the body in building new red blood cells. This nutrient is
especially important for pregnant women or women trying to become pregnant,
reducing the risk of some birth defects.
The phytochemicals - many of
which are antioxidants - that are abundant in whole grains fight inflammation.
Research has shown that whole grain intake can reduce the risk of death from
inflammatory diseases (not including heart disease or cancer).
But when it comes to heart
disease and cancer, whole grains are no slouches. A 2016 BMJ meta-analysis
claimed there's evidence that eating whole grains can lead to "a reduced
risk of coronary heart disease, cardiovascular disease, and total cancer, and
mortality from all causes, respiratory diseases, infectious diseases, diabetes,
and all non-cardiovascular, non-cancer causes."
It's usually best to try to get
the vitamins and minerals you need by eating whole grains, rather than taking
supplements or consuming products fortified with these nutrients. "In
general, getting your nutrients as they naturally occur, and in less processed
foods, helps ensure that you get all the nutrients you need on a daily basis,"
says Melina Jampolis, a physician nutritionist specialist in California.
"Many whole grains are rich in fiber, vitamins, minerals and
phytonutrients, as well as low in sugar and saturated fat; they are a very good
choice as part of a well-balanced, nutrient-dense diet."
It's not always easy to
differentiate between whole grain products and refined grain products, so it's
best to check labels. Even the most rustic-looking bread might be made with
refined flour.
According to the Whole Grain
Council, you should look for words such as, "100 percent whole
[grain]," "whole [grain]," "whole wheat,"
"oats," "stoneground whole [grain]," and "brown
rice." You should skip packages that say "enriched," "degerminated,"
"wheat flour," "bran" or "wheat germ" on the
label; these are not whole grains.
Wheat: As you look for
whole-wheat bread, pastas and crackers (cracked wheat, which you see on some
labels, is whole wheat that's simply been split open), compare items.
"Generally speaking, you want to make sure that a whole grain is the first
ingredient listed," Cording says. "Then, ideally, I recommend
choosing a product with at least three grams of fiber per serving."
If you're in a bakery without
product labels, ask employees how they make the bread and which type of flour
they use, Hogan says. "Notice the content of other grains like rye, oats
and seed, as well, which are great and can also add fiber," she says.
Rice: Skip white rice, which is the rice grain without its hull,
bran or germ. Though brown is the typical color of whole grain rice, including
varieties such as basmati and jasmine, whole grain versions can also be black,
red and purple. "The arsenic in brown rice is a concern, especially for
young children - but as long as you have a variety of whole grains in your diet,
this should not be an issue" for healthy adults, Jampolis says.
Corn: Hogan says corn is "technically both" a vegetable and
a grain. The vegetable is the fresh corn you would find on a cob; the grain is
the dried kernel (making popcorn a whole grain). When purchasing cornmeal,
grits, corn cakes and tortillas look for made "made with 'whole grain
corn' or 'whole grain cornmeal' " on the label.
Oats: Steel cut and rolled oats are healthy whole grain options.
In the case of instant oats, which are still whole grain, make sure there's no
added sugar - or skip altogether. "Being much more processed to allow for
much faster cooking, instant oats raise blood sugar more quickly and have a
higher glycemic index, so they're not as healthy as the former two,"
Jampolis says. "If you really want to choose the healthiest option, choose
plain steel cut or rolled oats and add your own flavor and sweetness like
cinnamon or Stevia."
Other options: Other grains include barley, rye, quinoa and buckwheat.
Jampolis loves barley and quinoa for their nutrient profile "in side
dishes and salads" you can whip up at home. Sorghum, freekeh, amaranth,
millet and wheat berries are also whole grains to look up if you're feeling
adventurous.
The Agriculture Department
recommends that adults have six one-ounce servings of grains a day, and
Jampolis says it isn't difficult to achieve the goal of getting half those
servings from whole grains. "A serving size is about a slice of bread or
half-cup of grains, so if you aim for three servings of whole grains daily and
limit the refined grains like white bread, regular pasta, baked goods, and so
on, to three servings a day or less, you will be fine," she says. "I
think it is critical to note that many of [nutritional] studies are observational,
and the key message is to replace refined grains with whole grains, not add
whole grains into the diet on top of the grains you are already eating."
Consuming more home-cooked meals
can help you balance your grain intake, Hogan says. She also suggests following
more of a plant-based diet. "This, by the way, can absolutely include
animal products, just more plants than anything else," she says.
"Start slow by opting for whole grain versions of crackers; high-fiber,
whole grain cereal; and whole-wheat breads and pastas. Then, as you get used to
it, you can branch out and cook with a new grain like quinoa or farro."
You can also use these grains in different ways. "They are delicious in
salads, stir fries and more."
Shining a
light on food
Sun,
25/08/2019 - 14:22 | Izabelanair
Claire
Pizzey of Diamond Light Source describes the potential benefits of using
the UK national synchrotron facility to undertake characterisation of foods and
food ingredients to enhance understanding of their properties and behaviour.
With rising raw material costs
around the world and increasing pressure for local food supplies,
sustainability and waste reduction are key drivers for the food industry,
particularly for global supply chains. Following food scares, consumers are
demanding higher levels of quality control and traceability for food security;
this is of vital importance in a very competitive market with new products
frequently introduced. Consumer trends, particularly the focus on health and
nutrition, also represent research and development challenges for the food
industry and meeting these diverse requirements is key to long term business
success. Innovation in these areas requires a fresh approach, a good
understanding of the science behind the product or process and access to the
widest possible variety of research and development tools. Diamond Light
Source’s advanced characterisation facilities are actively supporting this
innovation.
What is Diamond Light Source?
Diamond Light Source is the UK
national synchrotron facility, producing X-ray, infra-red and ultraviolet beams
of exceptional brightness for research purposes. This brilliant light, combined
with state of the art technological platforms, is extensively used by the
scientific community to undertake structural, chemical and imaging
investigations of a broad range of materials on very fast timescales and under
industrially relevant conditions. Diamond’s capabilities are very well suited
to a wide variety of materials research applications ranging from aircraft fan
blades to catalysts, hydrogen storage materials and batteries to high
performance coatings and fuel additives and complex formulations for the
pharmaceutical, food and consumer products industries respectively.
Located near Didcot in south
Oxfordshire, the research facility is used by approximately 8,000 scientists
from the UK and overseas every year. These scientists (called ‘users’) are
predominantly from academia (90%) and publish over 1,000 high impact journal
articles each year as a result of their experiments, which are free at the
point of access and awarded via a peer review competition. Commercial activity
plays a very important role at the Diamond Light Source and 10% of the facility
operational time is dedicated to proprietary use by industrial clients. Clients
range from the large multi-national household names through to SMEs and
start-ups with 150+ companies worldwide making use of Diamond’s facilities in
their R&D programmes by 2018.
Diamond is a not-for-profit limited
company funded as a joint venture by the UK Government through the Science
& Technology Facilities Council (part of UK Research and Innovation, UKRI)
in partnership with the Wellcome Trust. Diamond’s Industrial Science Committee
provides guidance on opportunities for a wide range of industries to be engaged
in research at the Diamond facility and identifies industrial research
priorities that help to shape Diamond’s operational strategy. Companies currently
and previously represented on the committee include Unilever, GlaxoSmithKline,
AstraZeneca, Johnson Matthey, Infineum, Rolls-Royce, Evotec, Shell and National
Nuclear Laboratory.
In order to facilitate the use of
the Diamond facility by researchers working in industry, an Industrial Liaison
team has been established, comprising highly qualified scientists experienced
in a range of techniques, enabling the translation of diverse research problems
into meaningful analytical solutions. Diamond offers a range of services
including full experimental design, data collection and analysis service, ideal
for those with limited time or no prior knowledge of the techniques. Working
with initiatives, such as the STFC Food Network+, enables Diamond to gain a greater
understanding of the pressures facing the agri-food sector and to tailor its
offering to suit the needs of the food industry.
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Aerial view of Diamond Light Source
©Diamond Light Source |
How is Diamond’s facility used by
the agri-food industry?
Diamond provides specialist
‘Formula 1’ analytical techniques for the atomic to microscale characterisation
of materials ranging from food ingredients and formulations, packaging and food
processing components through to agriculture. They are typically used by
scientists who have exhausted the capabilities of lab-based techniques and are
searching for characterisation tools that are higher resolution, faster, more
chemically specific and more sensitive than are achievable in the
laboratory.
Broadly speaking, the materials
characterisation facilities at Diamond fall into three main technique classes:
·
diffraction for structural
analysis of materials from the atomic to macro scale,
·
spectroscopy for chemical
analysis of local atomic structure in materials,
·
imaging with a wide variety of
imaging techniques including high resolution and high speed tomography and
phase contrast imaging.
A key benefit of synchrotron
facilities is the ability to perform in situ and in
operando experiments, closely mimicking the conditions experienced by
the sample during processing and monitoring changes in real time (for example
baking or freezing).
Measuring the mineral content of
grains using X-ray spectroscopy
Understanding the local structure
of materials with chemical specificity is of importance in answering central
questions in many scientific disciplines. A key advantage of the use of
synchrotron facilities is the ability to perform element-specific
investigations of materials with high sensitivity. The unique capability of
X-ray absorption spectroscopy (XAS) is its ability to investigate the local
electronic and geometric information around a particular element irrespective
of its state or environment. This powerful technique is suitable for studying
solids, liquids and even gases and can cover the vast majority of the periodic
table.
Case study: Measuring the mineral
content of wheat
This element-specific sensitivity
has played a key role in a project by Dr Andrew Neal and his colleagues from
Rothamsted Research, in collaboration with scientists from Diamond and Aarhus
University[1]. Diets with little or no meat, fruit and vegetables
can lead to deficiencies in micronutrients, such as iron and zinc, due to low
intake or bioavailability of minerals. The problem is affecting an increasing
number of people worldwide and is particularly acute in Africa, the eastern
Mediterranean and south-east Asia, where it can lead to serious health
problems, such as anaemia.
The Health Grain Programme is
focused on improving nutritional value of diets by breeding mineral enriched
wheat to increase the mineral content of flour. Understanding the mineral type
and content in the wheat is essential for subsequent studies of the
digestibility of the wheat. In order to facilitate this, the scientists performed
measurements using cross sections of individual wheat grains. They used
Diamond’s beamline I18, to perform high resolution X-ray fluorescence (XRF)
mapping and X-ray absorption spectroscopy (XAS) experiments. The combined
techniques allowed the team to generate high resolution chemical maps of the
wheat grain cross-sections (using XRF) and then select regions of interest
within the maps, focusing on areas of high metal distribution to perform XAS
measurements to obtain information about the local structure, oxidation state
and complexation of the elements. The elements investigated were iron (Fe),
zinc (Zn), manganese (Mn), copper (Cu) and nickel (Ni) (Figure 1).
 |
Mineral contents of grains has
important applications for other reasons. A team of scientists, led by Dr Manoj
Menon at the University of Sheffield, has used Diamond to investigate rice
plants to further the understanding of dietary sources of arsenic contamination[2].
Rice is one of the most widely-consumed cereals in the world – but if it is
grown in regions where soil and water are naturally rich in arsenic, the poison
can enter into the food chain with significant adverse effects on human and
animal health when rice is eaten in large enough quantities. It is estimated
that arsenic contamination in food and water affects nearly 140 million people
across 70 countries with South Asia most acutely affected as rice is consumed
as a staple food. Rice husk and straw are used for animal feed which could
provide an alternative dietary pathway for arsenic consumption through
contaminated meat and dairy products.
Different types of rice vary in the
uptake and accumulation of arsenic, although this is not well understood and
less still is known about where the arsenic accumulates within the rice plant
which may have a significant effect on the bioavailability of the arsenic.
The project focused on mapping
arsenic in different parts of rice grains using X-ray fluorescence. The high
intensity X-rays can be tuned and focused to a very small spot to enable arsenic
to be detected at very low concentration in particular regions of the grain.
Elemental mapping with this level of specificity for arsenic at low
concentration with high resolution is only possible using a synchrotron
facility. The next steps in the project seek to focus on rice cultivars that
accumulate less arsenic and to inform the development of cultivation practices
that reduce arsenic accumulation in rice.
Structural studies on food
materials
A wide variety of techniques are
available, mainly based around diffraction, that can provide information about
the structure of materials on the atomic and nanometre length scales. This
level of detail can be extremely important in understanding variations in
product or process performance. These experiments can be used to investigate
the behaviour of food additives in product formulations by:
·
examining phase behaviour in
emulsions, suspensions and gels to assess performance of new ingredients,
·
investigating the behaviour of
emulsifiers and complex structures for reducing fat content in products,
·
examining the crystalline and
solution structure of food proteins.
Case study: Investigating the
purity of lactose crystals
One example is a recent study of
the crystallisation of lactose by Dr Elena Simone and colleagues at the
University of Leeds[3]. Lactose, the main carbohydrate constituent
of milk, is extracted from whey, a by-product of cheese and yoghurt production,
mainly for environmental reasons, but it holds significant value in its own
right. Purified lactose exists in two main crystalline forms (called anomers),
α-lactose and β-lactose, and is commonly used as a food supplement or a
pharmaceutical excipient. Both anomers are present during the nucleation and
growth of a specific crystal structure which can affect the purity of the
precipitated crystals and in particular the α-lactose monohydrate is formed
very slowly. It is therefore difficult and time consuming for the dairy
industry to achieve a high yield of recovery and to obtain crystals of
sufficient size, shape and purity. The team made use of two different, highly
controlled crystallisation techniques and focused on determining the effect of
crystallisation process parameters on the characteristic properties of lactose
crystals including morphology, size distribution, level of agglomeration,
crystal structure, purity and overall recovery yield. The study provided a
greater understanding of the process parameters that are most effective in
obtaining a high purity product in a significant yield.
X-ray imaging of food products
X-ray imaging is a non-destructive
technique that has a very large range of applications in fields as broad as
bio-medicine, materials science, engineering, environmental science and food
technology. X-ray imaging techniques allow high speed visualisation of a sample
or retrieval of three dimensional (3D) information to view and measure the
internal structure of a sample (tomography).
 |
 |
|
Figure 2 X-ray imaging studies on some
example snack food products showing porosity and microstructure in high
resolution.
|
Advantages of synchrotron X-ray
imaging include:
·
much faster measurement times
compared with laboratory based instruments,
·
small beam sizes and special
optics to produce images with a resolution of less than 1μm,
·
enhanced contrast available by
tuning the X-rays themselves.
The techniques can be used to
monitor structural changes with thermal, mechanical and ageing treatments and
investigate microstructural changes with varying processing conditions to
optimise product behaviour (Figure 2). It is particularly helpful for detecting
cracks, voids and bubbles and so can be used for a wide range of food products,
such as foams, porous solids and complex structures e.g. confectionery or meat.
Case study: Investigating the 3D
structure of ice-cream using X-ray imaging
X-ray imaging at Diamond has been
used extensively by Unilever to explore the microstructure of ice cream[4].
The quality of ice cream is considered to depend on the size of constituent air
cells and ice crystals - the smaller and rounder the better. Product quality
and shelf life can be strongly affected by the temperature variations that can
commonly occur during storage and distribution, including by the end consumer,
where a significant number of the overall freeze-thaw ‘abuse’ cycles take
place. Ice cream is a complex multi-phase soft solid material that consists of
ice, air, fat and sugar, containing three states of matter: gas, liquid and
solid. An understanding of how the freeze-thaw cycle can influence ice formation
is important in controlling ice cream microstructure. The crystal size is
small, the material is opaque and the structure is easily disturbed by the
modification required by most analytical methods, all creating challenges for
detailed microstructural analysis.
A team from The University of
Manchester and Unilever performed X-ray tomography of ice cream microstructure
over temperature cycles from -20°C to -7°C using instrument Diamond’s I13-2.
This instrument provides high flux X-rays tuned to provide both high temporal
and spatial resolution to allow 4D in-line phase contrast imaging to be
performed. These non-invasive experiments allowed Unilever scientists to
investigate the 3D microstructure while largely maintaining the natural product
environment and provided a greater understanding of the mechanism of ice
formation. The results aided the determination of the influence of processing
conditions during manufacture and informed the development of
formulations.
Using the Diamond synchrotron
facility
There are two main routes to
working with Diamond through our proprietary and peer-reviewed access modes.
Up to 10% of the available
experimental time at Diamond is set aside for proprietary access, the most
popular choice for our industrial clients. The Industrial Liaison team acts as
the main point of contact for our industrial partners and can offer a range of
services including a mail-in data collection and full experimental design, data
collection and analysis service. Some of our partners prefer to perform their
own experiments and simply obtain access to the instruments with some technical
support. Some prefer to send their samples for a full analysis service while
others participate in the experiments to varying degrees. Our flexible approach
means that we can prepare a tailored package depending on the project needs and
we charge only for the time and services used. We are able to offer support
with as much or as little of the project as necessary. Government funding
streams may also prove helpful; previous industrial partners have attracted
Innovate UK funding for their projects with Diamond and we are currently
partners in the Bridging for Innovators (B4I) scheme, which provides funding
for UK based companies to access Diamond and other facilities to overcome
product, process or manufacturing challenges.
Dr Claire Pizzey Deputy Head of Industrial
Liaison, Diamond Light Source
Claire works closely with the
Industrial Liaison team and industrial partners providing a multi-disciplinary
approach to solving real-world problems. To find out more about Agri- Food
research & development activities at Diamond please get in touch.
Web diamond.ac.uk/industry
Email industry@diamond.ac.uk
Telephone 01235 778797
Twitter @DiamondILO also on LinkedIn
References
1. Neal et al, “Iron and zinc
complexation in wild-type and ferritin–expressing wheat grain: implications for
mineral transport into developing grain”, J. Biol. Inorg. Chem. (2013) 18,
557-570.
3. Simone et al, “Optimal Design of
Crystallization Processes for the Recovery of a Slow-Nucleating Sugar with a
Complex Chemical Equilibrium in Aqueous Solution: The Case of Lactose”, Org.
Process Res. Dev. (2019) 23, 2, 220-233.
4. Guo et al, “Revealing the
microstructural stability of a three-phase soft solid (ice cream) by 4D
synchrotron X-ray tomography”, J. Food. Eng. (2018) 237,
204-214.
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Dedicate
time for research - Michelle Rice urges local filmmakers
Michelle Rice, President of TV
One speaking to the audienceA Year of Return Master Class has been organized
for stakeholders in the movie industry with a call on them to research and know
the interests of international distributors before submitting contents for
consideration.While responding to a concern that contents from Ghana are mostly not featured on international channels, Michelle Rice, President of TV One mentioned that every channel has got their respective requirements hence, it was prudent for producers to spend time researching these requirements so their works are not rejected.
She said: “The most successful people who are getting their project made actually do the research or actually talk to the place: ‘I want my project on TV One or BET or HBO….Actually, what do they want?’’’
“A lot of people are trying to sell me stuff that I don’t want… You did a project but I don’t want it… It is also about trying to sell something to someone that they want,” she further stated.
On her part, Hollywood actress AJ Johnson underscored the need for networking.
Organised by The Year of Return Office, Ghana Tourism Authority, and Creative Arts Council, ‘The Year of Return Master Class’ was held on Thursday at the Accra Tourists Information Centre.
The topic was ‘Master the Business of Showbiz, America and Ghana Creative Industries Collaboration’.
The two-hour event saw many film producers, scriptwriters, actors, actresses, directors and media personalities in attendance. Notable among them were Martha Ankomah, Michael Ola, Prince David Osei, Yvonne Nelson, Efia Odo, Andy Dosty, Gordon Nambo, Zynnel Zuh, Kojo Delong, Executives of Film Producers Association of Ghana (FIPAG) as well as Executives of the Creative Arts Council.
Prior to this, one had been held in Ashanti regional capital, Kumasi on Wednesday where industry stakeholders were engaged on among other things, the importance of consistency and networking.
5 booked for manhandling cop
OKARA: Police booked five people on
charges of beating a police constable on Saturday. A local court ordered police
to produce a 9-month old child after taking the baby from Muhammad Yasin of
village Amar Singh. When police reached the village, Yasin and his accomplices
attacked the police party and injured constable Sajid Ali and also tore his
uniform. The cop was removed to hospital. Hujra Shah Moqeem police registered a
case against the accused and his accomplices.
Labourer dies in mill: A worker of
a rice mill died working at a rice mill on Saturday. Lal of Bahawalpur was
working at a local rice mill when an iron rod fell on him. As a result, he
sustained head injuries and died on the way to hospital.
BLIND MURDER CASE TRACED: Police
traced a blind murder case of village Rajowal after two years. Police using
scientific methods, traced and arrested the wife of a murdered man and her
paramour. The woman and her paramour killed the man and threw his body in the
Balluki-Head Sulemanki link canal.
DIES IN ROAD ACCIDENT: A
motorcyclist died in a road accident near Al-Waheed Farm on Depalpur-Pakpattan
Highway on Saturday. The bus hit the motorcyclist, leaving him dead on the spot
and injuring a child. The child was rushed to the THQ Hospital.
Supermarket special offers could cost shoppers more - despite promising
simpler deals
A new investigation found some items were half the price before
being bundled up in multiple buy deals.
Which? found that some supermarkets are still running “questionable
special offers”(Image: Getty)
Special offers in supermarkets
still risk leaving shoppers worse off, a probe has found.
Britain’s biggest supermarket
chains had promised to simplify deals to avoid luring customers into multi-buys
that work out more expensive.
But investigators from consumer
watchdog Which? have found shops are still running “questionable special
offers”.
They found Uncle Ben’s Classic
Basmati Rice at Tesco on a “3 for £4” deal – but the offer replaced a
half-price special of 74p a pack, when you could have got three for just £2.22.
At Iceland, the Which? team found
a 500g box of Kellogg’s Crunchy Nut on offer at “2 for £4”.
Yet the pre-offer price a week
earlier had been only £1.42 per pack – meaning shoppers paid £1.16 more for the
“deal”.
Which? also highlighted
“discounted” items that were still the same price. They found Cathedral City
cheddar at Morrisons sold at “£2, was £3.50”. It had cost £2 before the offer,
says Which?
Two years ago supermarkets
promised to review promotional practices after Which? prompted a review by
competition watchdogs.
Rice farmers having a torrid time
Dear Editor,
I visited rice farmers in Regions
2, 5 and 6 over the last couple of weeks. Rice farmers, small and large, are
experiencing a torrid time, the livelihoods of their families are in jeopardy,
and throughout it all the Ministry of Agriculture and the GRDB are no way in
sight. As trouble escalates in the rice industry, as farmers fight to stay
afloat, struggle to make ends meet, the GRDB, the Ministry of Agriculture and
the caretaker Ministers of Agriculture are lost in “lala” land. The President
is comfortably ensconced in State House, the PM avoids farmers like a plague,
the other Ministers, including the AFC-designated PM Candidate, behave like all
is dandy with rice. This government is so clueless they cannot comprehend rice
has been helping them to keep the economy afloat.
Dismissing the challenges and the
problems rice farmers face, insisting rice is a private sector activity is
dangerous and repulsive. Rice is too important a part of the economy for the
government to be at arms-length, too large to fail, employing a large number of
people, directly sustaining the livelihoods of almost 60,000, one of the more
important foreign currency earners. The truth is, with rice farmers and millers
investing easily more than $50B annually in the economy, the rice industry is a
public-private partnership. Certain inputs necessary for a successful rice
industry are a public good. The fight against the paddy bug and red-rice are
not the exclusive role for the farmers; the government has a mandate to be
involved, to invest and to lead the fight.
As of right now the paddy bug
problem has led to the loss of almost 20% of the rice crop in Region 6 and even
worse in Region 2. In Region 5, the red-rice problem is equally devastating to
farmers, even as they, too, struggle against paddy bug. For Region 6 alone,
this loss translates into 500,000 bags of paddy, equating to the loss of $1.4B
in revenue for farmers. In Region 2, the farmers have lost more than 500,000
bags of paddy because of the paddy bug. In Region 5, they have lost more than
600,000 bags of paddy with the combined onslaught from the paddy bug and red
rice. Overall, Guyanese rice farmers will lose about $9B this year,
having already lost more than $8B in 2018. Most of these are poor farmers and
it is unconscionable that the GRDB and the Ministry of Agriculture are largely
missing in action.
The paddy bug and red rice
problems are not the only obstacles rice farmers face. Farmers in all
rice-producing regions face alternating struggles with floods and dry
conditions, with clogged canals, pumps not working, etc. Neither, the NDIA nor
the Ministry of Agriculture has provided any support as farmers try to
desperately battle against flooding and try to irrigate their fields. These are
times when the government must be not just an active partner, these are times
when the government must carry out its mandate, providing public-good services.
Even as they fail the farmers,
even as they refuse to carry out their mandated functions in the rice industry,
they have gone out of their way to make life more difficult for rice farmers.
Land lease rates were increased. In the MMA, lease rates have increased from
$1,000 per acre to $7,000 per acre. This unconscionable increase is even
steeper in Black Bush Polder. At the same time, Drainage and Irrigation fees
have increased across the country. Supplies such as pesticides have increased
in cost and subsidies for equipment in the rice industry have been removed.
When farmers protest the unconscionable rate increases, the Minister of
Agriculture rebuked them for objecting to a “measly one beer per day” increase.
In spite of the grave
difficulties farmers face, they tightened their belts and have kept production
high, without which the economy would have tanked further. In 2014, Guyana
produced more than 637,000 tons of rice. In the first crop of 2015, production
reached almost 400,000 tons, far ahead of the pace to meet the 2015 target of
700,000 tons. But Guyana failed to reach the 2015 target because of a
significant drop in production for the second 2015 crop, reaching only 697,000
tons. Guyana failed again in 2016, 2017 and 2018 and now Guyana will fall far
short of the 700,000 target in 2019. But the failure to attain the 700,000 tons
target must not detract from the achievement of sustained high production,
above 600,000 tons, helping to keep GDP positive. Yet, our Government is
ungrateful and irresponsible, failing to keep their commitment, failing to
carry out their function. While rice is in trouble, APNU+AFC is fiddling.
Whose Knowledge Counts?
India as a Reluctant Leader in Agroecological Research
C Shambu Prasad (shambu@irma.ac.in) is a professor at the
Institute of Rural Management Anand.
Beyond the obvious claims of evidence-based research policy is
the lesser-questioned claim of what qualifies as evidence. This requires an
understanding of the politics of knowledge and examining knowledge claims made
both for and against any particular innovation. Through the case of a specific
agroecological innovation, the System of Rice Intensification in India, the
barriers to a sustainable transition from a green revolution to an
agroecological paradigm that reveals path dependence on certain agricultural
futures—such as the New Plant Type or genetic transformation in rice—are
highlighted.
Some of the research for this paper was carried out as part of a
Fulbright–Nehru fellowship in 2013–14 at Cornell University. I thank Lucy
Fisher and Norman Uphoff, and the SRI Rice family for their hospitality,
conversations, arguments and access to SRI Rice archives that made this
possible. Some of the ideas in the paper were presented both at Cornell and in
conferences since and I thank participants for their useful feedback.
The System of Rice
Intensification (SRI) in India has an unusual and complex journey involving
collaboration and co-creation of knowledge with Indian scientists interacting
with a broader set of actors, including farmers, and civil society
organisations (CSOs). The paper argues that beyond the international scientific
controversy on SRI there is indeed a case for opening up the politics of
knowledge in research pathways to enable newer agricultural futures.
Surprisingly, despite the absence of any official research policy supporting
agroecological approaches, India has become a world leader in research on SRI.
The Indian scientific
establishment has been involved in exercises to articulate future visions
through technology foresight or scenario planning in recent times. Grand vision
statements in documents such as the “India Technology Vision 2035” (see
Sekhsaria and Thayyil in this issue) reveal technological optimism that make a
case for the inevitability in the development of particular technologies. The
future of science and technology (S&T), following traditions of
evolutionary economics, is seen as the result of a linear or naturally-evolving
process (Nelson and Winter 2002). In contrast, scholars from the discipline of
science, technology and society studies (STS) see the future as always
uncertain and plural. Futures are actively created in the present and occupy a
contested terrain through claims and counterclaims. There is a distinction
between “looking into” the future, as represented by technology vision statements,
and “looking at” the future as a temporal abstraction that is constructed and
managed under specific conditions (Brown et al 2000: 5). This paper extends
this consideration of “contested futures” to discussions on agriculture in
India (Brown and Webster 2000;
Visvanathan 2002).
Visvanathan 2002).
Whose knowledge counts? Why do
some futures prevail over others? Why do once seemingly certain futures happen
to fail? Why are some futures marginalised as a consequence of dominant
metaphors and motifs used in everyday life? These are important questions that
need to be examined when deciding on research goals and priorities. Contrasting
visions of agrarian futures continue to be played out in India by different
groups. Prime Minister Narendra Modi in April 2016 envisioned a particular
future of agriculture through the popular slogan “Doubling Farmers Income.”
This represented a supposed break from the past by suggesting a need for India
to look beyond a primarily production-centred agronomic paradigm for increasing
food supplies, to a more explicit recognition of economic factors, increasing
and even doubling farmers’ incomes (Chand 2017).
While the possibility of such
doubling of farm income has been contested in some academic circles
(Chandrasekhar and Mehrotra 2016), widespread farmers’ protests across India
due to falling prices, reduced cash in the economy, and political pressures for
farm loan waivers have raised a different narrative.1 These
contrasting visions, of future promise and future despair, highlight the contending
interests and show how the projection of the futures for India and its people
are seen quite differently by policymakers and scientific and technological
experts on the one hand, and citizens and civil society groups, on the other.
In this paper, I review the
particular case of a certain agroecological innovation, the SRI, and seek to
understand what is considered as evidence and whose knowledge counts when
deciding agricultural research policy in India. I suggest that Indian research
policymakers would be better advised to examine international technological
“lock-ins” that prevent wider research choices. Technological path dependence
often arises out of the commitment of significant material and mental resources
in certain directions (such as the “C3”/“C4” genetic transformation, or the New
Plant Type [NPT] in the case of rice). I suggest, through a closer examination
of the scientific controversies around SRI, that controversies do not find
closure easily and cannot be settled through experiments alone. Controversies
reveal the “uncertain side of science” (Pinch and Leuenberger 2006), with
scientists commonly using scientific findings with “interpretative flexibility”
(Pinch and Bijker 1984). While there have been studies by scholars in Western
or developed nations on scientific and public controversies (Martin 2014), they
have been less sufficiently researched in developing countries (Pinch and
Leuenberger 2006). This study on SRI from India presents an opportunity to
revisit controversy studies from an Indian or knowledge futures perspective.
The SRI has presented a radical,
and in many ways counter-intuitive, alternative to the green revolution
paradigm for farmers and policymakers. Potential yield increases through the
SRI principles present an agricultural future without requiring the development
of highly improved genotypes, and without requiring farmers to use
ever-increasing inputs like fertilisers, pesticides and irrigation water. The
SRI works on an alternate paradigm, wherein farmers are advised to modify the
ways they manage their rice plants, soil, water and nutrients to improve
plants’ growth environments. By following the SRI principles, farmers can get
higher-yielding, more vigorous and more resilient plants. Reports of SRI yields
that exceeded what some prominent scientists considered as the maximum
biological potential of rice led to a scientific controversy, termed the “rice
wars” around 2004, the International Year of Rice (Prasad 2006).
Critics of the SRI, predominantly
researchers associated with the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI)
based in the Philippines, insisted that there was an absence of scientific
evidence supporting the SRI and even dismissed the SRI as based on unconfirmed
field observations (UFOs). Thinking and evaluating based on evidence is seen as
a critical element in truth-making and seeking confidence in knowledge. This
was the theme of the fourth Law and Social Sciences Network (LASSNET)
conference held in Delhi in 2016.2 I show, through an
examination of scientific articles in well-respected journals, that evidence is
not always, or merely, an objective phenomenon of data or facts, but is often
created to privilege certain scientific trajectories over others. The question
of evidence has been central to the formation of disciplines and to the claims
that they make upon knowledge. Scientific evidence cannot be divorced from the
politics of knowledge—that is, not just in the dissemination of scientific
knowledge or in who gets the benefits or costs—but equally from the production
of knowledge as well.
In the second part of the paper,
I extend this analysis beyond journal publications by looking at how alternate
knowledge was created, and continues to be created, in the case of the SRI,
through informal but highly effective national and international networks.
These networks have a valuable role to play, not just in building evidence to
counter the dominant narrative. They open up scientific knowledge to new
insights and democratise S&T by connecting scientists to farmers, CSOs and
policymakers.
This has significant implications
for research policy. Knowledge in the Indian context and especially in
agriculture is plural and diverse, and choices of the future hinge critically
on “whose knowledge counts” and on why and how certain pathways of
investigation and experimentation are privileged over others. I conclude the
analysis by exploring these implications for agricultural research policy in
India by providing alternate interpretations of the knowledge on agroecology.
The Indian agricultural establishment is probably better served by looking more
closely at the evidence of its scientists who are actually leading the world in
research on SRI. This is in contrast to the present research policy and
strategy which consigns India to an also-ran in a domain like genetic
engineering, and yet monopolises most of agricultural research funding in India
today (Raina 2015). By changing the framing of the discourse and by engaging in
broader knowledge dialogues that examine different kinds of evidence from a
wide range of sources, one can see an opportunity for Indian agricultural
research to pursue some directions that appear better suited to dealing with a
complex and uncertain future.
Revisiting the Scientific
Controversies on SRI
Agriculture in India is beset
with paradoxes. India leads world production of milk and buffalo meat and is
second in wheat, sugar, fruits, and vegetables. Tragically, India also leads
the world in the number of farmer suicides as part of a long-standing agrarian
crisis (Mishra 2014). While crop yields have increased over time, farm incomes
have stagnated or declined. High dependence on purchased external inputs—seeds,
fertilisers, and irrigation water—is coupled with increased indebtedness, which
means that Indian farmers are experiencing a loss of agency and deskilling
(Vasavi 2012; Stone 2007). The conventional approach to the farming crisis has
been to seek productivity enhancement by introducing more modern genotypes
through breeding higher-yielding varieties and hybrids of selected crops.
Social movements for agroecology
have articulated an alternative paradigm beyond the green revolution-based
technologies and food systems. Agroecology—defined as “the application of
ecological concepts and principles to the design and management of sustainable
agroecosystems”—is supported by ongoing food sovereignty and ecology movements
and presents an alternative strategy for change in agriculture (Silici 2014).
Agroecological methods seek to provide greater environmental sustainability and
enhance the resilience of farmers in the face of climate change. The SRI is one
such agroecological innovation. It intensifies knowledge, skill and management,
rather than material and capital inputs, and depends on the farmer’s skill and
local conditions. Through changes in the management of rice plants, soil,
water, and nutrients, with reduced use of material inputs, SRI practices
promote the emergence of more productive and more robust plant phenotypes.
These practices differ from conventional rice cultivation techniques by
transplanting young seedlings, singly and widely spaced, in unflooded but moist
soil conditions, with greater provision of organic matter in the soil, and use
of a hand or motorised weeders for weed control which also aerates the soil’s
surface. The SRI was constructed through persistent observation and
experimentation with farmers by Father Henri de Laulanié, (Society of Jesus),
in Madagascar during the 1970s and 1980s, and later through the Association Tefy
Saina, a non-governmental organisation (NGO) he founded in 1990 together with
Malagasy colleagues (Prasad 2007).
The SRI was unknown outside of
Madagascar until 1999. Since then, largely through the institutional
entrepreneurship of the Cornell International Institute for Food, Agriculture
and Development (CIIFAD) and its then director, Norman Uphoff, the SRI has
spread across 50 countries. From the outset, the SRI was treated as an “open
source” innovation, thereby ensuring free access by farmers and researchers to
the new ideas and opportunities. Because the SRI practices involved no
“miracle” seeds or external inputs for improving productivity, resource-poor
farmers, first in Madagascar and later in other parts of the world, were
encouraged to draw on their own potential for experimentation, to make
adaptations and appropriate applications. The rapid growth of the internet, the
prodigious use of email and websites, and more recently of social media, have
helped spread the knowledge of the SRI across the world with continuous
adaptation.3
SRI and Rice Wars
By 2004, which the United Nations
General Assembly declared as “the International Year of Rice” (IYR), SRI
experiments and evaluations had been carried out in at least 19 countries. The
declaration to focus attention on a single crop, rice, was unprecedented, and
it resulted from the successful advocacy and lobbying by the IRRI. The IRRI was
then investing heavily in developing a NPT meant to raise yields by 25%. Modest
results did not lead to abandonment, but more investment on genetically
modifying rice to have a C4 photosynthetic pathway instead of its evolved C3
pathway. Those who already had experience with SRI suggested that most of the
aims of the IYR agenda could easily be met quickly and with considerably lower
costs by following the SRI principles (Prasad and Basu 2015).
The major international
scientific journal Nature carried an article on the SRI which
was captioned “Proponents call it a miracle. Detractors call it smoke and
mirrors. Will the SRI feed the hungry or needlessly divert farmers from tried
and true techniques?” (Surridge 2004). Since its appearance on the world stage,
the SRI has been a scientific controversy. That some of the high yields
reported from the SRI fields exceeded what established rice scientists
considered as the biological maximum led to the “rice wars,” and fuelled this
controversy further (Prasad and Basu 2005; Glover 2014). Established rice
scientists, largely from the IRRI, dismissed the SRI as anecdotal, technically
flawed, and lacking scientific evidence with no peer-reviewed articles in top
scientific journals. A smaller set of scientists, on the other hand, suggested
that the SRI needs to be researched and experimented with, as it offers more
choices for farmers.
The article in Nature received
a response from India. Alapati Satyanarayana, the then Director of Extension of
undivided Andhra Pradesh’s state agricultural university, had conducted 200 SRI
trials, on-farm, across all 22 districts of the state in the kharif season of
2003. In his letter to Nature, he argued that farmers’ experiences
with the SRI methods increased paddy yields with less water requirements and
lower costs (Prasad 2007). The IRRI’s journal, Rice Today,
furthered the debate by publishing views and counterviews by Uphoff from CIIFAD
and Thomas Sinclair of the United States Department of Agriculture. Uphoff
suggested that the SRI was best situated to answer the needs of farmers in the
21st century. Sinclair upped the rhetoric by stating: “Discussion of SRI is
unfortunate because it implies SRI merits serious consideration.”4
Discussion on the merits of a
particular technological option usually assumes that claims and counterclaims
can and will be verified objectively through field trials and experiments. User
groups, however, often give diverse and even non-quantifiable assessments that
bear on the evaluation of technological choices as was the case with the SRI in
India. Since the rice wars, there has been a burgeoning body of scientific
publications on the SRI, estimated to include over 1,000 published journal
articles, theses, and detailed reports. The echoes and reverberations of the
controversy have continued and shaped research policy. While there has been
some research on the text and claims of the controversy (Berkhout and Glover
2011), there has been little attention given to the context of the debate and
the power interests involved.
A closer look at an earlier Nature article
“The Rice Squad” (Surridge 2002) indicates the kinds of investments that shaped
a possible lock-in towards the IRRI’s research policy:
Feeding the world in the twenty-first century could require a
second green revolution. But that may involve the most audacious feat of
genetic engineering yet attempted … Could a simple genetic switch make rice
capable of meeting the world’s food needs?
This genetically modified pathway
for rice research, through a C4 pathway, meant an investment of millions of
dollars and was part of the IYR campaign by the IRRI to legitimate and mobilise
research and donor funds (Sheehy et al 2007). The SRI, an upstart innovation
from outside of established scientific circles, was thus a threat to such
intentions as its proponents reported that yield improvements could be achieved
with just a fraction of the funds and investments needed for a C3/C4
transformation.
Politics of Knowledge in
Scientific Journals
The potential for knowledge
dissemination and sharing of ideas has multiplied in recent years through the
greater use of the internet. Researchers use blogs, presentations, working
papers, policy briefs, and monographs to share ideas and receive feedback and
rework ideas accordingly. Yet, the scientific journal is often seen as the
source of knowledge that counts most. From being one of the many channels for
distribution of new knowledge, the scientific journal today has assumed a
central role and primacy in knowledge production. There is now an established
ranking system for journals according to an “impact factor” metric. The
criticism of SRI on the absence of peer-reviewed publications led to attempts
by the SRI proponents to address the issue. The second phase of the scientific
controversy continued a short but intense period of discussions in some of the
leading scientific journals on agronomy like Field Crops Research (FCR)
between 2004 and 2008. A close look at the articles—not just at their content,
but also the asymmetry in the way that papers for and against SRI went through
the review process—reveals interesting insights into the politics of knowledge. Table 1 highlights
features of this debate featuring 10 articles in two high-impact factor
journals: FCR and Agricultural Systems.
The debate began with the SRI
proponents, Norman Uphoff, Willem Stoop and Amir Kassam, outlining the
possibilities that the SRI offers, on the basis of experiments and
farmer experiences in Madagascar. They suggest realisation of yields of up
to 15 tonnes of paddy per hectare. These were higher than the biological
maximum of rice according to the published rice science literature and,
understandably, raised doubts amongst rice scientists. From a socio-economic
standpoint a study by agricultural economists Moser and Barrett (2003)
emphasised the additional labour required in SRI methods compared to
traditional labour-extensive rice cultivation in Madagascar.
While there seemed to be a
healthy debate in Agricultural Systems in 2002–04 on the
merits of the SRI, the articles in FCR were hostile to
conducting SRI research. Interestingly, while Agricultural
Systems presented an opportunity for SRI proponents with normal review
processes (that took close to six months), the tone of the SRI discussions
in FCR were high on rhetoric from the beginning. The
discussion paper by Sinclair and Cassman (2004) characterised the SRI as being
a UFO, urged funders not to waste resources on it, and extolled the virtues of
their scientific approach.
This was followed by another
article that added to the debate by suggesting that the SRI is a curiosity, and
that proponents of SRI are “advocates of nonsense” and practitioners of
“non-science.” While a discussion on science vs non-science is germane to many
social science journals, especially those concerned about the relations between
science and society, a closer reading reveals the politics of knowledge in its
use in an agronomic journal. For a scientific journal with a high impact
factor, it is surprising to see such polemical language and use of phrases as
“non-science,” “curiosity,” and “UFOs.” A scrutiny of the articles’ review
histories reveals that those which were critical of the SRI had an unusually
short time from receipt of an article to its acceptance for publication (as few
as seven or 11 days). Responses by SRI proponents, however, took much longer to
process (88 days at a minimum, see Table 1).
FCR has had only two articles on the SRI since 2009, and none
since 2012. The asymmetric nature of knowledge management by the journal seems
to reveal a certain gatekeeping politics that ensured that those who wanted the
science of SRI to be discussed and explained were out of bounds for FCR.
SRI researchers chose other peer-reviewed journals such as Paddy and
Water Environment, Experimental Agriculture, Journal of Crop
and Soil Sciences, Advances in Agronomy, and Plant
and Soil. Those who were “anti-SRI” ceased to engage with the debate
scientifically. This knowledge politics had an impact on the small but growing
Indian research on SRI. Understanding what goes on “inside the black-box” is
key to much research in the field of STS. As has been pointed out by
Vanloqueren and Baret (2009) research strategies favouring one paradigm is
largely shaped by institutional choices and scientists choose to work in one
field such as genetic engineering more than another such as agroecology.
Understanding the politics of knowledge is thus important for explaining the
reasons for why Indian scientists have been shying from formal research on the
SRI, particularly if Indian farmers are experimenting with it.
India and International Research
Networks on SRI
Beyond the journals, from its
early days when it was introduced beyond Madagascar, the SRI has been presented
as a methodological innovation rather than as a technology. There has been a
conscious attempt to characterise SRI as work in progress— inviting scientists,
farmers and other stakeholders to join in improving, modifying and sharing the
SRI knowledge. This approach has also helped to distinguish between the
“adoption” of the SRI (its set of principles or practices), and the
recommendation that its ideas need to be “adapted” to local conditions and even
that the SRI can be modified locally through experiments and reflections with
other actors. This is particularly evident in India.
The SRI’s entry into India and
its growth since 1999 exemplifies the multi-institutional character of the
innovation and reflects the emergence of the SRI as a social movement. The
simultaneous, though independent, experimentation of the SRI by researchers and
CSOs in Tamil Nadu had modest results. Reputed scientists Satyanarayana from
Andhra Pradesh, and T M Thiyagarajan of the Tamil Nadu Agricultural University
or O P Rupela, a soil-biologist at the International Crops Research Institute
for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT) and Amod Thakur from an Indian Council of
Agricultural Research (ICAR) centre on water management in Bhubaneswar played
important roles as “creative dissenters” (Prasad et al 2012), opening up
possibilities for the SRI research to the large Indian rice research community.
Indian researchers had countered the concept of SRI being just a “niche”
innovation specific to Madagascar or certain soil types, and added newer
dimensions to the science of the SRI. The complex evolution of the SRI in India
involved many actors beyond agricultural researchers with many twists and
turns. Table 2 summarises the
phases within India, indicating key actors within the system that have led to a
complex SRI innovation pathway.
Civil society groups in Andhra
Pradesh, led by the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) India based at the ICRISAT
expanded the reach and scope of the SRI through collaborative workshops and
experiments on weeders. The WWF funded various initiatives for the SRI research
and extension in different parts of the country, but it also amplified and
changed the discourse by hosting a national symposium in 2006 that opened the
research agenda to various farmers. Progressive farmers from South India, small
and marginal farmers from central and eastern India, scientists and
administrators of CSOs came together in assemblies more diverse than is common
in this country. The ability of these multiple actors to extend SRI principles,
even to other crops, has been a feature of the spread of SRI in India (Prasad
2016).
Changing the venue for the
national SRI symposia from the centre of rice research Hyderabad) to the
margins of Tripura in North East India in 2007 nudged the emergence of the SRI
as a widespread movement with small and marginal farmers shaping the innovation
differently. Newer institutional arrangements like the learning alliance in
Odisha and state-level workshops in Uttarakhand and Himachal Pradesh
democratised the innovation with different discourses that were more locally
rooted. The SRI movement then faced challenges in institutionalising these
diverse activities through research programmes. Departments of Rural
Development in states like Bihar, Jharkhand, and Madhya Pradesh took up the SRI
through rural women’s self-help groups and brought in a livelihood focus to the
innovation even as departments of agriculture in most states took little or no
initiative on SRI, awaiting instructions from their agricultural research
centres to endorse the innovation.
An informal alliance known as the
National Consortium on SRI (NCS) continued to push the agenda forward by
bringing newer information and data onto the table, continually seeking to
engage policymakers and pointing out opportunities for India to be an
international leader in this area. Close to 40% of all journal articles
published on SRI currently are from Indian researchers (Prasad 2016). While
there was some traction with a few policymakers leading to dialogues with
Planning Commission members and to the formation of a sub-group to formulate
ideas for upscaling of SRI, national research centres continued to be sceptical
and pushed back recommendations of the subgroup on investments in
community-based extension for the spread of the SRI.
In the absence of a clear policy
or guidelines by the Government of India for the SRI uptake, national and
international networks have played important roles in reframing discussions and
encouraging research simultaneously. Networks have had a silent, often
invisible empowering role for individuals working within established and
hierarchical organisations. The connectivity that networks have provided—ideas,
critical feedback, personal friendships—have encouraged agricultural
researchers to think outside prevailing “boxes” providing space for
conversations across the boundaries of their own disciplines. Changes in
settled thinking often require dissonant voices within the scientific
establishment that interact with and listen to non-research actors, in the
process reconciling diverse experience and translating ideas for a paradigm
change. Innovation needs the expression of heterodoxy. Social and intellectual
networks have provided opportunities for getting new ideas considered and for
the “ventilation” of musty institutions.
The spread and application of SRI
owes a lot to the energy and passion of innovation champions like Uphoff, a
political scientist at Cornell University who took the innovation from
Madagascar, the country of its origin, to the rest of the world, working
through networks of CSOs, policymakers, and emerging alliances. While funding
from the CIIFAD played an important role in supporting the spread in the early
stages, the spread of the innovation to over 50 countries has largely been
possible through the entrepreneurial energies of a small team at Cornell
University, known since 2010 as SRI–Rice.5 This has been
supported by key actors in the agroecology and other agricultural research
networks around the world.
Led by Uphoff and Lucy Fisher,
SRI–Rice has provided useful support to young researchers by connecting them
into informal transnational networks. SRI–Rice sustains an informal worldwide
peer group, building research capacities and visibility among researchers in
developing countries through pro bono editorial support and advice. Researchers
have also benefited from the specialised documentation service on the SRI-Rice
website, which provides access to all available SRI articles in a single
location.6 The database draws upon networks such as the ncs,
capturing local research that often escapes international databases. The
open-source collaborative architecture of the SRI movement has facilitated the
emergence of a new “knowledge commons” for agriculture, countervailing the
currently dominant trend towards proprietarisation of agricultural
technology. This has taken diverse forms such as e-groups and regional networks;
joint participation in panels at mainstream professional and subject
conferences; wide sharing of manuals, videos, and Microsoft PowerPoint
presentations made in different forums; and specialised Facebook pages on
equipment. The diversity of these networks induces transformation in knowledge
systems and can avoid the kind of domination by researchers in innovation
platforms manifested elsewhere (Prasad 2016).
Shrum (2005) has suggested that
the advent of the internet offers the possibility of a change in the structure
of science, with the inclusion of researchers in distant lands as full
participants in global scientific communities. The internet, Shrum suggests,
could “reagentise” science in less-developed areas more effectively than prior
initiatives because of a shift in collaborative patterns that have very little
to do with the ideology of participation and much to do with the maintenance of
relationships online. While most Western researchers dismissed SRI, SRI found a
more hospitable home with scientists from “developing” areas who were able to
overcome their constraint of isolation from international scientific networks
through facilitated exchanges.
The SRI researchers started
exploring journals other than FCRwith a broader disciplinary
orientation such as ExperimentalAgriculture, CAB Reviews, Journal
of Crop and Soil Sciences,Advances in Agronomy, and Plant
and Soil. A special issue of “Paddy and Water Environment” was
published on SRI in 2011, with detailed evidence of SRI and its science in
different parts of the world. Research and publication have not died down, the
location changing from mainstream scientific journals to ones that were more
heterodox and multidisciplinary. More research on SRI emerged from China and
India.
Can India Lead in Agroecological
Innovation?
A significant contribution of
SRI–Rice has been the maintenance of a research network and database that
sources articles, thesis and reports on SRI and places all of these online.
Much agricultural research in India appears in Indian journals that are often
not indexed in Scopus and other searches. Similarly, Chinese scholars rarely
publish in English, but often share their work in their own journals.
Figure 1 shows the distribution of SRI publications in different
journals from 2002–17, and the share of Indian and Chinese researchers’
contribution to the same. Research by Indians on SRI began slowly and late, but
has been the most prominent in global publications since 2008.
This evidence could potentially
have implications for reorienting research policy in India towards greater
investment and leadership in agroecology. India has been arguably the most
active site for contestations, controversies, dialogues, alliances, and
experimentation on the SRI. Through some efforts by CSOs, some institutional
innovations have emerged where researchers find value in working and
experimenting with farmers and CSOs. A good example is evaluation research done
on the System of Wheat Intensification (SWI, extending SRI ideas to
wheat-growing) at the Indian Agricultural Research Institute (IARI) done in
collaboration with the NGO PRADAN (Professional Assistance for Development
Action) in 2011–13. The IARI scientists and PRADAN brought to Delhi a farmer
from Bihar who had practised the SWI. Together, they agreed upon research
protocols for comparing the SWI with the IARI’s recommended best practices. The
farmer then managed the SWI plots accordingly so that the new methods were used
properly and the SWI yield advantage was increased to 46% (Dhar et al 2015). Such
innovations in co-creating knowledge are rare in Indian agriculture, but offer
a counterpoint and solution to the often-voiced criticisms of an ossified
agricultural research system in India, where “nothing of significance has
emerged from this system to galvanise farming in recent decades” (Jishnu and
Sood 2015). However, as research on paradigms and funding patterns has shown
how existing institutional arrangements and the overall organisation of our
research systems favour the dominant genetic-engineering research strategy
rather than explore and validate agroecological methods (Vanloqueren and Baret
2009). In an international review of agriculture, Feldman and Biggs (2011) have
argued that despite support from broad-based social movements, CSOs, and policymakers
within various countries, there has been little shift in international thinking
about agricultural futures. India is no exception to this trend.
One of the popular images used
for SRI extension is that of two uprooted rice plants of the same variety,
showing profuse growth of tillers and root systems on the plant that was grown
with SRI practices compared to a conventionally-grown plant of the same age
(Uphoff 2016a). When farmers find it difficult to believe that their fields
with fewer seedlings can actually yield more, extension workers have found
creative ways to explain the phenomenon by encouraging farmers to uproot rice
plants and compare an SRI rice plant of the same age and variety with
another that did not follow SRI principles of crop management.
This practice from the SRI is in
some ways an apt metaphor for envisioning agricultural futures. The SRI has
contested settled visions of our agricultural future by “uprooting” rice
science and suggesting that farmers and government agencies do not have to
invest in developing and planting new genotypes if they want to improve rice
yields. Newer futures can be envisioned by unravelling some of the power
relations and technological lock-ins that favour certain choices over others.
The SRI case is not a panacea for
all that does not work with Indian agriculture. There are cases where the SRI
has not worked as well as usually reported, and farmers have reasons for
preferring some principles of the SRI more than others (Sen 2015). But the SRI
case shows that a sustainable transition in agriculture research would require
more than simply increased funding and expenditure to continue research
along its current trajectory. It also directs attention to the larger framework
and power that influences S&T choices.
Ten years after the “rice wars”
we notice evidence of power manifesting itself in the everyday practice of
science. At the 2014 International Rice Congress (IRC) a new controversy
emerged. This was the first time that there had been fewer proposed papers on
SRI accepted for presentation despite increasing research. An open letter was
sent from the SRI rice community to the conference organisers urging a
more open attitude to scientific knowledge. Pointing to the over 600
publications on the SRI, the letter reiterated the research community’s
interest to work with the IRRI and the rest of rice science community. It
further urged the IRC to see farmers not only as producers but as innovators.
It ended with a call:
We want the global rice community to … collaborate with
farmers organisations … [to] give more attention to issues of concern to
farmers … and to involve farmers and their organisations in the design of
research, and work with the SRI community on a wide range of disciplines and
occupations. (Minh and Styger 2014)
Despite the absence of a direct
or open confrontation at the conference, events such as the 2014 IRC indicate
that futures are indeed contested. There is not just one future to be
anticipated and supported and mere technology-foresight exercises are unlikely
to reveal the range of possibilities that need to be explored for a country as
diverse as India unless they actively seek out and welcome alternative visions.
As the SRI case shows, looking at alternate evidence and supporting more
diverse research choices should help the Indian research community to envision
newer and better futures, where India could lead in agroecological innovations
rather than be another participant in an unequal rat race of genetic
engineering.
Notes
1 Farmer protests in India have
spiked in the last two years. Large numbers of farmers under the banner of
the All-India Kisan Sangharsh Coordination Committee (AIKSCC), representing 184
farmer groups from across many states, converged in New Delhi in November 2017
and again in 2018 to protest against policies that they believe are reducing
farmers’ incomes and increasing agrarian distress.
2 For more details on LASSNET and
the theme, visit http://www.lassnet.org/lass2016call-for-papers.html.
3 The capacity of SRI methods to
improve rice crop productivity and resilience has been experimented in 60
countries, and an estimated 10 million farmers are now using most or all of the
recommended practices on probably more than 8 million hectares (Uphoff 2016b).
4 The debate between Uphoff
(2004) and Sinclair (2004) was featured in IRRI’s magazine Rice Today(http://books.irri.org/RT3_3_content.pdf).
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