Rainfed rice - IRRI books - International Rice Research Institute

RAINFED RICE A SOURCEBOOK OF BEST PRACTICES AND STRATEGIES IN EASTERN INDIA
Impact assessment
Effect of FPB on changes in biodiversity.
Assessment of adoption pattern (rate, diffusion, costs/benefits).
Project status and results
The project has run for two cropping seasons. The preliminary results show
that:
There was, by and large, a good agreement among farmers and breeders
in choice of varieties.
The agreement was, however, less in more diverse environments.
Though farmers and breeders agreed in on-farm varietal ranking, their
on-station ranking did not match.
The yield ranking did not match with the overall ranking of varieties by
breeders and more so by farmers. This shows that the rankers, especially
the farmers, considered other traits equally or more important than yield
alone in selection.
Farmers’ preferences of varieties differed greatly in raw and parboiled rice.
The results show that all the test varieties are not suitable for either raw or
parboiled rice. The preference of the farmers based on cooking characters
was not correlated with the actual yield of the varieties.
Conclusions
On-station research alone will not fully serve farmers in uncertain
rainfed heterogeneous environments. However, some doubt whether
farmers’ participatory approaches, e.g., participatory breeding, are the
best alternatives.
The IRRI-Eastern India FPB project aims more at testing some of the
hypotheses testing whether FPB increased efficiency, rather than
pursuing it as an alternative to formal breeding. The results will
determine the future of FPB.
FPB can complement mainstream plant breeding.
FPB can fulfill equity, efficiency and sustainability objectives.
Methodology development efforts are needed to make FPB more effective.
FPB will become legitimate only if research policy and institutional
support are forthcoming.
Prepared by:
R. K. Singh, K. Prasad, R.K. Sahu, J.K. Roy, A.T. Roy, S. Singh,
R. Thakur and N.K. Sarma
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