Restoring the Soil - Canadian Foodgrains Bank

22Choosing The Right GM/CC Cropping System For A Specific AreaThe same problems—expensive fertilizer, smaller plots, little or no opportunity tofallow and decreasing soil fertility—are affecting smallholder farmers elsewhere, eventhough the crisis situation seems to be approaching more slowly. Thus many farmersin Latin America and Asia are also becoming increasingly interested in the benefits ofgm/ccs.It is highly unlikely that gm/ccs will ever become just a footnote in history. Nevertheless,if we are to make introduced gm/cc systems as sustainable and widely popularas possible, we need to discover what makes certain specific gm/cc systems so muchmore popular than others. What is the difference?Most of the programs and organizations that have been successful in introducingsustainable gm/cc systems have used the following guidelines: 111. The land occupied by non-food-producing gm/ccs must have no opportunity cost.This means that if the gm/cc does not produce food, it must occupy land that cannotbe used for producing either a cash crop or a subsistence crop during the time the gm/cc is using it. This sounds like a very difficult, if not impossible, rule to follow, but weare finding more and more places and times that gm/ccs can be used:a) If the gm/cc does produce a valued food, it can be grown in any way that fits intothe system like any other equally valuable food crop.b) If the gm/cc does not produce food, it can be grown intercropped together withanother food or market crop. For instance, jackbeans are intercropped with maizeor cassava, or perennial peanut (Arachis pintoi) is intercropped with coffee. Intercroppingis currently the most popular way of growing gm/ccs.c) The gm/cc can be grown on wasteland or during the first year or two of a fallowas an improved fallow. For instance, farmers in Vietnam broadcast tephrosia(Tephrosia candida) seeds into their first year fallow. That way, instead of fallowingthe land for five years, as they normally do, the soil will be fertile enough to farmagain in just one or two years. In this case, since the soil is very poor when thefallow starts and the gm/cc is planted, farmers must use gm/cc species that can growwell in very poor soils. These include gm/cc species such as jackbeans, tephrosia, orcertain very hardy trees.d) The gm/cc can be grown mostly during the dry season. This can be done inthree ways. First, the gm/cc can be relayed (intercropped with another crop that hasalready been growing for some time) into traditional crops. Examples of this arethe maize/cowpea and maize/lablab bean systems in Thailand, which are S70 andS71 in the decision tree. The second way is to plant the gm/cc after the harvest ofnormal crops, such as in S78, the system in Vietnam in which rice bean is plantedafter the rice. The third way is to intercrop the gm/cc with the normal crop and11Bunch, Roland, “El Uso de Abonos Verdes por Agricultores Campesinos, Lo Que Hemos Aprendido Hasta la Fecha”.Reporte Técnico No. 3, Segunda Edición, Tegucigalpa, Honduras: Centro Internacional de Investigación y Divulgación deCultivos de Cobertura (CIDICCO), 1995.