Radio's Dramatic Impact

The award of the prestigious 2002 St Andrew's Environmental Prize has recognized the importance of finding appropriate and effective ways of communicating research results to farmers. The prize went to a project which has already substantially reduced pesticide use by some two million rice farmers in the Mekong Delta - long one of the great rice bowls of Asia - and has the potential to reach many more elsewhere. The project research and subsequent campaign marked a milestone in rice production for two reasons. Firstly, it clearly identified the damage caused by the overuse of insecticides, which kills off beneficial insects and so encourages the pests they would otherwise help control, and secondly it developed a completely new way of communicating information to farmers. By careful analysis of how and why farmers make the decisions they do, the project team successfully bridged the awkward gap between research knowledge and farmer perceptions.

Farmer uptake of researcher-developed IPM technologies is all-too-often poor, and failure of communication has been identified as an important reason for this. In rice, outstanding progress has been achieved in rice breeding and pest management by international and national research organizations but, as one of the prize-winners, IRRI (International Rice Research Institute, Philippines) entomologist K. L. Heong, says, this has not benefited rice farmers. Farm practices have remained substantially the same over the last 40 years ago and, at 3 t/ha, average annual yields from rice farmers' fields fall well short of the 10 t achieved in IRRI trials.

The 2002 Prize-winning project, which began in Vietnam in 1994, was devised and is implemented by K. L. Heong, communications specialist M. M. Escalada (Leyte State University, Philippines), and Nguyen Huu Huan (Director, Vietnam Plant Protection Department). They have pioneered new ways of overcoming the frustrating failure of extension, and the US$25,000 prize money will allow them to widen its scope.

From an investigation conducted in ten Asian countries concerning the use of pesticides in rice and what makes farmers decide to spray, the team identified some common problems:

• Many sprays are unnecessary because they are applied at the wrong time and to the wrong targets. Farmers spray heavily early in the season against perceived pests, leaf-feeding insects such as caterpillars, beetles and grasshoppers, which cause highly visible damage yet were demonstrated to have very little impact on yield or economic returns.
• The unnecessary sprays impact negatively on the beneficial species community in rice and precipitate outbreaks of secondary pests, which do decrease yields and promote yet more spraying later in the season. Not only can farmers become victims of pesticide poisoning, but sprays can also damage aquatic fauna, reducing fish and prawn cultures, and cause broad damage to the local environment.
• The resultant high pesticide use is not only unnecessary but includes category 1 pesticides such as methyl parathion, monocrotophos and metamidophos, which are hazardous to human health and the environment, many of which are banned in the developed world.
• The only consistent message the farmers receive, from agrochemical companies, tells them they must spray. Overuse and incorrect spraying of insecticides is due to years of aggressive pesticide advertising and marketing that has played to farmers' often-misplaced fears.

The team realized that if they could educate farmers not to spray against the leaf feeders, they might have a significant impact on total pesticide application throughout the season. They began by gaining an understanding of why farmers decided to spray leaf feeders and concluded:

• Farmers believed that leaf feeders were economically damaging, and this existing belief was a barrier to using new knowledge.
• Peer pressure, the desire to conform and live up to expectations, meant farmers were dissuaded from experimenting with new ideas.
• Complex information is processed into simple rules, based on perceptions and experience, and is therefore error-prone and biased.

What appeared to motivate farmers to spray insecticides during the early stages were misconceptions, lack of knowledge and biased estimations of losses due to pests. The amount rice farmers expected to lose if no insecticides were applied was about 13 times higher than the actual losses. Farmer perception, rather than economic rationale, was the basis of most pest management decisions. The team set about devising a strategy to reduce pesticide use that surmounted these obstacles, focusing on simple ideas that were easy to communicate. They quickly discovered that in Vietnam a primary source of information for farmers was local radio broadcasts. From then on, the ever-present farmer radios were at the heart of a media campaign that has had a profound impact on the use of insecticides in the Mekong Delta of southern Vietnam.

The campaign was trialled in two districts of Long An Province. A simple message to communicate was developed by national researchers and extensionists at a workshop: "In the first 40 days of the crop, spraying for leaf-feeding insects is a waste of money." The message was conveyed in an 'entertainment-education' radio comedy drama featuring two farmers talking about the experiment with a mix of rustic and scientific facts. The simple, humorous approach fixed the message in the minds of thousands of farmers. This was backed up by half-day village meetings at which trials of sprayed and unsprayed crops were set out; the effects of spraying on yields was followed up at the end of the season. The success of the strategy was soon evident from the results: the number of farmers spraying for leaf feeders fell from 68% in the first season to 20% by the second season and 11% in the third.

Scaling up was the next step. Working together with local government staff, the project team's aim was to reach some half a million farmers, which necessitated modifications to the approach used in the trial. Face-to-face methods were not feasible on such a large scale, so the team worked with local extensionists and farmers to develop leaflets and posters, to back up the radio campaign, which were tested at the farm level. In fact the success of the campaign was such that all 16 provincial administrations of the Mekong Delta adopted the radio strategy, and by 1997 the project message had reached some 92% of the Delta's 2.3 million farm households.

Analysis of the results of intensive surveys in 1999 confirmed the extent of impact. Insecticide use had fallen from an average of 3.4 applications per farmer per season, to just one - a decrease of 72%. The number of farmers who believed that insecticides would bring higher yields had fallen from 83% to 13%. The number who realized that insecticides killed the natural enemies of rice pests, as well as the pests themselves, had risen from 29% to 79%. At the same time, the gross paddy output of the Mekong Delta increased from 11 to 14 million tonnes per year. The project also affected policy: in November 1998, registration of pesticides for rice leaf-feeding insects was halted. However, K.L. Heong says that more could be achieved. He believes insecticide use can be further reduced by half without affecting rice production. But he and his research partners also fear that insecticide use will creep up again if the campaign is allowed to lapse.

However, the project is now building on its great strength of tailoring the message to suit local conditions. In June 2001, a campaign was launched in Thailand's Sing Buri Province using billboards, a popular method of disseminating information there, to publicize the message. The primary objective of the St Andrew's Prize is to find practical and original solutions to environmental problems, and an important aim is to provide seed-funding to help promote implementation of such ideas and solutions. The winning 2002 team plan to use their prize money to spread the message to their next target audience, the million rice farmers of the Red River Delta in northern Vietnam.

There are some 300 million rice farmers throughout the world and they fulfil a vital role in assuring the food security of 50% of world's people whose stable food is rice. The challenge is to reach all farmers so rice growing, which currently provides a poor and precarious income, comes to provide a sustainable livelihood, which will in turn improve world food security. In awarding the prize the Chairman of the St Andrew's Prize Board of Trustees, Sir Crispin Tickell, said that they had, "...decided to give the prize to a proposal of obvious and lasting benefit to millions of people which could and should be a model for others: the cultivation of rice by methods which combine the benefits of the old and the new, and avoid the hazards which have so damaged rice and other cultivation of grains worldwide."

Contact: K.L. Heong,
International Rice Research Institute,
Los Banos, Laguna, DAPO 7777,
Metro Manila, Philippines
Email: k.heong@cgiar.org 
Fax: +63 2 891 1292

❑