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The System of Rice Intensification
(SRI): A Challenge for Science, and an
Opportunity for Farmer Empowerment
Towards Sustainable Agriculture
Abha Mishra, Max Whitten, Jan Willem Ketelaar and
V M SalokheIntroduction
Rice is the dominant staple food crop throughout Asia and is an important source of
carbohydrate and fibre globally. In Asia alone, more than 2 billion people obtain
60–70 per cent of their calories from rice (FAO, 2004); and global demand is
expected to rise by 38 per cent above the current production within 30 years (Sur-
ridge, 2004). No doubt the Green Revolution helped many Asian countries achieve
food sufficiency, but it also degraded the environment and threatened agricultural
sustainability (Pretty, 2002). Competition for land due to urbanization, an impend-
ing water crisis (Wopereis et al, 1994; Barclay, 2004), declining soil fertility, and
overuse and misuse of harmful agrochemicals pose threats to production. At the
same time, current technologies are approaching their limits (Horie et al, 2005) and
are no longer sufficient to meet increasing demands with relatively shrinking natural
resources. These considerations have generated a number of novel rice production
management techniques, some of them overlapping. These include alternate wetting
and drying (AWD) (Belder et al, 2002), aerobic rice culture (Bouman and Tuong,
2001), integrated crop management (Balasubramanian et al, 2004), use of control-
led-release of fertilizer (Shoji and Kanno, 1994) and, more recently, the System of
Rice Intensification (SRI) (Stoop et al, 2002). SRI, among these ‘alternative’ options,
is currently perhaps attracting the greatest interest, and certainly the most contro-
versy. The article in Nature (Surridge, 2004) acknowledged SRI’s growing popularity
Reprinted from Mishra A, Whitten M, Ketelaar J W and Salokhe V M. 2007. The System of Rice
Intensification (SRI): A challenge for science, and an opportunity for farmer empowerment towards
sustainable agriculture. IJAS 4(3), 193–212, Earthscan, London.