Past Successes 297amassed at Los Baños and of the crosses made in 1962, a particularly promising
combination was between the tall, vigorous variety Peta from Indonesia and Dee-
geo-woo-gen, a short, stiff-strawed variety from Taiwan which contained a single
recessive gene for dwarfing. In 1966 the new variety, named IR8, was released for
commercial planting in the Philippines. It was immediately successful and, amid
considerable publicity, was dubbed the ‘miracle rice’.
In parallel with the work at IRRI a very similar breeding programme had been
launched at the Academy of Agricultural Sciences in the Chinese province of
Guandong.^16 Although this was only known much later, the Chinese and Philip-
pine teams were using breeding material containing the same dwarfing gene – the
Taiwanese variety Dee-geo-woo-gen had probably originated in southern China.
In 1959 the Chinese produced their first successful cross, similar in many respects
to IR8, and known as Guang-chai-ai. It was rapidly taken up in the province of
Guandong and in Jiangsu, Hunan and Fujian. By 1965, a year prior to the release
of IR8, it was being grown on 3·3 million hectares.
IR8 combined the seedling vigour of Peta with the short straw of Dee-geo-
woo-gen. It was, like the new wheats bred in Mexico, highly responsive to fertilizer
and essentially insensitive to photoperiod, maturing in 130 days. Under irrigation
it yielded 9 tons/ha in the dry season and, on the IRRI farm, when continuously
cultivated with a rapid turnaround between crops, produced average annual yields
of over 20 tons/ha. In Asian regional trials it outyielded virtually all other varieties,
producing from 5–10 tons/ha.
There was an immediate impact on Philippine rice production. By 1970, one
and a half million hectares, or half of the Philippines’ riceland, was planted to the
new varieties and the yield take-off had occurred. The Philippines became self-
sufficient in rice production in 1968 and 1969 for the first time in decades,
although this was temporarily lost in the early 1970s owing to bad weather and
disease outbreaks. A decade later, 75 per cent of the riceland was planted to the
new varieties, average yields were over 2000kg/ha and rising at nearly 70kg/ha per
year (Figure 13.4).
To begin with, the new varieties were distributed somewhat haphazardly.
When IR8 was first released, farmers who turned up at IRRI could have 2kg of
seed free, provided they left their name and address. The seed spread within a few
months to over two-thirds of the provinces of the Philippines. Later, seed was dis-
tributed through government agencies and a newly formed Seed Growers Associa-
tion, composed of private farmers who both grew and marketed the new seed.
Standard Oil of New Jersey (ESSO) also established 400 agroservice centres in the
Philippines to serve as marketing outlets not only for fertilizer but for seed, pesti-
cides and farm implements.^17
Two Mexican farm advisers working in El Salvador had hit on the idea of
putting together in one package all the basic inputs a farmer would need to try out
a new variety on a small patch of ground. The idea quickly spread to other countries
and was tried on a massive scale in the Philippines, where a typical package contained
0·9kg of IR8 seed, 19kg of fertilizer and 2·7kg of insecticide. The packages were