416 Modern Agricultural Reforms
more attractive and feasible options, providing water supplies in situ. We should
also understand better how land preparation practices affect water retention and
utilization.^18
Irrigation will surely remain a major means for solving water problems, and we
should be learning how to use scarce irrigation water more efficiently and effec-
tively through social organization (Uphoff, 1986; 1996). But irrigation is not the
only means to ensure that growing plants and animals have the water they need.
Water scarcity will surely increase for agriculture around the world, so all possible
means to acquire and conserve water need to be considered.
Genetic manipulation is not always necessary to raise
production significantly
The modern approach to agricultural improvement has stressed better plant and
animal breeding, especially since the advent and success of the Green Revolution.
Without denying the value of such efforts, or that there will be some future bene-
fits from biotechnology, we think more attention should be paid to cultural prac-
tices, to soil preparation and management, to the use of organic inputs, to more
productive cropping patterns and systems, and to species that have previously been
overlooked or underutilized.
A good example is the system of rice intensification (SRI) developed in Mada-
gascar which can boost yields from any variety of rice by 100–200 per cent or more
by changing management practices and without requiring any use of purchased
inputs. There are other examples of major yield increase potentials with staple
crops. In the 1970s, a programme in Guatemala was able to help farmers raise their
maize and bean yields from 400–600kg/ha to about 2400kg in just seven years, at
a cost of about US$50 per household. Farmers who had become acquainted with
experimentation and evaluation methods proceeded to double yields once more
on their own after external assistance was withdrawn. Very poor farmers working
with an NGO in the high Andean regions have found that they could double or
triple their yields of potatoes and barley by using lupine, a leguminous plant, as a
green manure to add nitrogen to the very poor mountain soils and increase soil
organic matter. This method, like SRI in Madagascar, works with whatever var-
ieties farmers are already planting and uses organic rather than chemical inputs from
outside the community. Leguminous fallows can raise maize yields in southern
Africa by two to four times.
The Mukibat technique, named after the farmer who devised it in Indonesia
almost 50 years ago, can increase the yield of cassava by five times or more. It
involves grafting cassava tubers onto the root of a wild rubber tree of the same genus
as cassava, which gives the growing tubers more access to sunlight and nutrients
(Foresta et al, 1994). That this technology has aroused so little scientific attention,
and was not reported in the literature until more than 20 years after it was devised
(Bruijn and Dharmaputra, 1974), may reflect the indifference among most research-
ers towards cassava, a low-status staple crop on which hundreds of millions of