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Sunday, February 12, 2006

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IRRI to collaborate with Indian scientists on GHG effect
2/12/2006
 

          THE International Rice Research Institute said recently it was collaborating with Indian scientists to develop a hybrid variety of rice that can withstand global warming.
This was conveyed by IRRI Director General Robert Zeigler to visiting President A P J Abdul Kalam who visited a field in IRRI complex. "One of our future plans is collaboration with India in view of the problem of climate change resulting from Greenhouse Gas effect.
"We will monitor the GHG and its impact on rice output," Zeigler said. IRRI officials said the concern over climate change affecting production stemmed from the fact that if the temperature goes up it could affect the yield, especially during the day which is the time for flowering.
The IRRI is also trying to popularise the use of "seed drummers" it had invented in 1980 contending it would help farmers reduce costs on labour and saving time of transplanting rice and increasing production, Mahbub Hossain, head of IRRI's Social Sciences Division told the news agency.
He said the use of seed drummer, priced at 20 US dollars, has helped farmers in West Bengal make a profit of about 60 to 70 US dollars through cost cutting, efficiency in transplanting and getting higher yield.
In the Philippines, the profit has been estimated to have gone up to 100 US dollars, he added. According to Hossain, use of seed drummers does not disturb the seeds involved in the manual transplanting and this is found to increase the rice production by five to ten per cent in per hectare cultivation.
Besides, seeds planted by seed drummers mature two weeks earlier than the manual transplanting process, a period which can be used by farmers to grow other crops, he said. Hossain said one reason why seed drummers had earlier not caught on with the farmers was that they were made of iron and were too heavy to pull.
But Vietnam modified the instrument using plastic in place of iron and it became very popular in that country, he added. Vietnam and Bangladesh are manufacturing the seed drummers.
He said IRRI advocates increasing use of seed drummers primarily because globalization had made it impossible for governments across the world to intervene in falling prices of rice and the only way to help the farmers was to help them cut cost of production.
The IRRI said it was also experimenting with a new technology that will help farmers to use their own hybrid without depending on companies supplying the seeds.
"We are trying to do this by creating a gene which preserves the hybrid because the F1 variety cannot be used after first use," Sant S Virmani, Principal Scientist in Plant Breeding, Genetics and Biotechnology Division of IRRI said. He said experiments were on and it might take 10 to 15 years to come to any conclusion.

 

 
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