For Ronb,
this will become a hard piece of work now for me and unfortunately I will have serious problems to explain some very important points, simply due to a lack of the correct English terminologies, but I also don’t like to spend my weekend with internet research for this, so I will give it a try.
Your statement
The Green Revolution made this possible and while issues like insecticides etc are real and need attention wistful ideas like perhaps undoing the Green Revolution won't fly unless you also halve the population.
We could certainly debate for the rest of our life about the pros and contras of industrial agriculture, but since the headline of this thread is
Balinese rice, I suggest we will stay focused on this?
Balance – isn’t it all what Bali is about?
Just 100 years ago every farmer on this world had a very solid knowledge about his personal micro cosmos, thousands and thousands years of experience have been forwarded from one generation to the next, the state of agriculture was based on founded knowledge about natural processes achieved by doing and observation.
Without any kind of modern scientific research, the human being found out that the symbiosis of flora and fauna is the only way to achieve successful farming, the people have known about the complexity of an ecosystem and their influence on it, they have known about the soil, the water and the wind, they have known how to use animals to improve their progress and so much more.
Lansing’s studies are a magnificent masterpiece of research, from an ethnological point of view he pictures in an impressive way how rice farming developed a social system over the centuries and (some will not like it) the fundamental importance of the religion in this development.
Balance – the balance of on ecosystem, the balance of water management, the balance within the community, all held together by religion.
Balinese have created a perfect system for cultivating wet rice, an ecosystem where flora and fauna have been in balance, only this balance assured successful harvest, they always understood that the fauna in the soil and the other animals are necessary for the rice to grow, the efficiency of this symbiosis is documented in different scientific studies.
Given the fact, that industrial influence on this system has caused more ecological and economical problems than it would have improved something, I will try to give you an impression from a botanical point of view on that matter.
Wet rice is a hydro culture, the most sensitive way to cultivate plants.
The main problem when plants are cultivated in standing water is the ongoing enrichment of salt on the surface of the substrate, in a sterile environment a permanent water circulation is a must to prevent this process.
In a rice paddy there is usually not much water circulation, so it is existential that the soil is worked, this provides an exchange with the water, the salt concentration is washed out.
Responsible for this job is the fauna inside the soil and all kind of other animals, snails, fishes, ducks, without these field workers the salt concentration will increase until the field is prepared the next time, so you can say the formula is less fauna will demand more water flow to avoid salinity.
Why is the salt content so important?
The water transport inside a plant is caused by the salt concentration within the cells, it’s responsible for the cell pressure, when the plant transpires the cell pressure drops and the salt concentration increases into the direction where the water is leaving the plant, so the concentration is higher at the leaf than at the root.
When the salt concentration in the soil reaches a higher level than inside the plant, the process is reversed, the plant will dry out even standing in the water.
Now let’s have a look what happened after the green revolution.
There was a perfect system in balance based on thousand years of experience, but this experience was wiped out by an industry which tried to improve the perfect.
Irrigation, planting periods, harvesting, periods of recovery for the soil, the calendar for the Subak system was a grown element within Balinese society and all this was ruled by priests, therefore accepted by a religious community.
In a laboratory it’s possible to simulate a lot of things, but it’s absolutely impossible to simulate the complexity of an existing ecosystem, in the intention to improve the efficiency and to modernize agriculture in general, a new philosophy was created, with the help of modern science and its industrial developments, the human being had the intention to gain take control over the system, the idea was to steer the natural processes and to calculate them.
The plan to increase the rice production was based on two things, to improve the yield per hectare by breeding new sorts of plants and to secure three harvesting periods in general, the Balinese had already before sometimes three harvests per year, but was this depending on weather situation and some more aspects.
A higher growth rate indicates also a better nutrition, so additional fertilisation is necessarily, responsible for the growth is Nitrogen given in form of chemical fertilizers, these are relatively cheap to produce in masses, the problem with chemical fertilizers is, the nutrients are tied to salt there, nitrates, sulphates, phosphates.
The effect on the planting is amazing, the Nitrogen is immediately available for the plants and they grow rapidly.
Whoever knows a bit about the basics of fertilization knows also that the nutrition has to be balanced, a plant needs much more than only Nitrogen to grow and here we are coming back to balance, an imbalanced nutrition of the crops will weaken the plant, due to a lack of other elements the rice is now less resistant toward outer influences, with the use of the chemical fertilizers the salt concentration in the field increases, this has directly influence on the fauna in the soil (edaphon) which is also effecting the oxygen content in the ground and the availability of trace elements important for the plant, the plant cannot develop a natural resistance toward insects and other pests anymore, the fauna in the soil decreases, the salt concentration rises and because the lack of worms, snails, etc. the animals which usually use this kind of fauna for food will disappear also little by little, now we have a vulnerable culture, the rice is not very healthy and vulnerable, the soil is less lively, the ducks which worked the surface of the soil by looking for food have been gone.
To avoid a salinity of the rice paddy the water flow must be increased, this means for the farmers in these terraces more work, a pump system for irrigation is not present, to protect the cultures the use of pesticides is a must now, this contributes on the other hand even more to the destruction of the soil fauna.
The industry is producing now newer sorts of rice with higher resistance toward salt content and pests, but the circle has already started to spin, now the farmers are struggling to stabilize the whole process and in this struggle they rely now completely on the industry, new seeds, new pesticides, new fertilizers, new irrigation channels must be build, maybe the use of pumps – not even to speak about the ecological impact on the water, the creeks, the rivers.
Now you could say, ok these are the side effects of higher production rate and regrettable, but even this is not true, when you read the studies where traditional farming and industrial farming are compared now on Bali, you will be amazed that under the line it’s almost the same, but when you compare it on a economical point of view that the advantage of traditional farming is significant.
Rockefeller is a famous name, I don’t know what you will associate with this name, but I don’t think at first about a family which’s first goal is to save the world and fight the hunger.
The income of the farmers world wide dropped since this so-called green revolution, nobody can really say what it was all worth for, who stands behind the most scientific studies in respect to this, who benefits at most from it?
India was presented as a success, have you read about the enormous rate of suicides under Indian farmers last year, they buy the seeds on loans, then they get almost nothing for the product, we are selling seeds to Africa and afterwards we are exporting the ready product in this areas for the price of the seeds, farmers are driven into bankrupt, fields are not cultivated anymore, than we send aid.
You just must have a look at the agriculture politics of the EU, this is already so absurd and perverted that you sometimes don’t know if to laugh or to cry about it.
Is there really not enough food on this world for the population, we grow wheat and then we burn it, millions over millions of tons over capacity are only produced for the garbage year by year, all sponsored by tax payers, we export agricultural products into nations for prices the local farmers cannot compete anymore, at the other hand we are charging Western prices in even these countries for the seeds, the fertilizers, the pesticides and everything else we are producing here, then we put extra high import customs on the products of these nations to avoid them from exporting the product back to us.
best regards
Thorsten
