Impacts of replacing rice fallows with productive crops in Bangladesh, Nepal and eastern India.

摘要

Large areas of rice fallows (land left fallow after the harvest of rainfed rice) were identified in Bangladesh (2.1 million hectares), Nepal (0.4 million hectares) and India (11.6 million hectares). This underscores the need to facilitate double cropping and replace rice fallows with productive crops in these areas. In Bangladesh, farmer's trials and surveys (2002) showed that a combination of early sowing (made possible by the use of early maturing rice cultivars) of short-duration chickpea cultivars, rapid minimum tillage, seed priming and simple IPM practices was effective and profitable. In Nepal, where double cropping was traditionally more prevalent, a baseline survey of a sample of households during the 2001/02 rabi season showed that more than 60% of the land used to grow rice was left fallow. By the end of 2003/04, after only two full years of project work, only 20% of the rice land was being left uncropped after the rice harvest. In India, after preliminary studies (2002) showed that protection from unsupervised grazing animals was a major constraint, planting a second crop in large areas was tested by cooperating groups of farmers. Although many areas were subject to additional constraints, second cropping with chickpea was readily adopted by farmers. The impacts of these technologies in enhancing productivity and improving livelihoods are discussed..