STRASA Economic Brief No.

3 (August 2013)

Perception, Adoption, and Realized Benefits of Swarna-Sub1 in Eastern India

STRASA Economic Brief

Takashi Yamano,* Maria Luz Malabayabas, and Architesh Panda

No.

1. Introduction Climate change is expected to increase the frequency and intensity of floods in Eastern India and is predicted to negatively affect rice farmers in the region as 80% of the ricegrowing area is rainfed and exposed to floods. The mostly poor farmers in the rainfed areas face crop losses caused by flooding, which can have a devastating impact on their livelihood, potentially exacerbating poverty in the region. The International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) and its collaborators have developed a submergence-tolerant rice variety Swarna-Sub1, whose seeds have been distributed to farmers in Eastern India since 2008 (see STRASA Economic Brief no. 1 and no. 2 for details on the development and distribution of Swarna-Sub1 in India). However, benefits from stress-tolerant rice varieties such as Swarna-Sub1 become visible only under stress conditions. The limited visibility of these benefits may hinder the diffusion of stress-tolerant rice varieties. The issue is essentially similar to the demand for insurance against extreme events. The insurance literature points to the fact that insurance purchases against these events remain low, leaving the majority of the people uninsured, until misfortune occurs. It is important, therefore, for the public sector to intervene and prepare people for such extreme events. To gain a better understanding of the adoption of Swarna-Sub1, we conducted a panel survey, visiting the same households twice in 2012 in eastern Uttar Pradesh (UP) and Odisha. In 2011, widespread floods occurred in Odisha but not in UP. We thus examined the changes in adoption rates of Swarna-Sub1 from 2011 to 2012 and in farmers perception of Swarna-Sub1 after the floods in 2011.

STRASA has been established by IRRI and Africa Rice with a view to reduce poverty and to stabilize rice production in drought and flood plagued and poor soiled rainfed ecosystems in South Asia and Africa through the use of modern technology. STRASA is funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

STRESS TOLERANT RICE FOR AFRICA AND SOUTH ASIA

2. Data The data we used in this report came from a two-visit panel survey conducted in April-June and October-December in 2012. The surveys were conducted in six districts in UP and in two districts in Odisha. The sample districts were chosen from a list of districts where four local NGOs have distributed Swarna-Sub1 seeds. From the NGOs, we obtained lists of villages and farmers who have received the seeds. From the village list, we randomly selected 52 villages in UP and Odisha. In the 52 villages, we randomly selected households, interviewing a total of 565 representative households twice (Table 1).1 In the first visit, we asked sample households about their crop production in the 2011 kharif season; in the second, we interviewed the same sample households after the 2012 planting season and asked about their adoption and perception of Swarna-Sub1.

T. Yamano is a senior scientist and M. Malabayabas and A. Panda are assistant scientists at the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI).

Table 1. Sample households in Eastern Uttar Pradesh and Odisha. Households that experienced submergence in 2011 kharif (%) (B) Adoption of Swarna-Sub1 (%)

State

Sample households (no.)

2011 (C)

2012 (D)

(A)

Uttar Pradesh Odisha Total

377 188 565

6.9 87.7 35.8

29.7 12.1 23.2

29.1 17.8 24.9

As previously mentioned, widespread floods occurred in Odisha during the 2011 kharif, with about 88% of the sample households in Odisha experiencing submergence at that time. On the other hand, only 7% of the households in UP had submerged plots in the same period. Indeed, there have not been major floods in UP since 2009. The 2009 floods were widespread and caused severe damage to rice production in UP. Because of the 2009 floods, UP state agencies have increased their efforts to distribute Swarna-Sub1 seeds since 2010. As a result, we found the adoption rate of Swarna-Sub1 (29.7%) to be high in 2011 in UP (Table 1). However, this rate declined slightly to 29.1% in 2012, the reason being the lack of widespread floods in the area since 2009. In contrast, adoption rate increased from 12.1 to 17.8% in Odisha. We hypothesize that the increase in adoption rate in Odisha is due to the bad experience farmers had when their fields were submerged in 2011. We examine this hypothesis below. In addition to measuring the impact of the 2011 floods on varietal adoption, we also measure the effect on the sample households perception of the variety. 3. Perception of Swarna-Sub1 under submergence To measure farmers perception of Swarna-Sub1, we asked respondents to evaluate five statements about Swarna-Sub1 on a five-point Likert scale: Scale 1 indicates strong disagreement, whereas scale 5 indicates strong agreement. The five statements are presented in Table 2. We found that farmers in Odisha have higher scores than farmers in UP, except for the last statement. First, Odisha farmers considered Swarna-Sub1 as submergence-tolerant more than did UP farmers. This could be because the former have experienced submergence in 2011 and have either directly seen or heard of SwarnaSub1s good performance under submergence. The Odisha farmers and their neighbors thought that Swarna-Sub1 is a good variety (statements 2 and 3). However, they did not agree about the ease of adopting Swarna-Sub1. The field interviews revealed that this difficulty is brought about by the limited availability of Swarna-Sub1 seeds. Because the average adoption rate of Swarna-Sub1 is still around 20% in the study areas, farmers may find it hard to obtain Swarna-Sub1 seeds from Swarna-Sub1 growers. This difficulty is expected to ease as more seeds are disseminated. The household data used in this report were collected by NEFORD, an NGO based in Lucknow, and A.I.D., an NGO based in Bhubaneswar. We thank Dr. RK Singh, Dr. JK Roy, and staff at the two NGOs for their excellent survey work.
1

Table 2: Farmers perception of Swarna-Sub1 in UP and Odisha. Odisha (A) 1. Swarna-Sub1 is more submergence-tolerant than other varieties. 2. I think Swarna-Sub1 is a very good variety. 3. Other farmers think Swarna-Sub1 is a good variety. 4. It is easy to adopt Swarna-Sub1. 5. Swarna-Sub1 tastes better than other varieties. Average score Perception index Note: ** indicate the 1% significance level of the t test. 3.80 3.74 3.68 3.33 2.51 3.41 0.21 (0.69) UP (B) 3.50 3.35 3.31 3.24 2.89 3.26 -0.12 (0.87) Difference (C) +0.30 +0.39 +0.37 +0.09 -0.38 +0.15 +0.33**

One potentially serious concern is the taste of the variety. Both Odisha and UP farmers gave below-average scores, 2.5 and 2.9, respectively, although our preliminary analysis found no difference in farmgate prices of Swarna-Sub1 and other rice varieties. The five-scale scores provided interesting results, but they were difficult to analyze. We thus created an index based on factor analysis. The mean value for the constructed Swarna-Sub1 perception index is set at zero. At the bottom of Table 2, we present the average scores of the perception index: 0.21 among Odisha farmers and -0.12 among UP farmers. The t test confirmed that the difference was statistically significant at the 1% level. Thus, farmers in Odisha had a significantly better perception of Swarna-Sub1 than farmers in UP. 4. Adoption and perception after the floods To investigate the impact of submergence on the adoption and perception of Swarna-Sub1 among the sample farmers, we stratified the samples by length of submergence in 2011 (Table 3). We found that adoption rate of Swarna-Sub1 remained at 27.5% in both years when farmers experienced no submergence in 2011. After the farmers experienced short-duration submergence in 2011, adoption increased from 3.2% in 2011 to 16.1% in 2012. The increase was large, a 13-percentage point increase, and statistically significant at the 5% level. When farmers experienced medium-duration submergence, adoption rate increased from 19.3% in 2011 to 21.6% in 2012, although the difference was not statistically significant. When submergence duration was longer than 15 days, adoption rate decreased from 36.4 to 27.3%. This may be attributed to the mistaken notion that Swarna-Sub1 could survive even under stagnant water for a long time; farmers thus cultivated the crop in areas that were prone to stagnant flooding. This was observed more in UP than in Odisha. After suffering from longduration submergence in 2011, farmers realized that Swarna-Sub1 was not suitable for areas prone to stagnant water, and they switched to different rice varieties.

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Table 3: Swarna-Sub1 adoption and perception, by length of submergence, 2011.

Households (no.) (A) Swarna-Sub1 adoption (%) 2011 (B) 2012 (C) Perception index (D)

Submergence length

No submergence Short (17 days) Medium (814 days) Long (15 days and above)

298 62 88 22

27.5 3.2 19.3 36.4

27.5 16.1** 21.6 27.3

-0.12 0.08 0.30 0.15

All

470

23.2

24.9

0.0

The perception index was high among households that experienced medium-duration submergence in 2011, the average score being 0.30. The corresponding averages were -0.12 among farmers who did not experience submergence, 0.08 among farmers who experienced short-duration submergence, and 0.15 among farmers who experienced long-duration submergence. Table 3 suggests that adoption of Swarna-Sub1 is high among farmers who experienced short- and medium-duration submergence in 2011 and that they have a good perception of Swarna-Sub1. 5. Conclusion In this report, we find that adoption rate of Swarna-Sub1 increased in 2012 among farmers who experienced submergence the previous year, and these same farmers had a good perception of Swarna-Sub1. The results provide some policy implications. First, to improve the effectiveness of dissemination efforts, it is important to promote Swarna-Sub1 when farmers have a high demand for iti.e., after their fields suffering from submergence. However, this is obviously too late for farmers who suffered from submergence before they adopted the variety. Second, to increase farmers awareness of the benefits of Swarna-Sub1, the use of visual media may come in handy. It is common behavior to underestimate the probability of undesirable events occurring, and this is true not only in India but also in other countries. As a result, natural disasters such as floods cause a devastating impact on people and communities that are not prepared for them. The public sector, therefore, has an important role to play in helping people prepare for such events. Stress-tolerant rice varieties, such as Swarna-Sub 1, can enable farmers implement measures to mitigate possible crop losses caused by submergence, drought, or salinity.

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