Data for this section are predominantly derived from the following sources:
■ results of several surveys conducted by PhilRice in various provinces of the Philippines in the late 1980s and early 1990s, as reported in the cited literature;
■ data of 132 farmers in the Central Luzon Region, collected by the IRRI Social Science Division over five seasons between 1979 and 198853, subsequently referred to as the ‘IRRI data set’;
■ results of a survey of 229 farmers in irrigated areas of Antique province conducted by the au-thor in November 1993, subsequently called the ‘Antique IPM/ALM survey’54.
Rice is the dominant crop in Philippine agriculture, accounting for roughly 17% of agricultural gross value added and a cultivation area of about 3.5 million ha in 1989 (ADB 1991). While rice is grown in many different environments, a considerable portion (approximately 50%) of Philippine rice land is irrigated, allowing two or even three crops of rice per year. Modern high-yielding varieties are planted on more than 90% of the irrigated ricelands (BAS 1991). Thus, it is not surprising that two-thirds of total rice production in the country come from irrigated areas (ADB 1991). Average yields per ha irrigated land amounted to about 3 metric tons between 1981 and 1987 (BAS 1988). Compared to other Asian countries, notably Japan, Republic of Korea, China, and Indonesia, this yield level is surprisingly low. A sharp drop in irrigation investments in the early 1980s, leading to a low efficiency of water delivery, as well as a decline in fertilizer use during the same time period are possible rea-sons for this phenomenon in the country that has been called the ‘home of the green revolution’
(Pathak and Gomez 1991).
Within the Philippines, rice is grown in all regions. However, the main ‘rice bowls’ of the Philip-pines are Region III (Central Luzon55) and Region VI (Western Visayas56), with more than 600 000 and 500 000 ha planted to rice, respectively (NSO 1994a). Since these are also the regions in which the two study areas are located, they will be at the center of the following discussion.
53 This data set was made available for this study by Dr. P.L. Pingali, former Head of the Social Science Division, International Rice Research Institute.
54 The main topics of this survey relate to IPM and aquatic organisms in ricefields and will be discussed in greater detail in Chapter 8. However, it also included general information on rice farming practices which can be utilized here.
55 Region III (Central Luzon) comprises the provinces of Bataan, Bulacan, Nueva Ecija, Pampanga, Tarlac and Zambales.
56 Region VI (Western Visayas) consists of the provinces Aklan, Antique, Capiz, Iloilo and Negros Occidental.
Rice farming in the Philippines is characterized by small production units. The average rice farm size was 1.7 ha in 1991 (NSO 1994a). While rice farms in Region III are slightly larger (2.3 ha/farm), farms in Region VI correspond exactly to the national average. These small farm units are mainly op-erated by family labor, although hired labor is commonly used for certain tasks such as transplanting, weeding, and harvesting/threshing. Average household size among rice farmers in the two regions was slightly higher in Region VI (6 persons/household) than in Region III (5 persons/household) during the late 1980s (Rola et al. 1991; Quintana et al. 1991b).
The dominant tenurial status under which rice farms are operated in Region III is land ownership (63% of parcels), followed by leasehold (15%), share tenancy (13%) and rent-free cultivation (8%). Re-gion VI shows a lower proportion of owned parcels (49%) but a larger share of tenanted (19%) and rent-free (17%) operations. Fourteen percent of parcels in this region are leased at a fixed rent (NSO 1994a). The larger share of owned plots in Region III indicates that this region has been the main focus of the land reform program in the Philippines, which has been going on for decades under different political leaderships, with very limited success (IBON 1988).
In areas with sufficient water, two or even three crops of rice are grown per year. This leaves rela-tively little time for land preparation, which is leading to the gradual displacement of the carabao (water buffalo) by the handtractor as the dominant method of land preparation (Samonte et al. 1993)57. Use of the handtractor, in turn, causes a higher dependence on hired labor in land preparation, since owners of handtractors will be asked to perform the work for others who cannot afford their own tractor.
Transplanting was still the most common method of crop establishment in the late 1980s, practiced by 86% and 53% of rice farmers in Regions III and VI, respectively (Samonte et al. 1993). However, di-rect seeding of rice is becoming more and more popular. In the Antique IPM/ALM survey, 99% of all farmers stated that they practiced direct seeding in 1993. While direct seeded rice requires less labor in crop establishment, it is more susceptible to snail damage and often goes hand in hand with an in-creased use of herbicides in order to give the rice an advantage over the weeds.
Almost all farmers in the irrigated rice areas of the Philippines apply mineral fertilizer. An analysis of the IRRI data set yielded the following results with regard to fertilizer use (Table 6.1).
More fertilizer is applied in the dry season than in the wet season and the quantity of fertilizer ap-plied per hectare has grown continuously over the years. Farmers normally split their application into two portions, giving one at the seedling stage (15-20 days after seeding) and the second at the booting stage (around 45 days after seeding) (results of the Antique IPM/ALM survey and Rola et al. 1991).
The most commonly used fertilizer is urea, followed by ‘complete’ (14-14-14), ammonium sulphate (21-0-0) and ammonium phosphate (16-20-0) (results of the Antique IPM/ALM survey and Rola et al.
1991).
In terms of weed control, a marked difference could be observed between Region III and Region VI in the late 1980s. While 48% of rice farmers in Region III applied herbicides, only 17% of rice farm-ers in Region VI resorted to this practice (Samonte et al. 1993). Here, most farmfarm-ers (58%) practiced
57 Own observations in Antique have shown that a combination of carabao and handtractor is the most common method of land preparation. While the handtractor is used for the plowing and harrowing of the center of the field, plowing of the sides of the field is still mainly conducted by carabao. Also, the carabao is used for the final leveling of the field, especially in areas with direct seeded rice. Proper leveling is important for weed control and the best results are achieved with a wooden board drawn by the carabao.
manual weeding and a considerable proportion (17%) did no weeding at all. On the other hand, manual weeding was practiced by 29% and no weeding by 20% of rice farmers in Region III. The greater use of herbicides points to the higher opportunity costs of labor and the better access to input markets in Region III compared to Region VI. However, the survey results reported by Samonte et al.
(1993) refer to all rice-growing environments, including irrigated, rainfed and upland. A disaggrega-tion of herbicide use by agro-climatic environment was conducted by Quintana et al. (1991a) for Re-gion VI. It showed that in the late 1980s, more than 80% of rice farmers in the irrigated and rainfed areas used herbicides, compared to only 34% in the upland areas. Own results from the Antique IPM/ALM survey showed that by 1993 more than 71% of the interviewed farmers in Antique used herbicides. It can thus be assumed that the use of herbicides spread rapidly during the late 1980s and early 1990s (together with the increased adoption of direct seeding as method of crop establishment) and has by now become the dominant method of weed control in irrigated rice production. Herbi-cides are normally applied once, during the first week after seeding. The most commonly used herbi-cides in Region VI are butachlor and 2,4-D ester (Quintana et al. 1991a) as well as pretilachlor (results from the Antique IPM/ALM survey). No data on herbicide type are available for Region III.
For the control of insect pests, the majority of farmers in Regions III (77%) and VI (88%) applied chemical insecticides in the late 1980s (Samonte et al. 1993). The average frequency of application was three times per cropping season for irrigated areas of Region VI (Quintana et al. 1991a) and Region III (own computations based on IRRI data set). This average frequency was also reported by Heong et al.
(1992) for a sample of 300 rice farmers in Leyte, Philippines (Region VIII). In contrast, among the 229 farmers interviewed in the Antique IPM/ALM survey, only 10 stated that they applied insecticides twice per cropping season. The remaining 81 farmers who used insecticides reported only one appli-cation per cropping season58. The most commonly used insecticides in Region VI in the late 1980s were endosulfan and monocrotophos (Quintana et al. 1991a); however, in 1993 parathion-methyl be-came the second most popular insecticide after endosulfan (own observations from the Antique IPM/
ALM survey). While endosulfan is an organochlorine compound classified as moderately hazardous (class II) by the World Health Organization (WHO), both parathion-methyl and monocrotophos are organophosphate compounds classified as extremely hazardous (class Ia) and highly hazardous (class
Table 6.1. Fertilizer use among rice farmers in Central Luzon, 1979-1988.
kg N/ha kg P/ha kg K/ha number of applications
wet season 1979 54.27 19.91 11.67 1.68
wet season 1985 74.09 22.05 11.25 1.95
dry season 1980 78.90 25.95 13.97 1.87
dry season 1986 93.77 26.93 13.82 2.00
dry season 1988 98.83 22.38 15.72 2.05
Source: Own computations, based on the IRRI data set.
58 Farmers might have been induced to report low frequencies of insecticide applications because they were aware of the focus on IPM in the Antique IPM/ALM survey. Therefore, two insecticide applications per cropping season were assumed to be a realistic estimate for conventional rice farmers in Antique. This is the frequency used in the model formulations in Chapter 9.
Ib), respectively. Cypermethrin, a synthetic pyrethroid not classified as hazardous, is also used to a considerable extent. These insecticides are normally applied with a knapsack sprayer and people wear relatively little or no protective clothing.
Harvesting is done manually in all rice-producing regions of the Philippines (Samonte et al. 1993).
Together with transplanting and weeding, this is the farming activity that relies most on hired labor.
The rice is threshed immediately after the harvest, mostly by use of the mechanical thresher. Harvest-ers and threshHarvest-ers are normally paid in kind, depending on the amount of rice harvested and threshed.
Before storage or marketing, the rice is dried. Solar drying on roads, basketball courts, back yards or other flat and dry places is the common method all over the Philippines. Drying takes between two and seven days, depending on the weather and the initial moisture content of the rice. The rice is then filled in sacks and stored before it is finally sold or consumed.
Seasonality of rice production depends on the start of the rainy season which comes a few weeks earlier in the southern parts of the Philippines than in the north (Table 6.2). Appendix Table A4.1 pro-vides a seasonal calendar of factors related to rice-aquaculture as they can be observed in Antique.
Seasonality is more pronounced in Region III, where only two crops of rice can be grown, than in Region VI where the production process is staggered and where neighboring fields can be in com-pletely different stages of rice growth at the same time. Since they do not necessarily correspond to wet and dry seasons, the different crops in Region VI have been called ‘first’, ‘second’ and ‘third’, as is the common practice among farmers in those provinces. The cropping cycle presented here is typical for many farmers in Region VI but may be shifted forwards or backwards by a month or two. With
Table 6.2. Rice production activities over the course of the year59.
Region III Region VI
June (wet season) land preparation for wet season crop land preparation and crop establishment for first crop
July (wet season) land preparation and crop crop care activities for first crop establishment for wet season crop
August (wet season) land preparation and crop establishment crop care activities for first crop for wet season crop
September (wet season) crop care activities for wet season crop harvesting of first crop
October (wet season) crop care activities for wet season crop land preparation and crop establishment for second crop
November (wet season) peak harvesting month for wet crop care activities for second crop season crop
December (end of rains) land preparation for dry season crop crop care activities for second crop January (dry season) crop establishment for dry season crop harvesting of second crop
February (dry season) crop establishment and crop care for land preparation and crop establishment
dry season crop for third crop (if possible)
March (dry season) crop care activities for dry season crop crop care activities for third crop (if possible)
April (dry season) crop care and harvesting of dry crop care activities for third crop
season crop (if possible)
May (onset of rains) peak harvesting month for harvesting of third crop (if possible) dry season crop
Source: Own illustration.
59 Information for Region III is derived from Lanzona (1988) as well as from monitoring farm activities of seven farmers in Nueva Ecija between March 1993 and February 1994 (‘Farm activity monitoring’, see Appendix 3).
The classification for Region VI is based on a survey of 30 farmers in the village of Catungan IV, Sibalom, An-tique in August 1994 (the ‘AnAn-tique rice labor survey’ discussed below).
the onset of the rains (normally around May/June), land preparation activities start and the wet sea-son rice crop is established by mid-June in Antique and within the month of July in Region III. The following two months are characterized by crop care activities (field monitoring, water management, fertilizer and pesticide application, weeding, etc.).
Depending on the rice variety planted, harvesting takes place between 90 and 120 days after seed-ing. Thus, peak harvest time is by the end of September in Region VI and in November in Region III.
The second rice crop is planted in October in Region VI and harvested in January, followed by a third crop between February and May in those locations with sufficient water. In contrast, in Region III where only two crops of rice can be grown, the dry season crop is established in January and har-vested in May60.