Paddy farmers a confused lot

Farmers in the district who have raised paddy nurseries in anticipation of good harvest in rabi season, are in confused as to go ahead with transplantation of the seedlings from nurseries to the main fields or drop the cultivation at nursery-stage itself to minimise the losses.

Reason for it is the continuing poor monsoon coupled with insufficient release of water from reservoirs for irrigation.

Already, it has been a poor season for paddy in the district this year with acreage under the crop been almost nil in the just-ended kharif season.

According to official statistics, paddy nurseries have come up on 110 acres to produce the seedlings required for 1,300 hectares of paddy cultivation during the just-commenced rabi season.

K.C.M. Balasubrmaniam, a progressive farmer and a former agriculture economist of Tamil Nadu Agricultural University, told The Hindu that in the present drought-like situation, it would be ‘technically’ unwise to go for transplantation to main cultivable areas as preparatory works in the main field itself requires lot of water.

“But with paddy is seen as a major grain crop, the district administration could try out a solution to ensure transplantation by going for micro-level interventions.

“Accordingly, the farmers who are struggling the most for the water need to be identified and then provide them with at least six hours of uninterrupted power supply daily for almost two months as ‘emergency cases’ to enable them draw groundwater for irrigation,” he said.

Considering the seriousness of the situation and protect the paddy acreage, the department of agriculture is planning to enthuse the farmers to go for a ‘modified’ implementation of System of Rice Intensification (SRI) technique so that whatever water available through canal irrigation could be judiciously used.

“Use of SRI methodology has advantages as it requires ‘reduced height of standing water’ when compared to traditional cultivation practices,” Joint Director of Agriculture M.K. Sherif said.

This apart, the department will also be distributing power weeders at subsidised rates to remove weeds for ensuring better root growth and power sprayers to help farmers fight pest attacks.

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Aid to agriculture increases by 130% in China and by 40% in the US

Global support to agriculture per capita in the period 2005-2010 has increased by 130% in China, by 60% in Brazil and by 40% in the United States, while in the European Union it has stayed in the same level since 2005, according to the indicator "Global Support to Agricultural Production (SGPA)" published by the Movement for a World Agricultural Organization, MOMAGRI.

According to the indicator that measures support to agriculture in the planet's four largest agricultural producers (Brazil, China, United States and European Union) in 2010, the first place in absolute value is for the US with 163,000 million dollars; in second place is China with 154,000 million dollars; in third place is the EU with 101,000 million dollars and Brazil is fourth with 38,000 million dollars.

In terms of the percentage of the production's value, the US takes the first place with aid representing 48% of the total value, followed by the EU and Brazil with 24% and finally China with 20%.

According to the report, it appears that Brazil and the US show similar support policies to promote competitiveness and stimulate domestic demand. This way, growers from those countries benefit from regulation tools such as:

1. For Brazil: direct intervention in the market, storage planning and funding for the development of biofuels (42% of the Brazilian AGPA).

2. For the US: countercyclical aid mechanisms carried out by insurers and a large plan for domestic food aid.

Regarding China, the report states that the government enforces policies of intervention and insurance of the agricultural production, especially in the shape of a minimum guaranteed price (258 US$/t for wheat, 291 US$/t for rice in 2010), direct income support, social support programs and tax cuts.

Contrastingly, "the EU is the only one basing its agricultural policy on aid decoupled from production, accompanied by greening criteria," according to MOMAGRI in their statement.

According to MOMAGRI:

- "Despite claims about the maintenance of the CAP budget, results show that, since 2005, Europe has taken a different direction to that of other large world producers, which are making large investments to ensure food security for their populations."

- "The worrying decrease in aid entails that the EU may fall behind; situation which would only get worse if the project for the reform of the CAP goes ahead."

- "If the EU persists in its plan to reform the CAP, falling behind would lead to very severe consequences for European agriculture and the agri-food industry." MOMAGRI does not call for an increase in the CAP's budget, but for the adoption of price regulation mechanisms and, consequently, of the income.

It is the first time that the institution compares the support to agriculture in the world's largest agricultural producers. To date, MOMAGRI had only published comparisons between the EU and the US.

Source: Fepex

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Severe drought has lasting effects on Amazon

The Amazon basin does not readily bounce back after a period of drought, researchers suggest.

Rodrigo Baleia/LatinContent/Getty Images

Hannah Hoag

A study published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences¹ sheds light on the long-term effects of drought on the Amazon rainforest — giving clues about how the rainforest might be affected by global warming in the future. The researchers report that the severe drought that hit the rainforest in 2005 had lasting effects on the forest canopy, such that it remained damaged at least four years later.
The effects of the 2005 drought have been debated since 2007, when researchers reported in Science² that photosynthesis within the canopy had increased, leading the Amazon basin to ‘green up’ during the dry period. But in 2010 another group reported that they were unable to reproduce the results using the same data³
“The ‘green-up’ is a short-term response and a bit of a red herring,” says Oliver Phillips, a tropical ecologist at the University of Leeds, UK. But the latest study “transcends that debate”, he says. “The question of the underlying health of the forest is much deeper than the instantaneous response.”

Bare branches

A drawback of the method used in the earlier studies — which used satellite measurements to estimate forest greenness using reflected solar radiation — is that the data can be muddied by clouds and atmospheric aerosols. So for the latest study, Sassan Saatchi, a remote-sensing expert at the California Institute of Technology Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, studied the forest’s microwave ‘silhouette’, showing its contours instead of its greenness. To look at canopy structure, he and his colleagues used microwave satellite data, which are unaffected by clouds, from a NASA probe. When it passed over lush canopy, the satellite sensor recorded a smooth signal. Bare branches, thinned leaves and missing trees showed more roughness.

Bad timing

“This is the first piece of really strong evidence that the drought has had a negative impact on the forest,” says Greg Asner, an environmental scientist at the Carnegie Institution for Science in Stanford, California.
The latest analysis paints a grim picture for Amazonian rainforests should severe droughts become more frequent. Most Amazonian droughts are driven by warmer surface waters in the eastern Pacific Ocean, but the severe droughts of 2005 and 2010 seem to have been influenced by warmer sea-surface temperatures in the North Atlantic Ocean.
It could change the drought outlook in the next report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, due in 2014. The most recent report, released in 2007 and based on climate-modelling experiments done before the droughts, was more “speculative”, says Ranga Myneni, an expert in the remote sensing of vegetation at Boston University in Massachusetts, and a co-author on the latest study.
Saatchi says that he hopes to extend the analysis past the 2010 drought using data from the Indian satellite Oceansat-2. If the droughts continue to occur every 5–10 years, the forest edges could begin to transition to dry forests, he warns. “We’d like to say something about how the Amazonian forest has been doing since 2009,” he says.

Journal name:

Nature

DOI:

doi:10.1038/nature.2012.12129

References

1. Saatchi, S. et al. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA http://dx.doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1204651110 (2012).
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2. Saleska, S. R., Didan, K., Huete, A. R. & da Rocha, H. R. Science 318, 612 (2007).
   
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3. Samanta, A. et al. Geophys. Res. Lett. 37, L05401 (2010).
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4. Xu, L. et al. Geophys. Res. Lett. 38, L07402 (2011).

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