Agriculture comes clean with soap

In the centre of a village four kilometres from Vinh Long City along the Kinh Doi Canal, one of thousands that crisscross the Mekong Delta of southern Vietnam, stands the home of Ong Hai and his family of three generations. Unhusked paddy dries on a concrete platform before the house. At the back, bamboo rises from the banks of a fishpond and whispers to the antique red tiles of the roof. Murmuring ducks and chickens forage freely in the dappled yard under jackfruit, pomelo and longan.

Inside the house, an electric fan, radio, television and videotape player remind the visitor that this is the 21st century. Nothing betrays that Ong Hai, his farm and his village are pure fiction. The creators of the radio soap opera Chuyen Que Minh saw to that during 18 months of meticulous scene setting and story plotting.

credit: KL Heong, IRRI

My Homeland, to use its English name, began broadcasting on Radio Vinh Long and Voice of Ho Chi Minh City in July 2004, as did a similar programme on National Lao Radio, a thousand kilometres up the Mekong River in Vientiane. Broadcasting twice a week for a year, both serials aim to get rice farmers hooked on the lives, loves, hopes, dreams, disappointments and challenges of people like themselves - people who also discuss, from time to time, the principles and practices of integrated pest management (IPM).

Entertainment-education

The Archers, the beloved, long-running radio soap in the UK, had a similar agricultural mandate when launched by the BBC in 1951. Entertainment-education, a deliberate message wrapped in a popular narrative, has since spread across the globe. My Homeland is nevertheless very much home grown, the latest stage in the evolution of a decade-long effort to communicate IPM to Vietnamese farmers.

Dr KL Heong, an entomologist at the International Rice Research Institute, realised early in the 1990s that Vietnamese rice farmers' misuse of insecticides was hurting harvests. By spraying early in the cropping cycle to kill leaf-feeding larvae that cause no yield loss, they were inadvertently killing the natural predators that control damaging pests, like brown planthoppers, later in the season.

Understanding that farmers used simple rules of thumb, such as 'all worms are pests', Heong developed a counter heuristic: 'Don't spray in the first 40 days after planting.' Having confirmed that farmers who followed the rule would not experience yield loss, he teamed up with Vietnamese and other colleagues to disseminate it.

Farmers see for themselves

The team designed an extension campaign that invited farmers - through short, humorous radio skits supported by posters and pamphlets - to test the No Early Spray rule for themselves. Launched in the Mekong Delta's Long An Province in 1994, the campaign proved successful at reducing farmers' insecticide use. Within three years, it had spread to 13 provinces. Heong and his partners repeated the experiment in 2001 in central Thailand and in 2003 in northern Vietnam.

credit: KL Heong, IRRI

The partners also applied the communication techniques they had honed with No Early Spray to another campaign designed to help Vietnamese farmers not only use less insecticide but also optimise their seed and fertiliser use. Many farmers use too much of both and so escalate input costs, cause fertiliser run-off and create field conditions favourable to rice disease. The new campaign - dubbed Ba Giam Ba Tang in Vietnamese, or Three Reductions, Three Gains - was launched in March 2003 at a well-publicised event in Can Tho City. The Three Reductions practices quickly spread to more than 90 per cent of farmers in the target sites, with most farmers reducing input costs by US$50-100/ha per season. Last October, the Vietnamese minister of agriculture and rural development urged all provincial governments to implement Three Reductions.

"We took an incremental approach," recalls Dr Monina Escalada, a professor of development communications at Leyte State University in the Philippines. "First we built farmers' confidence and then we made further demands. Now we're considering a fourth reduction, water use. Water shortage is an acute problem in the northern and central provinces."

Integrating biological and social sciences

"We showed that you can add value to biological research by integrating it with social science," says Heong. "First, understand the root causes of farmers' decision-making. Then distil research information into a simple heuristic. Build strong partnerships with lots of local stakeholders - as we did in workshops for developing the radio scripts and poster and leaflet designs. And remember that your innovation must be attractive both to farmers and to the implementing government agencies."

Jean Delion, a World Bank senior social development specialist, agrees. "There are various aspects involved in the Three Reductions case," he observes. "There is an excellent, high-quality communication approach, but other factors also contribute to the good results. The proposed innovations do not require additional work from the farmer. There is no marketing problem, and there is no extra cost."

Several awards have helped the reduction campaigns maintain a high profile in the development and donor community. With funding from the Rockefeller Foundation to support the radio soap operas, the partners now have an opportunity to build a permanent platform for agricultural extension in Vietnam and Laos. Success will depend, as it did for The Archers, on farmers recognising themselves in the programmes.

To listen to the radio soap programmes, visit www.irri.org/radio, where some of the episodes are also available in English manuscript.