Why this is important

• Conventional intensive rice farming causes the loss of biodiversity (wild fish, aquatic animals, crustaceans, indigenous plants), with fertilizer use resulting in less resilient agrifood systems.  

• Conventional and intensive rice farming generates more carbon emissions, soils become degraded due to overuse of chemical fertilizers and water becomes polluted due to pesticide use. 

• Rice farmer incomes on tropical deltas are declining due to increases in production costs. 

• Living Deltas Hub research has evidenced that expanding organic rice production has significant benefits for both farmer income, biodiversity, and regional trade 

Priorities and steps

• Foster partnerships between local universities, research institution, government and private sector scaling up successful ecological-organic rice farming and trade. 

• Promote locally-led approaches in delivering training in ecological-organic agriculture to the farming communities. 

• Integrate ecological-organic rice farming into the one million hectare of low carbon rice program in the Mekong Delta.

Want more information?

Check out our Outputs pages for more information about what we do and who we work with via a series of informal blogs and other resources, videos, books and booklets and policy briefs. Here you can also easily access our Hub publications in academic journals as well as a series of mid-project case studies.