Farmers' Personal Irrigated Sawah Systems: An Approach to Realizing Lowland Rice Potential and Green Revolution In Sub-Saharan Africa.

The size of lowlands in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) is put at roughly 250 million ha with over 40% under rice, yet self sufficiency in rice production and green revolution elude the region. Only about 10% of this (25 million ha) are potentially suitable sawah sites because of pedological, topographical and especially hydrological limitations. Furthermore, inland valleys (9 million ha) are the priority of all lowland types because of relatively easy water control. Sawah refers to a bunded, demarcated, puddled, leveled and row-transplanted rice field that is irrigated and drained as desired, thereby ensuring efficient water management. Our 15-year and continuing trials in Ghana and Nigeria have demonstrated the potential place of the sawah system in reversing the ugly trend in SSA, the small proportion of the inland valleys notwithstanding. At the present level of agricultural development in SSA, a pragmatic approach to sustaining the success so far recorded is the site-specific personal irrigated sawah systems development and management by farmers’ self-support efforts. The approach is site-specific because African lowlands are diverse and the target inland valleys differ markedly in hydrological conditions. Initially local farmers must be assisted technically and financially to acquire the skills for: (1) site selection and sawah system design, (2) cost-effective sawah systems development using a powertiller, and (3) sawah-based rice farming to realize and sustain a minimum paddy yield of 4 tons ha⁻¹. Since farmers have to master a wide range of skills including ecological engineering and hydrology manipulation, farmers’ organization for intensive on-the-job training on sawah systems development and management is important. Once mastered, however, the skills can be transferred farmer-to-farmer. It is thus worthwhile to establish institutional training-dissemination schemes for the sawah ecotechnology. This self-support approach offers low-cost and farmer-controlled irrigation compared to large-scale irrigation projects relying on heavy engineering works by outside expertise.