Sawah Ecotechnology – A Trigger for a Rice Green Revolution in Sub-Saharan Africa

Abstract

The green revolution has yet to be realized in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) even 40 years after its success in tropical Asia, suggesting that there was a missing element in the basic principles underlying the Asian green revolution when they were transferred to SSA. The authors argue that this missing element is ‘ecotechnology’. Ecotechnology improves the crop growing environment in farmers' fields and enables them to accommodate basic green revolution technologies such as modern varieties, chemical fertilizers and irrigation facilities. The authors focus on sawah ecotechnology, a sustainable rice production technology. The term ‘sawah’ refers to a levelled, bunded and puddled rice field under controlled submergence, and ‘sawah ecotechnology’ indicates the technology for designing, developing and managing the sawah system. The sawah system development potential is at least 20 million ha in the West Africa (WA) subregion only. Realizing this potential, WA can sustainably produce food for more than 300 million people, as well as enabling the conservation and restoration of hundreds of millions of hectares of upland forests, contributing to carbon sequestration and global warming mitigation in the future.