Sustainable rice farming: innovations in irrigation and resource management
Rice is a staple food for over half of the world’s population and consumes significant water resources. PROMEDRICE develops eco-friendly farming practices — building on MEDWATERICE’s success with dry seeding and drip irrigation — saving water while maintaining yields.
Why rice agroecosystems need protection.
Importance of rice and environmental impact
Rice is the staple food for more than half of the world’s population. It is the crop to which the largest volume of water is allocated worldwide, accounting for 24 to 30% of total freshwater withdrawals (Bouman et al., 2007). In the Mediterranean region, over 1,300,000 ha of rice paddies occupy river deltas, estuaries, marshes, plains and coastal wetlands — often near or part of protected ecosystems such as the EU Natura-2000 network. As most rice is continuously flooded, the agrochemicals required and the difficulty of controlling the fate of nutrients, pesticides and salts under flood irrigation can cause water pollution and soil degradation.
PROMEDRICE: sustainable farming practices
PROMEDRICE develops and fosters the adoption of innovative, environmentally respectful on-farm practices, and produces scientific evidence to support policymakers’ decisions on the sustainable management of water resources. It builds on MEDWATERICE, which implemented innovative irrigation practices — dry seeding and delayed flooding, alternate wetting and drying, end-of-season early drainage, and surface and subsurface drip irrigation — saving water with similar yields across 7 case studies in countries producing over 75% of Mediterranean rice.
The main objective of PROMEDRICE is to develop and foster the adoption of site-specific agricultural practices that reduce the contamination and salinization of soil and water bodies while maintaining or improving productivity and water-use efficiency in Mediterranean rice-based agroecosystems.
How the work is organised
Project management
Coordination, administration and quality assurance across the consortium.
Assessment of pressures on water and soil resources in rice areas
Data collection in rice areas from each case study, complementing existing data, to qualify the main pollution issues and identify the contributing agricultural practices.
Introducing effective farming practices to protect rice agroecosystems
Co-development with stakeholder panels of site-specific solutions to protect water bodies.
Economic and social sustainability assessment
Assessment of the economic sustainability and social acceptability of the proposed solutions.
Scaling up results to territorial level
Set-up and use of modelling tools to scale up on-farm results to the territorial level, preserving and improving the quality of soils and water.
Stakeholder involvement, dissemination, exploitation & communication
Set up a stakeholder panel in each case study to co-develop and transfer site-specific solutions, with effective dissemination and exploitation strategies.