Asia Sentinel, 29 Aug 2009
The traditional methods that Asian farmers have used for hundreds of years to grow rice are beginning to give way to what its supporters say are new, environmentally healthier and more productive practices developed in Madagascar by Henri de Laulanie, a Jesuit priest, in the 1980s.
SRI – the universal acronym for what de Laulanie called System of Rice Intensification – didn't begin to spread out of Madagascar until about 1999. But in the past 10 years, farmers from China to India to Indonesia and the Philippines have begun to shift to the new method, which paradoxically involves planting fewer and younger seedlings, spaced wider apart, and using less water than Asian farmers have used for centuries.
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