Managing Rice Biodiversity by Smallholder Farmers: A Case Study in Barak Valley, Assam

The indigenous rice germplasm of North-East India represents a wealth of valuable genes, which is threatened with the introduction, and popularization of high yielding varieties. As such there is an urgent need to inventorise the indigenous rice varieties and examine the role of traditional farming systems in the on-farm conservation of agrobiodiversity. In this paper, an attempt was made to study the on-farm conservation strategy of rice diversity by smallholder farmers and the traditional farming practices in a village Dorgakona (24°4′N latitude and 92° 41′E longitude) in Barak Valley (South Assam), North-East India. An inventory of rice diversity was made and a total of 12 traditional cultivars were recorded from the study site. Since farmers on the basis of their local knowledge shape the cropdiversity, an attempt was made to examine the role of farmers' traditional knowledge in the maintenance of rice diversity. The present study indicates that farmers in Barak Valley still cultivate traditional varieties and modern varieties have not been successful in completely replacing them. The study reveals that the farmers in more fragile ecosystems maintain more crop diversity to adapt to the heterogeneous environment. Also smallholder farmers are the main preservers and managers of agrobiodiversity, and the traditional ecological knowledge and the heterogeneous environment are the main factors determining the diversity and conservation of local paddy land races.