Adoption of Improved Rice Varieties in Sarpang District of Bhutan

Yangchen Ghishing, Mahesh Ghimiray & Pema Tamang

The adoption of improved rice varieties (IRVs) is imperative for ensuring smallholder farmers’ food security as well as their collective contribution to national food security. It is important to comprehend the adoption rate of IRVs and determine what influences their adoption. This study employed a farmer-oriented approach to understand the current adoption status of IRVs and the factors affecting their adoption in Sarpang district of Bhutan. A total of 264 rice growing households selected through a multi-stage sampling technique were interviewed using structured and semi-structured questionnaires. A binary logistic regression was employed to analyse the data, and the adoption of IRVs was defined from the perspective of whether farmers grow any of the IRVs or not. The result showed that the household-level adoption rate of IRVs was 60.61%, which translated into a coverage of 47.25% of the total cultivated wetland in the district. A total of 18 rice varieties were recorded in the study site with five IRVs; three of which were released officially and two were sourced by farmers through informal channels from India. The IRVs in the area showed a 39.71% yield advantage over the traditional varieties (p < .001). The empirical results showed that family size had a significantly positive influence (p = .023) on the probability of adoption of IRVs, suggesting that bigger families were more likely to adopt IRVs due to increased labour availability for agricultural tasks. Conversely, total wetlands under cultivation had a significantly negative influence (p = .01) on the probability of the adoption of the IRVs. This indicates that farmers who cultivated smaller wetland areas were more likely to adopt IRVs, due to the higher productivity of IRVs meeting their household’s food needs.

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