Abundance Lessons From Drought – The Brown Mekong River & The Green Bamboo

You would be very wrong if you thought that only 6 Asian countries – Cambodia, China, Lao PDR, Myanmar, Thailand and Vietnam – should learn lessons about rivers now that ANN says, "Mekong Shrivels As Drought, Dam Strangle Southeast Asia's Largest River" (Author Not Named, 31 October 2019, Agence France-Presse, philstar.com; main image is from this site; from Facebook sharing of Annie Revilleza; bamboo image from Business Diary Philippines,businessdiary.com.ph):

The once mighty Mekong River has been reduced to a thin, grubby neck of water in stretches of northern Thailand – record lows blamed on drought and a recently opened dam far upstream.

The Mekong River is now bad news for rice. Robert Akam & Guillaume Gruere write that along the Delta there is now saline water intrusion, extensive dam-building, and too much pumping of groundwater ("Rice And Risks In The Mekong River Delta," 16 January 2018, OECD Insights, oecdinsights.org).

This calls for a paradigm shift: From drought, abundance!

Mekong farmers have to learn that:

It is the water that irrigates their crops and not the river!
So?
Farmers have to learn to harness the power of water from Mother Nature.

Now look at the images above again – at right are 2 clumps of bamboo growing in the Philippines, the greens providing a sharp contrast to the browns on the Mekong River. The healthy bamboo clumps show rich leaf litters below them; the unhealthy Mekong River is "flooded" with eroding soils.

I say the bamboo clump is teaching us sustainable intensification.

Now, what is sustainable intensification? 5 years ago, I already wrote about it; in my essay "Shifting To Sustainable Intensification In Agriculture. How To Be Climate-Smart" (28 October 2014, iCRISAT Watch, icrisatwatch.blogspot.com), I said: "… sustainable intensification of agriculture, Sinag, my acronym." In Tagalog, sinag means glimmer or light.

Now, I am going to show you that those bamboo clumps are giving us glimmers of hope. Note the leaf litter scattered in and around those clumps: Those leaves rot and provide rich organic matter to the bamboo shoots – no wonder that bamboos can survive the poorest soil!

Now, what are the many sinag lessons from the bamboo? These 2 should be enough:

Trash farming.
Weeds in your farm are trash, just like the leaf litter in that bamboo clump – and they make good organic matter. Simply incorporate your weeds with the soil by rotavating the field surface so that the weeds and the soil are cut together and mixed in 1 rotary motion – and you have a surface mulch when you are finished, organic matter to decay and enrich your field with nutrients and moisture. Trash farming is an old practice we have yet to learn. Did you know that the term is already in the dictionaries? Google it!

Direct-seeding SRI.
Learn from the bamboo: You plant cuttings directly on the soil, and their leaf litter give them moisture & nutrients. Now, some farmers like ZIDOFA are doing System of Rice Intensification, SRI; I want them to try direct-seeding to conserve more water – from conservation comes abundance.@517