Hi, I'm Willie Erskine. I'm a Professor at the University of Western Australia in the
Centre for Legumes and Mediterranean Agriculture and we're researching the food security in
East Timor. East Timor is one of the nearest neighbours to Australia, amongst Papua New Guinea, it's
just off the North West coast of Australia. And they have a major problem with food security for
much of the rural population. That population's about 1.1 million. About 80% is involved with
Agriculture while about 40% is below the poverty line and what happens is that when they're
waiting for the rain during the main growing season, many families have run out of food.
Typically a family grows their crops in about three quarters to a half a hectare.
The agriculture is based on cutting down the vegetation and the trees, burning it
and then growing crops for about 1 – 1 ½ years; until the weeds overcome them then
they go somewhere else. So they're growing maize, they're growing rice in some of the
wetter areas and they're growing sweet potatoes and cassava and peanuts. Those are the staples.
Now the Indonesians and the Portuguese before them, they didn't do any work to try and improve those
crops. So it's basically ground zero as far as improvement is concerned and we found that
the easiest way to try and fill that hungry period at the end of the rainy season was
trying to improve the food crops.
So we went and brought a lot of improved genetic material from similar agroclimates. That's
Thailand, the Philippines, bits of Indonesia, from the International Centres working on
those crops. So for rice we went to the International Rice Research Institute in the Philippines
and sourced a lot of rice germplasm. For maize we got material from the Maize and Wheat
International Centre based in Mexico. None of this is GM, it's just ordinary, open pollenated
material and after initial sorting out on what remained of the research station we then took the best
material we could find and grew it with farmers. We just said, “Ok from your garden
can you look out 5 x 5 square metres and with this seed, the planting material
that you've got, can you just grow that material and compare it under your own conditions.”
So no change in fertiliser, no change in sewing date, just the new material. And we
followed those people, those households, during the growing cycle. After harvest we asked them,
ok please help us measure this material. What do you think of it? Would you grow this
material again? And then we asked them; How it ate? How did the maize pound? Could you
use it properly in food? How did you market it if you had any extra? We followed with
hundreds of farmers what they made of all these new materials. And this program is embedded closely within
the Minister of Agriculture, within the government of East Timor.
So what have we got from this? So far we've got maize that is producing between 45-50% more
yield than the local maize and it just means larger cobs. The local size of the cob would
be about that size whereas the new improved one would be about that size. And with rice,
in which the Indonesians did some work, there's been a less spectacular increase in yield of
about 25%. With sweet potato we've got between 60-120% yield increase just with replacing
the planting material.
One of the exciting things with sweet potato is that one of the new varieties that's
performing really well is a little bit orange fleshed. Orange fleshed as in the orange of
carrots which the colour coming from the beta-carotene and that's what has a huge effect on Vitamin
A. Because after calorie malnutrition, Vitamin A malnutrition is the second worst problem
in the island. And I should say that East Timor ranks number three in the world amongst
the worst countries for the number of proportion of malnourished kids and it's a combination of
calories and Vitamin A deficiency. So not only have we got high yielding sweet potatoes
but also they're contributing to help solve the Vitamin A deficiency that's there.
Now the major thrust is to improve the seed production systems so that we can multiply
it up and get it out from the seven provinces that we were working in into the rest of the country.
So we're working with the government to try and increase the amount of seed produced
in the formal seed sector which is run by the government, and then helping to develop
an informal seed sector which means getting farmers together in order that they can grow
seed, make enough money in order to make it worthwhile but then pass seed on by selling
it to neighbouring farmers.
And with the last survey we did, it's something like 33,000 different households in the country
are now growing this improved material or one of the other improved varieties of maize,
sweet potato, rice, cassava, and peanuts. That represents about 15% of the farming population
and our target in another couple of years is to jack that up so about half the farming
populations will have been growing the new material and make some surplus.
What's really nice coming back to East Timor after a couple of years is to find that there are
now, beside the road, little stalls being set up and you can find farmers trying to
sell their excess material. It's their first money that they're coming into the economy,
making some money and then we're trying to track what happens. What do they do with that
first money? Do they use it for books, for school? Do they re-do the roof on the house?
Are they buying medicines? Are they buying clothes? Are they having a party? They're
using the money for a wide range of different reasons. But it's interesting to track what happens
to the first money in a household.
So the University's involved not only in helping to design the experiment but also in capacity
building - not only in East Timor but also bringing some people from East Timor down
to the University to do Masters and PhDs. And some of that work, the research work
that the students do is done here, some of it is done in East Timo, so that they can
go back and play a larger role in food security in the future.