Setting sustainability targets for irrigated rice production and application of the Sustainable Rice Platform performance indicators

Stakeholders have diverse purposes for analyzing economic, environmental and social sustainability indicators of rice production systems. Our aim was to show the added value of identifying external target values of the Sustainable Rice Platform’'s 12 performance indicators in addition to internal descriptive statistics values such as median and top decile performance for each indicator. Using household survey data from 1499 households in seven favorable rice production areas across seven countries in Asia, we identified baseline and target values appropriate to each indicator and illustrated their use for three purposes: assessing the outcomes of an extension program, comparing tradeoffs associated with two widely-used crop establishment methods, and providing individual feedback to a farmer about how to improve farm performance. We worked with our large survey data set and external reference values to calculate specific target values for each of the 12 indicators. These target values were used to evaluate the effectiveness of an extension program, showing that the extension program resulted in an improvement in scores for most indicators but did not achieve the target values for any of them. A comparison of wet-direct seeded rice (widely practice in irrigated regions of Vietnam, Thailand, and Sri Lanka) vs. puddled transplanted rice (China, Indonesia, Myanmar) indicated that there was a trade-off with wet-direct seeding having better labor productivity and greenhouse gas emission but worse pesticide use, and that both establishment methods had lower profitability than the target value. For the advice provided to an individual farmer, it was useful to be able to show both what the neighbors' average performance was and how far that was from the target values. Our illustrations demonstrate that using target values for indicators adds depth to the interpretation of indicator data.