Boonngam lists among the benefits of the system savings on machinery rental for land and water-channel preparation; better control of weeds, which are eaten by the ducks or suppressed by standing water; reduced loss of soil organic matter because more crop residue remains in the field; natural fertilizer left by the ducks; and, importantly, chemical-free control of golden apple snails, which are a major rice pest in the area.
“There are very few snails in the fields prepared by ducks because the ducks eat the small ones, and big wading birds eat the big ones,” Boonngam explains. “The wading birds are smart. They know which fields are free of pesticides.”
Meanwhile, the No Early Spray campaign and its partners have started to receive honors and international recognition. In May 2002, Heong, the IRRI entomologist; Monina M. Escalada, a professor of development communication at the Philippines’ Leyte State University later seconded to IRRI; and Nguyen Huu Huan, vice director general of Vietnam’s Plant Protection Department, received the United Kingdom’s Saint Andrews Environmental Prize. The partners used the $25,000 purse to expand the project into northern Vietnam.
In December of the same year, Heong, Huan, and Escalada, as well as Vo Mai, Huan’s predecessor, received the Vietnamese government’s Golden Rice Award (Heong had earlier been honored with Vietnam’s 1996 Medal for Agricultural Development). The following month, the Council for Agricultural Science and Technology, an international consortium of 37 scientific and professional societies based in Washington, D.C., named Heong the recipient of its 2003 Charles A. Black Award, which annually honors an agricultural, environmental, or food scientist’s outstanding contribution to the advancement of science in the public-policy arena. In a November 2003 ceremony at the Houses of Parliament in London, Heong received for the project the International Green Apple Environment Award from the UK-based Green Organization. In May 2003, Heong, a Malaysian national, was honored by the Malaysian Plant Protection Society with its most prestigious award, the Excellence Award in Plant Protection in the Tropics.
 The partners decided to build upon their success by expanding the No Early Spray campaign to include information to help farmers optimize their seed and fertilizer use. Research has found that many farmers apply too much of both, creating field conditions favorable to rice disease, escalating input costs, and causing environmentally damaging fertilizer runoff. They launched the campaign—dubbed Ba Giam Ba Tang in Vietnamese, literally Three Reductions, Three Gains—in March 2003 at a well-publicized event in Cantho City. The Three Reductions practices quickly spread to more than 90% of the farmers in the Cantho Province target sites of Omon and Vi Thuy. Most farmers tried the practices and found that they could reduce input costs by as much as $50−100 per hectare per season. The Three Reductions campaign earned the partners in December 2003 a second Golden Rice Award. In October 2004, Cao Duc Phat, the minister of agriculture and rural development, endorsed the Three Reductions program and urged all provincial governments to implement it.
Central to the integrated pest management communications arsenal is radio drama, initially short skits but finally full-blown soap operas like The Archers, a vintage UK program with a similar agricultural communications mandate. After teams of scientists in Vietnam and Laos spent 18 months studying farming communities to develop characters and storylines, separate soap operas started airing in July 2004 on Vietnam’s Voice of Ho Chi Minh and Radio Vinh Long and on National Lao Radio. Both soap operas have 104 episodes to allow two episodes to be aired each week for a year. The 3-year project is supported by a $300,000 grant from the Rockefeller Foundation.
Also formally launched in 2004 was the extension of the No Early Spray campaign to the Red River Delta of northern Vietnam. This fulfilled the partners’ pledge made when they received the $25,000 Saint Andrews Prize in 2002, modest foundations for which had been laid immediately in Quang Ninh Province.
“In the summer season of 2002, only 60 Quang Ninh farm households participated in the No Early Spray campaign,” recalls Vu Thi Thang, a senior officer in the Plant Protection Department. “In the winter/spring season, 500 households participated. In the summer of 2003—after the formal launch in June on World Environment Day and encouragement from provincial authorities—more than 60,000 households participated out of 80,000 rice-farming households in the whole province.”
Tran Duc Thuy, vice director of the People’s Committee of Quang Ninh Department of Agriculture and Rural Development, explains that his was the first province chosen for the campaign because of Ha Long Bay. The bay is famous for its karst limestone formations jutting picturesquely from the sea, which in 1984 earned it United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) World Heritage Site status. UNESCO listed Ha Long town and nearby caves in 1987.
“One reason Ha Long was selected for the project is that farmers violate environmental laws,” Thuy admits. “Agriculture is a small part of the Quang Ninh economy, only 8.7% including aquaculture. But 54% of the work force—and 56% of our population of a little more than a million—lives in rural areas and depends on agriculture. So the campaign has great potential for social impact as well as environmental benefit.”
Khong Thi Lien, director of the Plant Protection Sub-Department of Quang Ninh, adds that rice productivity is low in the province, averaging 4 tons per hectare and that the slogan of the campaign needed to be lengthened to “No spray for 40 days after sowing or 30 days after transplanting” because transplanting seedlings is still the usual way to establish a crop in the north.
“ Ba Giam Ba Tang is appropriate for the Mekong Delta, but we have different conditions here,” she explains. “We have a smaller cultivated area and don’t use direct seeding as much as in the south. We’ve already reduced seed use under integrated pest management, and now 80−90% of the farmers in the north optimize seed use. There is little scope for reducing fertilizer use in Quang Ninh because farmers already do everything they can to reduce the cost of inputs. Other northern provinces may need two reductions, for insecticides and for nitrogen use to control rice disease, but we need to focus on insecticides.”
Dai Yen Commune in Ha Long was one of the first northern adopters of No Early Spray, with 30 households participating in the summer of 2002, accounting for half of all participating households in the province in that first season. Tran Xuan Chinh, manager of the commune’s agricultural cooperative, reports that the number of participating households has increased to 1,500, covering the commune’s entire allotment of 200 hectares.
“Three seasons have now passed, and we have stopped pesticide use in the first 30 days,” Chinh says. “The result is quite encouraging. All the crops look healthy, and pest infestation is lower than in previous years. Brown planthoppers have declined, so we conclude that early spraying caused their outbreaks. We see more fish and natural enemies of pests than we used to. And our health has improved.”
Chinh calculates that the commune saves 540,000 dong ($35) per hectare in insecticide purchases, and 1 million dong per hectare allowing for labor costs. He adds, “These savings add up to enough over a year to pay for a new school building.”
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