ABSTRACT
The cultivation of the highly fertilizer-responsive rice seeds is very uneven throughout the twenty-two districts of Sri Lanka. Some districts' cultivators are planting all their rice land to either the first generations of improved seed or to the released lines known as the new improved varieties. A review of the experience in Sri Lanka suggests different routes to increasing rice yields and recommends a decentralized research system with a much closer involvement with local cultivators, encouraging them to share in investigating and improving the varied forms of agriculture. The variation in the rice cultivating systems can be identified more precisely using variables related to rice growing from each of the twenty-two districts. Agricultural land is principally rice land, for the estates have pre-empted the slopes where other crops might have been cultivated by the villagers. The centralized organization of research may have to give way to a diversified one responsive to regional and local agricultural systems.
