Bird Scaring Technologies in Rice Production: The need for Policies Prohibiting Participation of Women and Children

Abstract

A disruptive technology improves a product or service in ways that the market does not expect typically by
being lower priced or designed for a different set of consumers. There are arrested technologies which
reduce human drudgery but have not taken root and are therefore marginalized on account of the neglected
sector which they serve. In Nigeria, bird scaring in the agricultural sector, is to date effected manually; in
the aviation sector, it is never done manually. Nigeria’s total consumption stands at 4.4 million tons of
milled rice, but produces only about 2.8 million tons. The deficit is augmented through rice importation. Of
all the problems of rice production, that of birds scaring tends to be the least discussed in literature and by
extension a neglected area. This neglect has in effect arrested bird scaring technologies that upgrade the
traditional tedious and laborious use of women and children in bird scaring. For 3-5 weeks during the milk
stage of rice in the field, women and children spend the hours of 7am-6pm on end daily scaring birds. For
the women, the activity is an additional burden to their domestic chores. For the children, their attendance
to school is adversely affected. This paper presents some alternative bird scaring operations in rice
farming. It also proposes some policy measures aimed at releasing these technologies for mass adoption
and thereby effectively relieving women and children from manually scaring birds in rice fields.