Sri Lanka Faces ‘Man-Made’ Food Crisis as Farmers Stop Plantinghttps://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/5/18/a-food-crisis-looms-in-sri-lanka-as-farmers-give-up-on-plantingOnce self-sufficient nation reels from fall-out of ill-conceived shift to organic agriculture, compounded by fuel shortages.Walsapugala, Sri Lanka – Mahinda Samarawickrema, 49, will not be planting paddy this season.
After a government ban on chemical fertilisers cut his yield in half during the March harvest, the farmer, who owns eight hectares (20 acres) of paddy and banana, said he no longer has the income to maintain a farm – especially as his banana crop also looks set to fail.
“It’s a total loss,” the father of five said in mid-April, standing in a field of stunted banana trees in Sri Lanka’s southern Hambantota district. “When I look at this, I know I cannot get the usual yield.”
By this time of the year, most of Samarawickrema’s trees should be twice their height and in bloom, but only a few of the 1,300 trees in the weed-strewn fields have any flowers.
Samarawickrema says he used to get up to 37,000kg (81,571 pounds) of bananas a year, but this time, he expects only 6,000kg (13,228 pounds). “Everything has collapsed,” he said. “I don’t know what to do, but to look up at the sky, look down at the ground and just wait.”
Most smallholder farmers in Samarawickrema’s Walsapugala village also say they will not be irrigating their fields in the growing season that runs from May to August. They say the fertiliser ban induced crop failures, coming amid nationwide fuel shortages, make farming untenable.
“There’s no point in farming any more,” said KA Sumanadasa, who grows brinjals (aubergine) on a his quarter of a hectare (0.6-acre) field. Taking out a bag of puny vegetables, many streaked with fungus, the 70-year-old says the switch to organic agriculture has brought down his yield from 400kg (882 pounds) per season to 50kg (110 pounds). With this output, Sumanadasa said he cannot recover the money he has invested in his farm.
The Movement for Land and Agricultural Reform (MONLAR), a non-government organisation, says most farmers in the surrounding Hambantota district, and in agricultural regions in the north, such as Anuradhapura and Polonnaruwa districts, are also halting operations this season
That could leave Sri Lanka, which is already grappling with shortages of imported foodstuffs amid its worst-ever economic crisis, facing widespread shortages of domestically produced food, too.
Fertiliser banA
n island nation of 22 million people, Sri Lanka used to be self-sufficient in food.
But President Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s drive to make the country the world’s first to fully adopt organic agriculture – by banning all synthetic agrochemicals, including fertilisers and pesticides – has proved disastrous for Sri Lanka’s two million farmers. Sold as a bid to improve soil health and reduce water pollution, the ban was imposed overnight in May last year.
Across the country, farmers, who were until then dependent on subsidised chemical fertilisers, suddenly found themselves left to their own devices. Despite the ban, they said the government neither increased production of organic fertiliser nor imported sufficient soil nutrients to meet their needs.
The result has been a dramatic fall in agricultural output across the country.Official figures are not yet available for the March harvest, but experts have predicted a drop of between 20 to 70 percent, depending on the crop.
For rice, a staple of the Sri Lankan diet, output fell by between 40 and 50 percent nationwide in March, according to estimates. The drop has resulted in the island nation importing some 300,000 metric tonnes of rice in the first three months of the year – a sharp rise compared with the 14,000 metric tonnes it imported in 2020.
All of this comes as the country reels from a foreign exchange crisis that has left the government unable to pay for essential imports, including fuel and medicines. Shortages have led to sky-high inflation, long queues for diesel, rolling electricity cuts of up to 13 hours and warnings of a “catastrophic number of deaths” from doctors..
... “The president has agreed that the shift to organics was done too hastily. We have understood the errors and we will provide the fertiliser required by the farmers soon,” said Janaka Wakkumbura, who briefly served as agriculture minister in April after all of Rajapaksa’s ministers resigned in March over the worsening economic crisis
But with Sri Lanka’s foreign reserves having dwindled to $1.8bn at the end of April and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine pushing up fertiliser prices in the world market, experts have said it is not clear how the government can afford to import enough soil nutrients for its two million farmers, much less subsidise them.
In Walsapugala, farmers said they were worried about the future.
Despite the government reversing its ban on agrochemicals, they are unable to find adequate supplies or afford the sky-high prices charged by importers.
“Our lifestyle has been destroyed,” said Ajith Kumar, who like Samarawickrema, grows bananas.
Food inflation, which is currently at about 30 percent, could rise even further.
“Food availability is at a crossroads and food accessibility is at a crossroads,” said Jeewika Weerahewa, professor of agriculture at the University of Peradeniya in Sri Lanka.
