Editorial
Agriculture in poison hole
View(s):For more than 2,500 years agriculture and the farmer have played a vital part not only in Sri Lanka’s economy but also in our hallowed civilisation with festivals like the National New Year and Thai Pongal being linked to the harvesting season. The internationally famous Robert Knox in a historical 17th century book on life in Sri Lanka said the farmer, when the mud was washed off his back, was fit to be a king. But most of that appears to have gone with the wind and in recent decades our leaders have sowed the wind and are now reaping the whirlwind.
Tens of thousands of farmers and their families in the North Central, Uva and Northern and Eastern provinces are not in anything like a kingdom but more in a mud hole or a pig sty. For instance, our ancient kings encouraged our engineers to build marvels like the Parakrama Samudraya, thosuands of Wevas and irrigation systems. Most people these days do not even understand the engineering masterpiece behind the weva where water is preserved in times of heavy rain to be used in times of drought. These policies gave Sri Lanka the honour of being known as the Rice Bowl of Asia, but today most of the rice has turned stale if not poisonous.
During the past year, one of the worst ever droughts in decades has devastated tens of thousands of acres of paddy and other crop leaving most of the families as paupers languishing in varying degrees of destitution and unpaid loans. The Rajapaksa Government promised to pay Rs. 100,000 as compensation to the affected farmer families but tragically this too was politicised because it came during the election campaign in the NCP and many candidates are alleged to have given the compensation in a manner that amounted to a political bribe while they also used the farmers’ misery for their political benefit.
Dragging the farmers deeper into the mud hole, bank officials are reported to be insisting on the repayment of the loans and most farmers are known to be pawning or selling their jewellery and other valuables they may have.
In this catastrophic situation, the farmer communities are also facing the calamity of an epidemic of chronic kidney diseases (CKD) with research by Health Ministry, the World Health Organisation and university scientists showing that as many as 15 per cent of the people in the North Central and Uva and other provinces are suffering from these chronic kidney diseases. They are mainly in the age group of between 15 and 70 with researchers and scientists warning even younger children could be afflicted if urgent and effective measures are not taken.
The WHO team which was invited by the Health Ministry in 2008 to find the causes of these chronic kidney diseases has still not come to a clear-cut conclusion and its reports issued last year and in June this year are a little vague if not secretive. The WHO experts say they hope to issue a more conclusive report later next month but university scientists and other analysts believe that the root causes include the excessive use of low quality fertilizer and pesticides with a high content of arsenic and cadmium. They say these nephrotoxic heavy metals have poisoned or polluted the ground water in these provinces and therefore the kidney epidemic is caused by what those people eat and the excessively hard water they drink.
The Sunday Times is publishing a series of articles on the extensive report issued by the United States-based Centre for Public Integrity. These reports also identify and explain the possible causes while the WHO has called upon the Government to act fast in controlling the quality of the fertilizer and pesticide being imported.
Last week an ally of the ruling coalition held a satyagraha at the Viharamahadevi Park urging the Government to reconsider its whole agricultural policy where it was spending a staggering 55 billion rupees annually to provide low-quality agrochemical subsidies to the farmers.
Agricultural experts believe the most effective long-term solution, though it is the more difficult one, is for the Government to provide a full awareness, encouragement, incentives to farmers to turn to bio farming or organic farming. The Government also needs to closely study agro-industrial development policies in other countries and adopt what is suitable for Sri Lanka. This will also help us to overcome the problem of our still inefficient marketing networks to get perishable produce from rural areas to markets or consumers or to factories for preservation. If this is done on a large-scale, we will not only have non-polluted food and drinking water but Sri Lanka could also save hundreds of millions of dollars in foreign exchange by curbing the import of low quality, high arsenic agrochemicals.
What we eat and drink is what we are. Many nutritionists and other analysts believe that despite the marvels of modern medical technology, most of us are falling sick more often because we are eating poisoned or polluted food and drinking polluted water. Driven by self-centredness and greed, some food traders are known to be using dangerous preservatives such as carbide, malathion or formalin on fruit and vegetable. Sometimes, we consume some of these without boiling or washing and end up with deadly or even fatal ailments including cancer.
While the overall agriculture policy is gradually transformed to bio or organic farming, we also need to go back to the beautiful practice of home gardening though most cities are today overcrowded with thousands living in apartment blocks and no garden to plant even a small tree. If we wish to eat food that is not poisoned or polluted, we need to grow it on our own and the place is the home garden.
It may be difficult or strenuous but clichés apart, health is wealth and the hard work for a home garden could mean saving several hundred of thousands of rupees that we may have to spend on kidney transplants or regular dialysis. If Sri Lanka hopes or wishes to become the model of Asia, we need to first become a healthy nation so that healthy people could sustain development policies based on social justice and more equitable distribution of wealth and resources.
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