Meal plate and development
View(s):Komagata-san, a Japanese farmer living in a rural village, made a remarkable comment about “development”, while we were his invited guests having lunch at his home. I was with my wife, accompanied by our friend Prof. N.S. Cooray, who was a friend of Komagata-san. We were excited about this invitation, because it was a rare opportunity to visit a traditional farmer’s house in rural Japan.
We were sitting on the floor mats around a Japanese short-legged dining table. His wife started serving the lunch in Japanese style, bringing various small dishes in a row – vegetables, raw fish, prawns, octopus, pickles, yams, and many others with seasonings and sauces; it was at the end of the row, that rice came to the table. When all little dishes counted together, it was a big lunch!
Prof. Cooray, who was serving as a University Professor in Japan, translated our conversation between Japanese and Sinhala. Komagata-san continued to explain not only the meal, but also the containers which were used to serve the meal – plates, sauces, cups and, all sort of little ceramic containers and accessories with elegant Japanese designs.
It was during this conversation that Komagata-san made the comment on development: “We can understand development of a country, when we look at the meal plate of the people!”
I was amazed to hear such a profound statement from a rural farmer. He has travelled to many countries, including Sri Lanka where he had stayed many days touring around the island. It means he absolutely knew what he was talking about.
Poor meal and nutrition
I didn’t have to research and learn about the quality of an average Sri Lankan meal. I knew it well from the top to the bottom. I remembered the average lunch packet sold on the pavements; low quality rice that comes with a little bit of curries as if it is served with a tea-spoon and, wrapped in a polythene sheet!
If a little bigger spoon had been used to serve, it is for some specific curries which are the cheapest in the market such as kasawa or jackfruit or breadfruit. Often there is mango or “ambarella” among the curries, because their strong sour flavour can cover up any loopholes in the meal.
The main purpose of an average meal seems to be just “filling the stomach” with something big enough for that, which has little nutritional value.
Nutritional value
The inadequate nutritional value of our average meal is clear from our health indicators. Sri Lanka has strange and contradictory child health indicators.
Infant mortality rate is as low as 0.8 per per cent of live births. But child malnutrition-related indicators are high; children with low birth weight is 15.5 per cent; among the children below five years of age, under-weight rate is 20.5 per cent; acute under-nutrition (wasting) rate is 15.1 per cent and, chronic malnutrition (stunting) rate is 17.3 per cent.
How do we explain these paradoxical health indicators? Perhaps, the answer is that the “low” infant mortality rates are influenced by health services including maternity care, while “high” child malnutrition and underweight rates are determined by a mother’s food intake.
Thanks to our historical public health services and maternity care, Sri Lanka does not have a serious issue of infant mortality. But we do have an issue with respect to “mothers’ poor meal” which affects their children’s nutritional standards.
Japanese farmers collecting their water melon harvest during a hot summer. Pic by Prof. Jay Rajasekera, International University of Japan.
Quality of food intake
Why is our average meal low in quality? There are a variety of reasons for this such as high cost of food, low incomes and, sub-standard food habits. Out of many reasons, I am going to focus on only one factor; high food prices, which force average people to choose inadequate quantities and cheaper varieties which together do not seem to have a standard nutritional value of a meal plate.
Vegetables and fish or meat are in tiny qualities. Salads, fruits and dairy products seem to be luxuries. The biggest quantity is the amount of rice that fills the belly. Rice is relatively cheaper due to subsidies and administered prices, but other stuff is relatively expensive in Sri Lanka.
I am going to highlight three interrelated economic factors that might cause high food prices. In other words, in a development policy that is aimed at feeding the nation ensuring adequate nutritional value, the policy makers should pay attention to these three factors.
Small farm size
The first is the small farm size which is little more than 1 acre in Sri Lanka. Small is not beautiful at least in economics, because then the cost of production is high.
A farmer who tries to sell 10 kg of tomato is obviously at a losing end in the market, compared to another who sells 1000 kg. The cost of producing 1 kg of tomato should be higher for the small farmer than for the big farmer. Therefore, in order to make a living if not a profit out of his tomato harvest, the small farmer has to sell it at a higher price, while the big farmer can still make profit by selling his produce at a lower price.
When the average farm size is too small, the agricultural produce is naturally expensive. It is not the whole story, however. When the farm size is not viable in an economic sense, introduction of new technology and the use of machinery and, post-harvest grading, packaging, preserving and transporting, all these modern practices are out of the question. Small farmers do not have the capacity to undertake these developments.
This means that food production with small farms tend to not only be expensive, but also low quality.
Middlemen in the supply chain
The second problem is associated with supply chain issues. In the supply chain of any product, there should be “middlemen” – persons or institutions as wholesale traders and distributors. Neither can the producers keep looking for consumers to sell their products, nor could consumers look for producers of what they want to buy.
However, there are two issues in the supply chain: One is that the middlemen involvement is too lengthy and too complicated. The second is the undue bargaining power enjoyed by the middlemen due to weak, end points at both producer and consumer sides.
As a result of the two problems in under-developed supply chains, what the producers receive is too low and what the consumer pays is too high.
The weak bargaining power of the small farmers is an important reason why the middlemen have the controlling power over the supply chains.
Import controls and rupee depreciation
The third problem of high food prices is the excessive import controls. The taxes applied on imported food and beverages resulted in high prices not only for the imported items, but also for domestic produce.
Sri Lanka imposes a number of different taxes – the so-called tariffs and para-tariffs, on food items such as meat, dairy, vegetables, fruit, fruit juices, coffee, cocoa, pasta, cereal, and others: customs duty, value added tax, port and airport levy, nation building tax, cess, and special commodity levy. All these taxes together with handling charges and commissions can result in 50 to 100 per cent increase in domestic prices of imported food and beverage items.
An added problem is the continuous depreciation of the Sri Lankan exchange rate which keeps the domestic prices of imported commodities continuously on the rise. Today we spend close to Rs. 180 on an imported commodity worth US$1, which was only Rs. 150 a year ago.
This means that just within a period of one year, the prices of our imported goods have increased by about 20 per cent. As the taxes are calculated on the rupee price of imported commodities, the amount of taxes also keep increasing along with exchange rate depreciation, although tax rates remain the same.
(The writer is a Professor of Economics at the University of Colombo. He can be reached at sirimal@econ.cmb.ac.lk)