Trapped by “Swarna Bhoomi” deeds
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I am quoting one of the comments he made, as follows:
“In Cyprus, compared to the income levels of the people, food prices – including the prices of vegetables and fruits, are very low. For anyone, it is not a big deal to find a good meal with standard quality. In Sri Lanka, of course, it is a big deal for many people. We used to transport vegetables and fruits in sacks, and sell them to the consumers spreading it on the ground.”
“If we also had large farms in Sri Lanka, vegetables and fruits as well as dairy products such as milk and cheese would have been plenty and cheaper. In the small gardens of our villagers, there are only a couple of fruit trees, probably, one or two trees of each kind – mango, durian, rambutan, and orange. Their harvest is usually no more than sufficient for their own family consumption. But they too are compelled to sell it, because of poverty.”
“Traders who collect their harvest also pluck all the fruits at once – matured ones and tender ones both. They know how to make even the tender ones ripe and sell it. The consumers buy sub-standard products. Villagers or traders have no understanding about quality control. Mostly our consumers eat not only sub-standard food, but also poisonous food, because the farmers or suppliers do not have a sense of quality. Our villagers will never be able to supply quality products at competitive prices so that they will never be able to enter the international market.”
“Swarna Bhoomi”
We have already discussed many issues related to our rural agriculture in this column many times in the recent past. Nevertheless, I was inspired to bring the issue back for discussion again due to another event, which goes well with the above comments.
I happened to have a chat with Kumara – a farmer from a village in Kurunegala district whom I knew for many years. He was the youngest among nine siblings of the family. He is in the forties and, lived with his family in the house that he inherited from his parents. The old-fashioned house was located in the middle of a coconut land, which is about one and three-quarter acres.
This time, Kumara had a tragic story to tell me. As his brothers had a long dispute about the land inherited from their parents, it was divided among the nine brothers. Each one has got 28 perches with common access routes. As the youngest in the family, Kumara’s piece of land included the house he lived with his family, but their toilet at the back of the house is now in another piece of land. He could save his mango tree and the guava tree, but his jackfruit tree and the sour sap tree are gone. Many coconut trees were cut down as they blocked the new access route.
Kumara was sad and disappointed – what can he do with a small piece of land with little over 28 perches, whereas even the productivity of the former 1¾ acre land was inadequate to feed his family.
Selling for a song?
File picture of a vegetable stall in Colombo.Pic courtesy Michael Moonasinghe.
He tried to sell his piece of land and get out of the village and go to a better place. Alas! There was no “market price” for the land! It was a government-owned land, which has a “Swarna Bhoomi” deed. He has only now realised that it was a bogus deed, which has no legal ownership or market value.
Kumara couldn’t make up his mind to sell it for a song, because he wanted to spend it on an adequate plot of land even if it’s further away in a remote areas. And at whatever the price, selling a land which belongs to the government is illegal, after all. All these things happened to him and made him realise that “he is trapped” without a way out!
“I heard that people in Colombo are against giving us ‘free hold’ deeds, and that’s why the government doesn’t give us free hold deeds. Is it true?” he asked me. “Yes, there are groups of people like that.” I replied.
“Then the government should take over their own free hold titles too and give them also ‘Swarna Bhoomi; deeds,” he said raising a logical point.
Without much focus, I just said: “They think that they are intelligent enough to keep a free hold deed.”
He didn’t try to respond, as his eyes were fixed on the empty sky. If he did, he would have said: “Then, they must be thinking that we in the village are fools!”
Smaller land pieces
During the past 75 years, the population of Sri Lanka has trebled from seven million to 21 million. These people have spread horizontally, not vertically, dividing the land of the country into smaller pieces. Neither had they concentrated in urbanised areas. They moved into the deep jungles cutting down trees and reducing the forest cover and, encroached into the territories of the elephants resulting in a human-elephant conflict.
Then they asked the governments to build roads and culverts and, then to provide transport into the remote villages. The environment was destroyed, weather patterns got distorted and, rivers dried up. When there was no water, indeed, the governments were responsible for providing water. The human-elephant conflict was to be resolved by the governments too, but so far all such attempts have proved to be futile.
And after all, agricultural activities in smaller pieces of land became unproductive. Each farmer household was producing and supplying smaller quantities of produce from their smaller pieces of land, as Prof. Rev. Wimalaratana Thero remarked in his blog post. According to the agriculture surveys of the Department of Census and Statistics, the average size of agriculture land of Sri Lankan household is 2 acres only. And over 90 per cent of the poor people in Sri Lanka live in rural areas, indicating that agriculture and poverty are interrelated.
There have been constant efforts by state agencies to improve agriculture productivity with the introduction of new technology, new varieties, and mechanisation efforts. But the positive outcome of all these efforts was outweighed increasingly by the small-scale production issue: more and more people, working less and less in farm lands, which became smaller and smaller.
Then, the governments provide all types of assistance and services: fertiliser subsidies, extension services, free inputs such as water, guaranteed prices, import protection and other. The farmers also try to use more and more agrochemicals in order to get maximum harvest, but it continues to be a poor quantity with poor quality.
Poverty and politics
There have been numerous rural development activities by the governments, by the politicians, and by the non-governmental organisations. They attempt to fulfil a handful of needs of the rural poor, by looking at the “symptoms of poverty” rather than the “source of poverty”.
All sorts of external support and government assistance have resulted in one important thing: More people are trapped in the “Swarna Bhoomi” concept. They all became an incentive for people to remain in less-productive and less-rewarding rural agriculture.
After all, poverty helps at elections too: We select the governments which can give more subsidies and, help people to remain in poverty. Poverty is important for politics!
(The writer is a Professor of Economics at the University of Colombo and can be reached at sirimal@econ.cmb.ac.lk).