Sunday Times 2
Rice is still politics in Lanka
When the last presidential election campaign was picking up with Gotabaya Rajapaksa and Sajith Premadasa trying to outbid each other in wooing the electorate, we commented that it reminded us of that old favourite of Doris Day in the fifties: ‘Anything you can do I can do better — Anything You can do I can do best’. One stunning offer of Rajapaksa, in the campaign was: free fertiliser for all paddy farmers. Not to be outdone, Premadasa came back: free fertiliser for all farmers — paddy and vegetable farmers and others included.
The economy of the country was in tatters at that time, as it had been for years. And most voters who had a head above their shoulders were left wondering whether these pledges were fact or fiction. Premadasa lost and, with it, was absolved from keeping his rash promises.
Rajapaksa won and now after one year and six months, he is keeping to his word and is about to give free fertiliser to farmers. On election platforms, he did not specify what kind of fertiliser he would gift farmers though many like this writer presumed, it would be imported inorganic fertiliser which is terribly expensive — the import bill is around 40 to 50 billion rupees a year.
As an ex-military man, Rajapaksa does not dilly-dally. He means business. He has already, in a flourish, turned away two shiploads of inorganic fertiliser that were to dock in at Colombo.
What our President is offering is organic fertilizer — fertiliser that can be made out of garbage, garden leaves, flotsam and jetsam, including other forms of decomposed organic matter.
Gotabaya Rajapaksa keeps to his word exactly. Read his election manifesto: Visions of Splendour and Prosperity. Under the Chapter on Agriculture he says: “We need to develop the habit of consuming food with no contamination with harmful chemicals. In order to guarantee the right to such food the entire Sri Lankan agriculture has to be promoted to use organic fertiliser during the next ten years. To resuscitate the farming community, we need to replace the existing fertiliser subsidy scheme with an alternate system….”
There it is, in black and white in print and in technicolour on his website. If anyone presumed that Rajapaksa was talking on election platforms about gifting synthetic or inorganic fertiliser that had been in use in Lanka in almost all systems of agriculture, for all these years free of charge, who is to blame?
Not listening attentively to get the exact meaning of promises made by political leaders in full flight in their verbosity on election platforms or not reading gushing accounts of themselves and their promises of splendour and joy in the promised utopian paradises in election manifestos with a list of unbelievable pledges, is the weakness of our masses educated and not.
None can tell Rajapaksa: You promised us imported high quality fertiliser, not garbage.
Rajapaksa at election time was obviously talking of going ‘Green’, consuming organic food and switching over to organic fertiliser turned out from garbage dumps like at Meetotamulla, although he did not go into stinking details of the proposals. He obviously also wanted to ban the use of pesticides, which many passionately believed was causing Chronic Kidney Disease (CKD) although much scientific research by Lankan and foreign scientists had not produced evidence to justify the conclusion.
If President Rajapaksa’s proposal can eliminate annual billion-dollar fertiliser bills and result in no adverse effects on agricultural produce, he will surely be the recipient of global accolades — not only political supremacy in Lanka?
Never mind allegations about the inability to pay million-dollar bills if inorganic fertiliser is to be ordered as before. Ask state minister Nivard Cabraal, all about it, cynics say.
However, the consensus of authoritative Lankan and global scientific opinion appears to be that elimination of inorganic synthetic fertiliser could lead to drastic drop in food production.
In an article titled, ‘Banning of inorganic fertilisers’ last week in a daily, former Agriculture Professor C. S. Weeraratna says: “Banning the import of inorganic fertilisers will be disastrous, as not applying adequate amounts of nutrients will cause yields to drop; making it essential to increase food imports, resulting in our annual expenditure to rise substantially from the current Rs 310 billion. This may be impossible to our economy in dire straits. Further importing rice may be an issue as most Asian countries, which grow paddy, are currently facing problems.’
Another scientist Dr. Parakrama Waidyanatha in an article says: “The total world extent under organic farming yet remains at about 1.5 percent of the total farm lands; of this two-thirds are grasslands and 8 percent arable crops… organic farming is thus a minor phenomenon in many countries and a long way from feeding nations.”
The much maligned Yahapalanaya government too had attempted organic farming under a Strategic Enterprises Management Movement with many organic farming projects around the country. In some of these projects, crops had not responded to organic fertiliser and cultivators had used chemical fertiliser surreptitiously to sell their produce.
The issue of organic or inorganic is not a matter only of scientific terminology or semantics. It is an issue which can shake the political firmaments of a country if a shift could result in drastic adverse effects on rice production. The 1953 Hartal on the increase of 25 cents in the subsidy on rice resulted in the resignation of Premier Dudley Senanayake and the beginning of the end of continuous rule of the UNP.
In the early fifties, this country whose capacity of rice production was far short of the consumer demand was importing rice. The end of the Korean War ended the ‘Korean Boom’ that we were enjoying and we were hard pressed to find the financial resources to meet our rice imports. The UNP Pukka Sahibs of the time had no hesitation in signing the Rubber-Rice Pact with ‘Red China’ despite consequences in the halt of US aid. The significance of the Rubber-Rice Pact is evident in that it lasted towards the end of the 1970s.
Just as much the saying ‘Oil is politics of the Middle East’ has been proved true for decades, ‘Rice has been Politics’ in Sri Lanka since independence. Many years before Lanka gained Independence, D.S. Senanayake, began the clearing of jungles of the Dry Zone and restoring abandoned and destroyed irrigation tanks of the ancients with the sole aim of making the country self-sufficient in rice. Subsequent leaders followed through and finally this country is on the verge of self-sufficiency in rice.
The fertiliser issue — as the most important issues facing the nation — is being wrapped up in ethno- nationalism, partisan politics and absolute ignorance and idiocy although the issue in purely scientific. An often asked question is: How did Sri Lanka become the ‘Granary of the East’ in the time of Parakrama Bahu?
Did he use inorganic fertiliser or the organic variety? Whether Lanka was the ‘Granary of the East’ is yet to be determined by historians. More important is to consider the Census statistics in the Great King’s time. How many mouths did he have to feed? Today we have around 20.1 million people and at the time of Independence,73 years ago, only about 7 million. Did Parakrama Bahu have many more to feed? The world has changed rapidly, some of the learned monks got to learn.
Another question posed has been: If forests can grow without inorganic fertiliser why can’t paddy be cultivated without it?
Even a GCE-O/L failed legislator could tell the monk that paddy cultivation was an art developed over eons by Asians long before the advent of all established religions. They grew paddy in the wet lowlands and by terracing hills and building massive irrigation reservoirs. The produce, it is presumed, was sufficient for the populations at that time. It is a crop that has been cultivated for eons and not a wild plant that can grow in a forest.
Perhaps, a little bit of information on demographics too would be worthwhile. It took 200,000 years for the human population to reach the I billion mark and only 200 years to reach 7 billion. Eighty million babies are being added each year in present times and the world population now 7.7 billion is heading towards the 10 billion mark by 2050 by which time, we humans will be running short of food and water, according to scientific projections.
Those calculations we presume are based on current rates of food production — using inorganic fertiliser. Will organic fertilisers help humanity to survive?
It has long been said that ‘Sinhalayas’ need three square meals of rice — morning, noon and night — with kirihodhi and lunumiris for satisfaction.
Without it, there would be fire in the belly and possibly fires elsewhere too — an ominous projection.
(The writer is a former editor of The Sunday Island, The Island and former consultant editor of the Sunday Leader)