Sri Lanka needs ‘agricultural renaissance’
Just before and after Sri Lanka was liberated, it was cited as a model low-income nation with extraordinary human development index. Somewhere down the line the country lost its focus and today suffers from acute food insecurity, coming out of which will be a colossal task for its people, says an editorial in Daily Mirror.
Who is responsible for your right to food? The right to food is one of the priority fundamental human rights. Food is the number one concern of human kind. Health is a close second. These two are closely inter-related. Adequate nutrition is a determinant of health. The state is certainly responsible for your right to food.
Sri Lanka has long been cited by development economists and public health specialists as a model low-income country which achieved extraordinary success in high life expectancy at birth, low infant mortality, high levels of literacy, particularly female literacy, and almost 100% school enrollment.
Few low-income countries such as Costa Rica, Cuba and the State of Kerala in South India had equaled Sri Lankan standards. This was the scenario in the late 1940s and early 1950s, immediately before and after Sri Lanka got independence.
It is ironical that the country got its freedom but the people gradually lost the freedom to have the right to food.
Losing focus
Sri Lanka is now classified as a low-income food deficit country with a relatively high global hunger index in South Asia according to the World Food Programme (Sri Lanka Food Security Assessment, based on the Integrated Food Security and Humanitarian Phase Classification Approach, April 15-30, 2007).
Successive governments from the dawn of independence up to the present have brought the people to this pitiful state. The priority of every government was to ensure its survival and regaining power at the next election. Most of their energies and resources were focused on this single issue.
In the process poverty has taken over our people. Poverty is a predominant factor that causes food insecurity in Sri Lanka. A number of articles in the Health Action pages of the Daily Mirror have given critical analysis of poverty based on data published by the Department of Census and Statistics Household Income and Expenditure Survey (DCSHIES).
Data available from the 17 districts outside the North and East showed the following: In six districts almost a third of the population lives below the poverty line; poverty has increased in seven, remained the same in two and came down in eight districts and the depth and severity has increased in four out of the seven provinces.
Food supply and availability are a major issue in the rural areas of Badulla, Hambantota, Kegalle, Matara, Moneragla and Puttalam. These are the districts where almost a third of the population lives below the poverty line.
Access to food is a major concern in almost all districts for the poorest households due to un-affordability and high price increases. And there is poverty in each of the 17 districts. No one knows what is happening in the eight districts in the North and East. Lack of food security is the cause of unacceptably low nutritional indicators – especially acute malnutrition (wasting) and underweight.
The national average is 33%. Almost 40% of pregnant women are anemic. These, being national averages, are meaningless. Regrettably there are no disaggregated data on these nutritional indicators. The indicators for the poorest districts listed above may be extremely high – 75% of under five children may be malnourished and 75-80% of pregnant women anemic.
This is a public health crisis. Lack of food, especially for children and pregnant mothers, is perhaps the gravest form of violation of the fundamental human right to food. It is very unfortunate that human rights activists both national and international have never taken up this issue. They have focused all their attention on human rights violation following the ethnic crisis.
Need for new approach
What Sri Lanka needs to get over this human tragedy is an agricultural renaissance promised by Mahinda Chinthanaya.
The President, coming from a rice producing district knows very well the severe suffering farmers undergo and is fully aware of their problems and expectations and has promised a new approach to resolve problems faced by farmers and make Sri Lanka self sufficient in food.
The new approach will be vastly different from the election promises given by politicians who represent the elite and live in luxury mansions in Colombo and are therefore attempting to force alien values on our farming community. Every Sri Lankan should support our President to make agricultural renaissance a reality.
