FOOD: Sri Lanka to Build Up Food Security With FAO Help

By Feizal Samath Reprint | | Print |

Feizal Samath

COLOMBO, Apr 28 1998 (IPS) - Taking a hard look at the widening gap between farm productivity and food security, Sri Lanka has unveiled plans to review agricultural policies with the support of the Rome-based Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO).

The three-year project, called the pilot phase of a special programme for food security, will assess the country’s constraints and weaknesses in raising farm yields and recommend measures to improve the situation.

“At the end of the pilot phase, the government will formulate a national programme of food security and present it to donor agencies for aid and investment purposes,” said Gerald Bernard, FAO representative in Sri Lanka.

The Indian Ocean island nation among a list of 86 that have been described as low-income, food-deficit countries (LIFDCs) — 43 in Africa, 23 in Asia, nine in Latin America and the Caribbean, seven in Oceania and three in Europe where most of the world’s 800 million, chronically undernourished people live.

The food security programme is an outcome of the World Food Summit held in Rome in November 1996. There, participants including about 100 heads of state or government, made a commitment to reduce the number of undernourished people in the world by half by the year 2015.

The conference approved a plan of action that included recognition of the need “to pursue, through participatory means, sustainable, intensified and diversified food production, increasing productivity, efficiency, safety gains, pest control and reduce water losses, taking fully into account the need to sustain natural resources.”

The pilot phase has already been launched in some countries, and the goal in each case is food security which has replaced food self-sufficiency as the universal goal.

FAO’s Bernard points to a distinct difference between food “self-sufficiency” and “security”. “Self sufficiency is an old concept in which every country must produce everything it needs. In food security, a country can produce something that its neighbour doesn’t have, export it and use the foreign exchange to buy the food it needs.”

The FAO official said that some of the food problems in Sri Lanka were the high cost of production, the lack of diversification such as the growing of rice only in some parts of the country when other crops too would be grown, and post harvest losses due to poor storage facilities and transport.

“In Sri Lanka there is a 35 percent post-harvest loss. This is a big problem,” he added. Some of the reasons for high production costs are costly fertiliser application and the high cost of transportation of produce to the markets.

In addition, losses mount with the lack of proper storage facilities at the production site, which means that during the off-peak crop seasons, prices of perishable farm produce like vegetables are very high because of shortages.

“If you can bring down post-harvest losses to about 15 percent from 35 percent, prices will then come down and the consumer benefits,” Bernard said.

The FAO-assisted food security programme focuses on irrigation as one of its chief concerns. The absence of small irrigation projects has been a major drawback in the case of Sri Lanka. “There is a lot of water which is not put to proper use. There is money available for big irrigation schemes but then maintenance becomes a problem. The answer lies in small schemes in which the farmer or small village, level groups can be responsible to look after,” the FAO official said.

The raging civil war in Sri Lanka’s north and east, which has divided the country’s Sinhala and Tamil populations, has also caused disruptions in food productivity. With major fishing areas falling within the war zones, fish production has fallen by 40 percent and the reason for the high cost of fish in the south.

Under the FAO-assisted pilot phase which will get off the ground in May, FAO experts will be ascertaining the reasons for the country’s inability to achieve food security and suggesting solutions. “We will have to prepare big, national level investment projects to boost food security,” said Bernard.

Simultaneously, funding agencies like the World Bank, Asian Development Bank, United Nations Development Programme and the Economic Commission would be briefed “all the way like the way it is done in most of our projects” during the tenure of the three-year pilot phase.

“By the end of this phase, donors would then have decided — when the national programme is formulated and the government

seeks funds to implement it — which part of the food security programme it would be interested in helping,” Bernard noted.

The FAO programme has started showing results in countries where it has been launched. In Bolivia, maize yields in project sites were reported to have more than doubled as compared to local varieties, and potato production was 240 to 425 percent higher in areas applying improved techniques.

In Tanzania, the pilot phase became operational in July 1995 and in the 1995/96 crop year, yields were found to be approximately double those in surrounding areas using traditional methods, while in Nepal, the special programme has demonstrated how to expand irrigated acres by 30 to 100 percent simply through good water management.