POPULATION-SRI LANKA: Young Migrate From Neglected Farm Lands

By Feizal Samath Reprint | | Print |

Feizal Samath

COLOMBO, Jul 7 1998 (IPS) - Years of neglect by governments has ruined Sri Lanka’s prosperous agricultural economy, forcing an exodus of young people from the villages.

“Younger people don’t want to get involved in agriculture because they have seen how their parents have suffered due to the negligence and indifference of policymakers,” said professor of sociology Siripala Hettige of the University of Colombo.

Now, the island’s rural economy is held together by Sri Lankan migrant workers in the Middle East, government soldiers fighting Tamil rebels, women workers in the Export Processing Zones (EPZ) and the government’s poverty alleviation programmes.

While the farmers, according to Prof. Hettige, are struggling to survive, neglected by the government and vulnerable to the vagaries of the weather, fluctuating markets and pests.

Recent studies show that the crisis has been building up in rural Sri Lanka since the mid-1980s against a backdrop of an acute land shortage, falling incomes from rice farming and little or no shift to high-value crops from the low-return rice.

Sri Lanka’s agriculture economy has two components: plantation and paddy. The tea, rubber and coconut plantations have been doing well particularly after these mostly state-owned holdings were partly sold to private companies in the mid-1990s.

Tea, Sri Lanka’s biggest export commodity, is doing extremely well in view of favourable world market prices during the past two years and last month, John Keells Holdings Ltd. – the country’s biggest conglomerate which has sizable tea and rubber plantations – reported a 100 percent increase in post-tax profits for the 1997-1998 fiscal year which ended in March.

Likewise rubber and coconut have also done reasonably well because government efforts have been channeled in that direction.

Paddy, which affects the majority of peasant cultivators, however, has been neglected. Though the island nation is self sufficient in rice, the country’s staple diet, sometimes small quantities have been imported to offset shortages caused by drought.

Rice farmers, argues Hettige, are considered ignorant and unproductive and not contributing to national wealth, unlike the export crops. “Therefore the authorities tend to disregard them and their needs,” he says.

An acute shortage of paddy land has meant that nearly 70 percent of farmers own less than two acres of land, which is not enough to produce surplus grain.

With farming and other related farm jobs becoming uneconomical, the children of farmers have been leaving the villages, finding jobs overseas, in Sri Lanka’s military — major employer since 1983 when the civil war broke out, and in large garment factories, among the foremost export industry.

More than 600,000 Sri Lankan women and men work in the Gulf countries in the Middle East, mostly as domestics and construction labour. According to estimates, roughly 50,000 new workers are added annually to the Sri Lankan expatriate workforce.

The island’s 100,000-strong military and garment industry which employs between 30,000 and 35,000 mostly women workers recruit villagers from the poor rural areas. Roughly three quarters of the population live in Sri Lanka’s villages.

“Despite the risks in military service, rural youths still choose to join for reasons such as higher income and social recognition, particularly from villages bordering the war zone which have experienced the direct effects of the 15-year battle,” says Sena Jayasena, a researcher at Colombo’s Agrarian Research and Training Institute.

A recent study by the Colombo-based Institute of Policy Studies found that the rural economy was heavily and increasingly dependent on transfers from outside, and it was this that has enabled people to survive in the face of an “agrarian crisis”.

“The rural economy emerges, in short, as a remittance and transfer economy, and in turn has major ramifications when it comes to agriculture policy,” the Institute, a top semi- government think-tank, has concluded.

According to the study, a “remittance and transfer economy” is by definition “brittle and vulnerable economy”, threatened by instability or policy changes in the Middle East and peaceful resolution of the civil war which would affect jobs in the army.

The agrarian crisis which has caused incomes to plummet and indebtedness to rise in the villages, has led to an increase in

suicides by desperate peasant cultivators and families.

Prof. Hettige who is dean of the department of sociology at Colombo University, recommends the creation of safety nets, like an agricultural insurance scheme to compensate for crop failures, to cushion subsistence farmers from penury.

He said poor farmers had lost faith in state programmes but they needed protection because agriculture is the main source of the country’s food security. “Food can be obtained from anywhere but one is less vulnerable if it comes from your own backyard,” he cautions.