DEVELOPMENT-SRI LANKA: Farmers Struggle Against Trade Lords

By Feizal Samath Reprint | | Print |

Feizal Samath

DAMBULLA, Sri Lanka, Sep 23 1998 (IPS) - Farmers in Sri Lanka have toiled over the years to produce the country’s food requirements but like their counterparts in other poor nations, the biggest adversary to a reasonable income is the middle-man who sets price.

The middle-man is a trader or group of traders who buys the entire produce in a rural town, transports it to urban areas and sells it at exorbitant prices, sometimes about 10 times more than the original price.

The only way farmers can fight back against this unfair pricing structure is to have proper storage facilities near their farms to store the produce for weeks or months and sell it when prices are favourable. Now, if they don’t sell it soon after harvests, it rots.

In the farming town of Dambulla, about 200 km northeast of Colombo, the harvest of the rice season which has just ended is being gathered in most fields, while others are being ploughed for the next season.

Shops are stacked with sacks and sacks of vegetables including onions, snake gourd, ladies’ fingers, string beans, cabbage, cucumber, pumpkins, capsicum, lime and water- melon. Lorries are parked in queues as bulging sacks are loaded on to them.

Siripala, a 33-year old farmer voices the concern of most vegetable farmers. They toil to farm the land during the day and watch over their crops at night. But what did they get in return?

“We don’t have the means or the money to transport the produce to Colombo, the hub of commerce. So we are compelled to sell the vegetables to the small wholesaler in the town, who in turn sells it to the big traders who come from Colombo,” he said, chewing betel outside his mud hut.

Farmers say the Colombo traders set the prices. They decide in advance how much they would pay for one type of vegetable. Like in the case of capsicum, they would pay 10 rupees for a whole kilo. In Colombo it sells for more than 80 rupees per kilo.

“There is no fair play. They are in absolute control. They are the marketing mafia. No one dares cross their path,” Siripala said, voice trembling with emotion. “If we don’t give it dirt cheap, we starve.”

On one occasion Dambulla farmers decided to resist. They offered capsicum at 12 rupees per kilo but the traders insisted on 10 rupees and no more. The farmers were adamant and stuck to their price.

To their horror, all the lorries brought by traders returned to Colombo empty, leaving the vegetables behind to rot and many miserable farmers and their families, penniless. That was the first and the last attempt by farmers to set prices.

“We desperately need storage facilities and no one is helping us here,” lamented Muthu Menike, her face splattered with mud as she dug into a small vegetable plot.

“If we can store for long periods, we can sell it at good prices,” the mother of two children believes. All the cultivators tell the same tale. Menike’s husband cultivates onions on the same land but their income is barely sufficient to make ends meet. Menike supplements the family’s earnings by cutting bricks.

For decades, farmers have pleaded for a proper marketing and transport network by government agencies that would ensure fair pricing but promises made by politicians – and that too during national and local election campaign – have not been kept.

Like Menike, Siripala utilises his talents as a flute player to earn extra money. He goes to the nearby Kandalama Hotel at sunset, sits on a rock by the side of the swimming pool, and delights dollar-spending tourists with haunting melodies.

The situation is so bad in the rural countryside that the next generation is unlikely to take to farming, agriculture economists warn. Studies have shown that the agriculture sector – the backbone of the country’s economy – is disintegrating due to apathy and indifference by the authorities, forcing budding young farmers to seek employment outside farmlands.

As a result of this neglect, the farm economy has all but collapsed and is now thinly held together by a mix of incomes from sons and daughters of farmers working in the Middle East and employed as government soldiers and garment workers.

“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 by policymakers,” says Professor Siripala Hettige, a sociologist at the University of Colombo.

A recent study by the Colombo-based Institute of Policy Studies (IPS) 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 of Sri Lanka emerges, in short, as a remittance and transfer economy, and in turn has major ramifications when it comes to agriculture policy,” IPS, the country’s top semi-government think-tank, said.

With incomes rapidly falling and indebtedness rising, the number of suicides amongst farmer families is high. Sri Lanka has the highest rate of suicides in the world, and the commonest form of suicide is swallowing pesticides – freely available in the homes of farming communities.

The Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) is making provision for storage facilities in its new three-year food security project in Sri Lanka. Under this, refrigerated storage facilities will be provided to farmers to help stock excess produce and sell it during off-season periods.

But economists say there is much more that has to be done to solve the farming crisis.