DEVELOPMENT-SRI LANKA: Sky-High Success for Poor Region Farmers

By Feizal Samath Reprint | | Print |

Feizal Samath

COLOMBO, Oct 18 2000 (IPS) - When passengers on Sri Lanka’s national carrier eat their meals high up in the sky, little do they realise that the fine food has come from the country’s poorest region.

The high quality vegetables and fruit, which were once mainly imported from Singapore, Australia and the United States, are now also being supplied to ‘Sri Lankan Airlines’ by farmers in the Indian Ocean island nation’s central Uva region.

“There is a huge demand from Sri Lankan Airlines for vegetables and fruits produced by farmers from the Uva region,” says Asoka Kasturiarachchi, assistant resident representative at the U.N. Development Programme (UNDP) office in Colombo, which has helped make this possible.

“They will probably stop their overseas sources of supply once the airline is assured of an unlimited supply from Uva farmers,” he adds.

An anti-poverty programme, led by the UNDP, is helping the farmers grow produce for which there is a demand in national and international markets, and then sell directly to such buyers.

This includes high-quality vegetables, fruit, pesticide-free rice and bee honey. The U.N. agency is working with Sri Lankan government agencies, private companies and some non-governmental organisations (NGOs) on this.

In the past, most rural development schemes like this, only helped farmers to grow for markets, without helping them sell their produce. Farmers lacked the knowledge to sell straight to markets and had to depend on middlemen, who cornered the benefits.

“We want to create linkages between producers and markets in a direct and transparent way so that the value addition goes to farmers, not private companies or middlemen,” says the UNDP official.

The programme helps identify farm products for niche markets and gives farmers, modern know-how to produce these. It also helps with packaging, labelling and costing, and assists farmers’ groups to form partnerships with buyers.

The four million-U.S. dollar Area Based Growth with Equity Programme (ABGEP) was launched two years ago, jointly with the government.

According to the UNDP, it is the first in Sri Lanka and probably the world, to involve also the International Labour Organisation, (ILO), the United Nations Volunteers, government ministries and the Uva Provincial Council.

“We are eventually raising and improving their standard of living,” says D.W. Dassanayake, Provincial Director of Agriculture at the Uva Provincial Council. “This programme is a catalyst for change in the lifestyles of the people and in their development,” he adds.

The programme has established direct links between the Uva farmers and five to six big buyers, one of them being Sri Lankan Airlines. “The demand is growing from the airline for fruits and vegetables and we need to expand production,” he says.

Dassanayake said they were setting up 20 new greenhouses to increase production of fruits and vegetables. Jayasekera Manatunga, an Uva farmer, who supplies to a top Sri Lankan supermarket chain, says he has applied for a loan under the programme to buy a lorry and set up a store.

“I want to expand my storage capacity which will then increase output of my network of farmers,” he says. Besides his own plot where he grows rice and vegetables, Manatunga collects produce on a weekly basis from a network of more than 200 farmers.

Having studied packing and marketing techniques under UNDP experts, Manatunga and his 12 employees pack the produce into cartons and polythene bags to send to supermarkets in Colombo.

Manatunga sends two trucks with 2,000 to 3,000 kg of vegetables and fruits per week and is hoping that the UNDP loan, through the Uva provincial council, would improve his business. “If I develop, the farmers would also develop,” he adds.

“We are particular about quality and only the best vegetables and fruit are sent to the supermarkets,” he says.

Early September, the farmers began selling pesticide-free rice and honey to the Co-operate Wholesale Establishment (CWE), a government agency, which buys for Sri Lanka’s largest supermarket chain.

Pesticide-free rice was produced by 30 farmers in the area. The programme is so successful that the farmers want to form a co- operative and set up their own mill. These farmers, operating through the Uva Agricultural Marketing Initiative, plan to sell 200,000 kg of such rice to CWE outlets, during the October to February rice season.

A private company has also approached programme authorities to buy this rice for export to Britain every month starting October, says Uva provincial council director Dassanayake.

“The CWE also wants a lot of vegetables and cereals, which we are supplying,” he says. Micro-irrigation schemes, begun under the UNDP programme, have lowered production costs because there is less use of water and fuel.

The Monaragala region of Uva had large wells to irrigate farms, but there was a lot of wastage and damage to plants. “We have used the existing agro-wells and are channeling the water to fields through a series of tubes and pipes in a scheme that was earlier successful in Israel and Taiwan,” says UNDP’s Kasturiarachchi.

The farmers are also being encouraged to grow in greenhouses, which allows all year round production. “In a controlled environment, you can supply the required amount of nutrients for the plants to grow throughout the year. The plants are not subject to the vagaries of weather and pests,” he says.

Though the capital outlay is initially high, farmers are helped with credit offered by commercial banks. Some farmers have increased yields and incomes by four to five times and paid off all loans in a period of less than two years, says the UNDP official.