A kilo of sugar costs five kilos of paddy: JVP

by Saman Indrajith

The fact that a farmer has to sell five kilos of paddy to buy a kilo of sugar at present market prices is a testimony to the government economic mismanagement reneging its election promise to help the poor and downtrodden to uplift their lives, says Namal Karunaratne,  national organizer of JVP-led All Ceylon Farmer’s Federation.

Speaking at the Online Farmer’s rally under the theme of “Crisis of agriculture and farmers’ struggle” via internet on Wednesday, Karunaratne said that the dire plight of farmers was not an outcome of an accident but was a result of series of processes of economic mismanagement under all governments since independence, especially by those after 1977.

“The objective of those economic policies is clear – that is to keep the farmers out of agriculture. Their attempts have been successful because no child of a farmer no longer wants to be a farmer someday, seeing the plight of their parents,” Karunaratne said.

He said that the neo-liberal economic policies have systematically made farmers redundant to a community of people living on government relief packages.

“The farmers do not get a due price for their products. The governments have left them at the mercy of the middlemen. They have neither fertilizer nor chemicals they need for their cultivations. In some other areas, they complain that they have been adversely affected as a result of not receiving seeds.

“After the pandemic, farmers in some districts have had to throw away their harvests because they were unable to sell their produce. Some were forced to sell their crops for a pittance,” the former JVP MP Karunaratne said.

President of the Ampara District Farmers’ Associations, CH Kumara, Chairman of Nocchiyagama MILCO Farmers’ Association, Susantha Fernando and Prof LM Abeywickrama of the Agriculture Faculty of the University of Ruhuna also addressed the online rally.