Ominous signs

Tuesday 28th December, 2021

Fear continues to be expressed in agricultural circles about an impending food shortage. Former Secretary to the Ministry of Agriculture Prof. Uditha Jayasinghe, who was hounded out of his job recently for expressing dissent, is not alone in sounding this warning. Most experts are of the same view. The general consensus is that a food crisis is bound to result from a huge drop in the domestic agricultural output owing to the current fertiliser shortage, and the crippling forex crunch, which has stood in the way of food imports.

President Gotabaya Rajapaksa reiterated, at a meeting with a group of editors in Colombo, yesterday, that there had been nothing sudden about the government’s organic fertiliser drive, which had been presented to the public in his policy programme before the 2019 presidential election. Things, however, had not moved the way he expected them to, he said. What one gathered from his side of the story was that his plan had been to use 30% of agricultural land for organic farming first, and then expand the area gradually, but the officials entrusted with implementing the project had not carried it out according to his specifications. If so, it is not too late for a course correction; the government’s fertiliser experiment that has gone pear-shaped can be discontinued immediately with farmers being given what they need urgently to save their crops and thereby prevent a food shortage; thereafter, the organic fertiliser drive could be re-launched systematically, as originally planned, with all precautions being taken to prevent a repetition of mistakes that have caused yield losses and hardships to farmers. All stakeholders, especially agricultural scientists, will have to be consulted and their views taken on board.

True, not all opponents of organic farming are driven by a genuine desire to save the agricultural sector; there are sinister elements furthering the interests of the agrochemical industry, which spares no pains to promote its sales and is not concerned about people’s health or the environment, at all. However, it will be a mistake for the government to tar all critics of its botched fertiliser experiment with the same brush, and reject their views out of hand. There are independent, patriotic experts voicing dissenting views based on scientific data about the fertiliser issue, and their opinions should be heeded if further trouble is to be averted.

Minister of Agriculture Mahindananda Aluthgamage is apparently all at sea. He does a great deal of tilting at windmills and bellows rhetoric. Some public officials in key positions, tasked with the implementation of national programmes, also seem to have cognitive deficits. So, it is not advisable for the government to depend solely on their briefings to have a clear picture of the fertiliser crisis, or any other problem for that matter.

If the President cares to invite the protesting farmers’ associations to a discussion, he will be able to obtain first-hand accounts of what is happening out there, and adopt remedial measures. Had he been conducting his Gama Samaga Pilisandara programme, and meeting villagers engaged in agriculture, he would have been able to keep his ear to the ground, but that initiative came to an abrupt end owing to the spread of the pandemic.

The fertiliser mess has to be sorted out without further delay to ensure that the feared food shortage will not come to pass. However, that alone will not help meet the problem head on. Other measures such as a national cultivation drive have been proposed as a way out. All of them have to be tried. India is struggling to ward off another wave of Covid-19 infections due to the spread of the Omicron variant of coronavirus; it has even imposed a night curfew in Delhi, and the day may not be far off when this country has to do likewise. We do not want any other problems such as a food shortage to contend with, do we?