Heading for sustainable food security

The ascent of agro-technology as well as benevolent farming policies have drawn Sri Lanka towards sustainable food security for good. It is abundantly clear that the doomsday predictions of food shortages of the 90s have been dispelled irrefutably. The overall allocation for paddy purchases during the current Yala season reached a colossal Rs three billion this July

We are getting into an era of high-yielding, disease and insect resistant varieties of crops as a rule now in Asia. Sri Lanka’s Mahaveli farmers had harvested successive good crop seasons in a row. Years of sustained growth policies have paid off.

The urgency of changing consumption patterns, averting adverse climate damage, protecting the amount of arable land and ensuring adequate water levels are vital to the scenario described above.

Overall, we are better equipped in achieving the massive increase in food crop production (at least 50 percent increase) that will be required by 2050 to meet global food demands. Additional three billion would enter the population stream by that date.

Wagering better times

Farming predictions are in for better times. Matt Ridley a well-known British agro-science writer in his book The Rational Optimist has convincingly made a case that collective innovation by human beings has taken root perhaps in a far more profound manner than our mastery over language or capacity for imitation and social learning earlier on. Matt has drawn from the underlying Darwinian theory of evolution as well as Adam Smith fee enterprise prognosis.

Matt describing how prosperity evolved over the decades made the case that our planet is not in a precipitous freefall as suggested by some.

Progress in innovation amidst occasional retardation is the central theme of Ridley’s monumental work. He believes that humans are uniquely distinguished by the ability to innovate.

He added that specialization is inherently germane to all this. The cumulative improvement occurring in society is at its zenith now. Technologies are being improved at a faster pace.

Several others have also drawn from the so called “faster amortization of capital” idea that capital is no longer held in bondage confined to a few monopolists but in a broad-based ownership pattern. Thanks to the accessibility to the Internet, knowledge is no longer the exclusive prerogative of a few. Production of wealth seemed to occur with the least amount of effort and capital-unprecedented in human history.

Benefit to agriculture

Ridley believes that agriculture is benefitting from the technological progress as never seen before. No matter which way we look at it there is indisputable statistical proof that we are better off every decade than the one before. Ridley cites the examples such as California’s clean air innovations that wiped out the haze of the ozone pollution, the vaccination rates in Bangladesh that took care of many diseases and the life expectancy progress in Japan unheard of before. We could add our own rice growers in the Mahaveli region or China’s spectacular expansion in growing crops. These successes herald greater things to come.

To cap it all, access to information has offset many of the evils of globalization that had provided the West an entrenched advantage. The off-setting phenomenon is there now-the farmer in Asia could access knowhow as easily as anyone elsewhere with the click of the “mouse”. Thanks to rapid research engines like Google or Bing. Innovation is no longer the birthright of the privileged or the rich.

Technocrats do not thrive on ivory towers but work amidst the average farmers and factory hands trying to improve their methods of production. Capital is no longer the preserve of a few. Networking is now the norm.

We are inching towards the goal of feeding a world as humungous as three billion or more. It is not a presumptuous prediction but a testimony to our greatest achievement, innovation infinite in quantity.

The emphasis is on new approach to crop management including modified irrigation regimes, seed treatments to protect against pests and diseases: all germane to better farming. The new breed of farmers now recognizes their applicability.

The new mindset takes into account agro-ecological approaches probe the potential interactions between plants, animals, microorganisms and the physical environment within agricultural systems-avoiding trial and error methods. It is well-known that the ‘push-pull’ system for pest management in maize crops has worked very well.

By growing a border of Napier grass which is more attractive to moths than the maize for laying their eggs, yields have grown up substantially. In addition, rows of maize are intercropped with rows of the forage legume silver-leaf which repels stem-borer moths away from maize.

As I write there is news that over 100,000 acres of arable land lying fallow due to the war are being readied for food production.

Farmers in Jaffna, Kilinochchi and Mullaitivu would be provided with two bushels of seed paddy each in the coming season. More than 137,650 acres of fallow fields have been cultivated in the three areas so far.