Agriculture has become agribusiness - Editorial

As an online controversy or Facebook sarcasm provides palatable food for thought in Malaysia over Prime Minister Najib Abdul Razak saying people should eat more of the low-cost and popular water spinach kangkung, Sri Lanka also needs to put jokes apart and reflect deeply on its food and nutrition policy or the lack of a policy.

 We do have a Ministry of Health and Nutrition and an officially approved Nutrition Society of Sri Lanka (NSSL). But leading nutritionists and consumer rights activists ask what the NSSL has been doing to educate and empower the people on important issues relating to nutrition.  For instance, they ask why the NSSL was silent during the recent crisis or controversy over milk powder when even the Government Medical Officers’ Association spoke out strongly for the revival of fresh milk production in Sri Lanka. The activists ask whether the NSSL, like many other medical associations is under obligation to vested interests such as trans-national food or milk companies which have sponsored events of the NSSL.

Most western nutrition models-though widely promoted and popular especially among the elite and middle-class – have failed miserably and are being seriously reconsidered by right-thinking people in the west. These models, manufactured by trans-national companies, have produced large-scale obesity which has reached the proportions of ‘globesity’. As a result millions of people in those countries are suffering from non-communicable diseases (NCDs) such as diabetes, high cholesterol, and heart ailments.

For more than 2500 years agriculture has been an important part of Sri Lanka’s civilisation and culture. The word agriculture itself shows there was a culture aspect in cultivation. We know the story of the Lord Buddha telling his ‘weda mahathaya’ to go out and find even a single plant which did not have medicinal, food or nutritional value. The ‘weda mahathaya’ came back empty-handed, meaning that every plant or tree, small or big had some value. At that time we did not have or even hear of any of the imported chemical fertilisers, weedicides and pesticides which are aggressively promoted today in this era of the globalised capitalist market economy where selfishness and greed are central factors, though they are colour-washed with seemingly good words such as competitiveness, creativity and value addition. For some 35 years, the governments of Sri Lanka have blindly followed or swallowed wholesale the market economy policies with some of its consequences being spotlighted in the Daily Mirror Editorial of January 6.

 Under the headline ‘Are we eating to die?’ The Daily Mirror pointed out that most of the food we were eating ranging from rice to beetroot and bananas to brinjals had been polluted by agro-chemicals.

Today agriculture to a large extent has become agribusiness. That means it is no longer part of our culture that revered rulers like King Parakramabahu promoted through organic farming and the engineering marvels known as ‘wewas’. Sri Lanka was then known as the rice bowl of Asia. But today our rulers are boasting of making Sri Lanka the miracle of Asia while allowing trans-national pharmaceutical food and chemical companies among others to run or over-run the economy of our country.

Opposition United National Party Leader Ranil Wickremasinghe, addressing a Duruthu Poya meeting in Maharagama, summed up the situation well when he said the first Mahinda had brought the three golden precepts of Buddhism to Sri Lanka. In this rein of the second Mahinda we are seeing a ‘kudu’ culture, an ethanol culture and a casino culture. Any more bets on what might happen next?