Sarath Fernando
Movement for National Land and Agricultural Reforms (MONLAR)

Hunger in Sri Lanka today has become one of the worst crimes. However, those who could and should take urgent remedial action have not yet decided to look at this situation with concern that it deserves.

16 October is declared the World Food Day to bring to awareness the shame of hunger and starvation that prevails worldwide.

World Food Summit Commitment

The World Food Summit (WFS), held in Rome from 13 to 17 November 1996, with representatives of 186 countries participating, including 41 presidents and 41 prime ministers, highlighted the shocking fact that nearly 840 million - about 20 percent of the world’s population - go to sleep in hunger every day. About 200 million of them are little children.

Though with some reluctance on the part of the richest countries such as the United States, the leaders finally agreed that "food is a human right" which is obvious and so vital to those hundreds of millions of people, now in all the parts of the world (including the West). For whom "right to life" is threatened as a result of being deprived the "right to food."

What the WFS attempted was to convince the world community that 20 percent of its people (about 20 percent of whom are little children who should be fed, nourished and protected by adults) have to go hungry, starve and become malnourished in a world that is producing more food than necessary to feed everybody sufficiently and that this should not be tolerated. This was shameful when the world is about to enter the third millennium with all its claimed achievements in science and technology. Communication revolution is said to have brought into human society the possibility of such close links and mutual concern and assistance.

The WFS succeeded in making a joint commitment to eliminate hunger and death caused by starvation and under nourishment. It was seen as a responsibility of all the governments, the civil society, the private businesses and the international institutions such as the U.N. organisations, the World Bank, etc.

‘Food for All’

As a strategy of achieving the above goal a campaign "Food for All" has been launched under the guidance of the Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO) in which all countries are expected to participate and contribute to.

One of the programmes envisaged is a "Special Programme for Food Security" in 85 selected low income, food deficit countries, of which Sri Lanka is identified as one.

A Country of Hunger, Malnutrition and Starvation

Sri Lanka, a country that claimed to have achieved the best social development results (as identified by a high physical quality of life index) in this part of the world, South Asia, and was among the advanced countries in this respect just a few decades ago, is today a country that has deteriorated very rapidly to the lowest rank. This has been the trend particularly during the last two decades.

The Sri Lanka Position Paper on Food Security presented by the government to the WFS in Rome in 1996 says the following regarding the overall nutritional status:

"The nutritional status of the Sri Lankan population has not compared well with other indicators, such as high literacy rate, etc.

"The main nutrition disorders commonly found in Sri Lanka are deficiency disorders that include protein, energy malnutrition and micro-nutrient deficiencies, such as iron, iodine and vitamin A.

"The per capita energy intake in the country has declined during the last decade, according to a Medical Research Institute (MRI) study. In 1979, the average intake was 2,316 K cal/day, and this had declined to 1,548 (which is a 33 percent reduction). It would be seen that the energy intake is much less than the amount recommended by the FAO /WHO [World Health Organisation], which is 2,530 K cal/day for men and 2,200 K cal/day for women.

"Between 1980 and 1990, the average energy intake was reduced from 2,119 K cal/day to 1,548 K cal/day."

Concerning low birth weight and the nutritional status of children, it also says that "statistics show that the prevalence of low birth weight, which is associated with maternal nutrition, is as high as 18.7 percent." (Recent World Bank reports and the figures quoted by some of the prominent nutritionists recently say that between 28 percent to 30 percent of the babies are of low birth weight.)

Thus, a significant proportion of children begin life with a nutrition handicap. The figures in Table 1 indicate the effects of malnutrition among children in the different sectors.

This report further says, "In children, the prevalence of wasting is on the increase, which is indicated by a deficit of weight to height. This is due to undernourishment associated with poverty and the lowering of purchasing power." (Table 2)

Why Hunger Is a Crime in Sri Lanka?

An islandwide study done by UNICEF several years ago said that 60 percent of the children below five years were malnourished. It is well-known that 25 percent of the growth of brain cells of a person takes place before birth and about 85 percent of this growth should take place before the age of five years. A child victim of malnutrition during this age period will not achieve this growth, and it cannot be recovered later in life.

In addition, 65 percent of mothers giving birth are said to suffer anemia. Thus, they give birth to low birth-weight babies.

The Sinhala newspaper Divaina reported the death of a child six months old and the mother gave evidence at the post-mortem saying that the child was born prematurely after seven months of pregnancy. The mother did not have the capacity to breast-feed the child. They were a family surviving on daily wage labour, not finding work every day. It was not possible for them to earn enough to buy milk to feed the child, and the child died since she was not fed.

It is not rarely that children faint daily at school assemblies or during class hours, and teachers say that many such children often hide the fact that they come to school not only without breakfast but with hardly any dinner the previous night. There are many children in these schools who walk out of school during lunch intervals when other children have their lunch, merely to hide the fact that they have not brought any lunch with them.

It is said by those who visit the war-affected areas of the Vanni District that the number of children fainting in school can increase up to 20 to 30 daily while in other village schools it could be just three or four per day.

It is also to be understood and recognised that children who are subject to such handicaps, disadvantages and injustice in their very early ages are expected to enter into the tremendous battle for survival in education.

It is not only among the rich and middle classes in urban areas that the little children below fifth grade are pushed so hard to jump the first hurdle in their race in education at the fifth grade scholarship examination. They are then expected to compete with richer children with all the additional advantages of attending schools with good teachers and additional tuition outside.

The possibilities and facilities made available to the richer sections of society outside the official education in schools and the complete monopolising of the media by sellers of children’s fancy food and goods have completely removed the concern and consciences needed in broader society to look into the educational, health and food needs of these poor children and their families.

This crime of hunger and malnutrition against the weakest, the youngest and the most vulnerable is shameful and totally intolerable in a country such as Sri Lanka since it is largely a result of the conscious decisions taken by the people at the topmost levels of decision-making.

It is even worse when one looks at the facts not only of early history but also of the early post-independence decades. This needs to be brought to the urgent attention of the leaders for two reasons. Firstly, it is because the policies and plans at both national and international levels in relation to agriculture, trade and food security seem to be oriented not towards improving the situation of the poor and the hungry but towards making their situation worse. This is done in the name of protecting trade rights of the rich multinational and local big businesses at the cost of the rights of the poor farmers and the rural women to use their abilities and limited resources in their surroundings to feed themselves, their little ones and ordinary people in their own country. This is in spite of the fact that they have proved they could do this, if unobstructed, at low cost and in a sustainable manner.

These decisions that came in the form of "free trade," an "open and globalised market," "modern and advanced technology for higher and better yields," "commercial agriculture" and "export orientation" and also in the form of international agreements, such as the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) (which includes the Trade-Related Intellectual Property Rights [TRIPs] Agreement), the WTO and the South Asian Preferential Trade Area (SAPTA), which would further eliminate the rights of the poor in the villages, towns, plantations and coastal and inland fishing regions to produce or have food in ways that are economically viable to them.

It leads to a process that would take away the right and the potential they have in using their land, water and other natural environmental resources while eroding the traditional historical knowledge base and experience in feeding themselves, their children and the yet-to-be born. Their ability and the traditional cultural practices of recognising their responsibility to look into the food and nutritional needs of their neighbour are being made impossible.

Secondly, these trends demand serious consideration and rethinking because we, at least in Sri Lanka and several other countries with similar natural, historical and cultural backgrounds, still have a tremendous potential to obtain a considerable share of the food, nutrition and health requirements of the poor as a "free gift of nature." What is necessary is to decide to create conditions, policies, strategies, plans and attitudes that would allow and enhance the capacities of rural small-scale food producers to use their potential to strengthen the contribution that their natural environment could make and to utilise their own capacities in subsistence farming for household, community level and local food security.

It can also be shown that such a process would have tremendous potential in contribution to the overall growth of the economy and provide meaningful livelihoods, when compared with the little we have achieved within the last 20 years when we believed that to overcome poverty and to provide more employment opportunities we could achieve rapid economic growth by bringing in large-scale foreign investment, which would strengthen our position within the international market.

The economic costs and the social or human development losses that we have incurred in the 20 years efforts to attract and strengthen foreign and local private sector investments have been tremendous with hardly any achievements in terms of poverty reduction through "trickling down" of the expected "growth." This article, however, does not provide enough space to go in to a detailed discussion of such losses.

A few facts, however, would amply illustrate this aspect.

1. Income disparities have increased tremendously during this period, making Sri Lanka only second to Brazil in the World Bank’s listing of countries on the basis of income disparities.

2. Rural poverty in Sri Lanka has had the sharpest increase among 114 countries studied by the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) between 1965 and 1988. In 1965 only 13 percent of the rural population in Sri Lanka was below poverty line and in 1988 it had increased to 46 percent. The number of rural poor had increased from 1,163,000 to 6,101,000.

3. Youth uprisings caused about 60,000 disappearances in the South between 1988 to 1990 while the war in the North has led to at least another 60,000 deaths mostly of the youth. The reasons for both these events and the continuing tendency among the youth to adopt such violent means include the fact that the economic processes adopted in the country make it impossible to meaningfully absorb and cover a large section of our population within the globalised market.

The adjustments made over the last 20 years have resulted in loss of livelihoods for many more people than the employment opportunities that this process created.

The proposals now made by the World Bank and the top economic advisers to the government, such as the National Development Council, envisages a process of eliminating further millions of small farmers from their land and from the cultivation of domestic food crops. For example, Non-Plantation Sector Policy Alternatives: Report of the World Bank in March 1996, the joint report of the World Bank and Sri Lankan experts entitled Sri Lanka in the Year 2000: An Agenda for Action and the agricultural policy recommendations report and action plan of the National Development Council of 2 December 1996 all aim at policy adjustments towards "freeing the land market," "freeing the labour market," etc, to create much more cheap labour and cheaply available land resources to attract large investors in export-oriented commercial agriculture and industry at the expense of local food production and agricultural livelihoods for the rural poor.

These processes and policies are now being accepted and implemented regardless of the failure of this strategy during the last 20 years and the obvious disadvantages we face in the processes of globalisation when GATT, WTO, SAPTA, etc, entered the country with their policies pushing hundreds of thousands of rural small farmers, small fish workers, plantation workers and even industrial workers towards the possibility of losing their livelihoods and the resources for producing their food or the access to food due to a loss of employment.

Globalised (Liberalised) Market in Sri Lanka Benefits Only the Rich

It is fairly clear that our efforts to enter effectively into the globalised market has not benefited the poor in the country and Sri Lanka as a whole has failed to benefit from these efforts so far.

The new proposals though expected to create greater attraction to investors and to foreign capital are very likely to create opposite results since the intensification of poverty will only weaken the local market, the technical skills base, the productivity of our labour and eliminate our capacity to compete for the type of higher technology industries. As already seen, the political environment of increased social and political unrest, the need to increase investments on internal security and arms and the loss of democratic environment are likely to create much bigger disadvantages even for the envisaged export-oriented growth and attraction of foreign capital investments.

Failed Poverty-Alleviation Strategies

The above considerations should compel us to think seriously about alternative approaches and strategies to feed the hungry and to eliminate malnutrition among children and mothers. Poverty alleviation strategies worked out so far under the guidance and assistance of the World Bank, such as the Janasaviya Trust Fund (JTF) and the Samurdhi Movement, have clearly failed to make any worthwhile impact on poverty, hunger and malnutrition. This is mainly because these were intentionally designed so as not to make any change in the so-called "free market" structural adjustments and "globalisation" processes, which are the main processes that create and intensify poverty. While the main economic strategies in their effort to create cheap labour, high expenditure on providing infrastructure, on liberalised imports and tax benefits to the richest have consciously reduced service and opportunities to the poorer sections of society to produce and sell their products, the above poverty alleviation approaches have only attempted to keep the poorest within the market by providing them some relief.

Almost all attempts at providing self-employment to the "targeted" poor communities have failed since the market, as it is planned, works to their disadvantage.

The overwhelming concern that the top policy markers have in looking after the rich investors has allowed very little concern about the poor and the hungry. This is proved by the fact that the JTF, later renamed National Development Trust Fund (NDTF), failed to utilise much of the funds obtained from the World Bank for projects to help the poor and to overcome the shocking situation of malnutrition. About 1,300 million rupees (US million) allocated were taken back after six years. Over 500 million (US million) left over was from allocations for nutrition of children.

Another indication of this lack for concern for the hunger was the omission and delay of the Sri Lanka government to apply for the Special Programme on Food Security for which Sri Lanka was entitled. In spite of several reminders by the FAO office in Colombo since March 1997, the relevant ministries had not taken any action to enter into this programme until mid-October 1997.

Food and Nutrition for the Poor Can Be a Free Gift of Nature

As we have already described, hunger and malnutrition has become a serious problem in Sri Lanka not because we lack the natural environmental resources or the human resource potential to overcome these, but only because the policies and approaches adopted have completely failed to give serious attention to the hunger and malnutrition among the poor.

Sri Lanka has had a long history when the ordinary people in the villages knew and had the capacity to make use of the free gifts of nature to feed and nourish the people sufficiently. This capacity and knowledge base had been weakened and destroyed gradually during the period of nearly two centuries when we allowed the international market forces to dominate and decide on the economic processes. During the last two decades, particularly when we allowed these same market forces to take complete control over the production and marketing processes, the poorer sections of society, the rural small-scale producers and the poorer consumers had been almost completely pushed out of survival within the market economy.

Thus, it is now relevant than ever before for these poor to think of the advantages and the potentials they have in finding ways and means of feeding themselves and nourishing their children outside the market economy that no longer sees them as necessary and useful.

If one carefully analyses the responses of the people of civil society that are emerging throughout the world to the existing crises in the present development processes, such as those identified and expressed at the world summits of the United Nations, from the Earth Summit in Rio in 1992 to the WFS in Rome in 1996 (the crisis in environment and rapid destruction of natural resources [Food Summit in Rome]; human rights violations and the suppression of rights [Human Rights Summit in Vienna]; growing poverty, disparities and social disintegration [Social Summit in Copenhagen in 1995]; suppression and exploitation of women [Women’s Summit in Beijing in 1996]), they are strongly emphasising that the "market" as it is structured today cannot solve any of these problems, and, in fact, they are being aggravated by the present processes of globalisation and restructuring.

The right, the capacity and the need to allow the potential of those who are now pushed out and marginalised in these processes to find effective solutions, too, were highlighted. The NGO Declaration at the WFS particularly emphasised that "market alone cannot solve food insecurity" and that it was necessary to strengthen the small producers and review their traditional knowledge and experiences. The clear conclusions of the study, The State of World Rural Poverty, published by the IFAD in 1992 were that recognition and strengthening of the contribution made by small, rural producers was the needed approach to overcome rural poverty. It is well recognised that this is necessary to prevent the present processes of environmental damage caused by large-scale commercial agriculture and by the rapid displacement of small farmers from their present farmlands that pushes them to deforestation and to an unproductive urbanisation. The tremendous growth in the concern for safe food and the desire to adopt natural, ecological ways to produce them is obvious, in spite of the obstacles and restrictions created by the dominant forces in the "market" that utilise national and international political domination and financial control by the international financial institutions.

Non-Market Approaches to Food Security

"Economy" traditionally included several aspects. If we accept the broad and more complete definition of "economy" as the ways adopted by the people for their material survival, it has very meaningful and substantial components such as the "economy of nature" and the "non-market subsistence activities" of the people, which includes activities conducted by the households and often by small communities as their livelihoods that are usually not linked to market and are not given any market value.

In Sri Lanka too this has been a strong component. Apart from the purely economic need that keeps these aspects of people’s economic life alive, there has also been a strong cultural background and a set of social and religious values that helped and sustained them.

The logic of the present model and strategy of development as stated by the World Bank and our own policy-makers who follow the same logic is outlined in this way. They claim that their primary aim is to reduce poverty, hunger and related problems of the poor. It is said that to do this growth is necessary. For growth, we need capital investment for industry and agriculture to provide jobs, etc. This capital has to be attracted from outside by attracting foreign investment. To do this, we then have to provide cheap labour, land, resources, political stability, a subservient labour force, etc. Having done this now for 20 years, it is said we need to provide more, thus, a further reduction of social spending, further privatisation, a further removal of labour protection, a further freeing of land markets, labour markets and natural resources to be used by the expected investors. These taken together are most likely to lead to a massive loss of livelihoods, increased hunger and poverty. This amounts to say that we need to make people poorer to reduce poverty, that we need to reduce employment and increase the loss of livelihoods of people to reduce unemployment and a series of other equally absurd statements.

A Simpler Approach to Alleviate Hunger

As much of the hunger and poverty is in the rural areas, urban hunger and poverty increases as and when the rural poor are forced into migrating to cities, simply by destroying their rural livelihoods, without alternative opportunities and livelihoods created in the cities. This is very well seen in the present processes of urban migrations of the rural poor, in most Third World countries. Sri Lanka has a special feature where the youth thus rejected to be absorbed by the economy tend to engage themselves in rebellion or war.

Thus, maximising the potential that exists in the rural areas to provide sustainable livelihoods, maximising the food availability in the rural surroundings at low cost or no financial cost, maximising the overall productivity while strengthening the sustainable use of natural resources base for such livelihoods, minimising the need for external inputs that have to be obtained at high cost in the present market, adjusting the consumption patterns that are created not for better living but for the needs of market expansion are some of the essential elements of such a non-market dependent approach.

We can easily understand this approach by trying to work out a common package of approaches in sustainable, low-cost food production.

Most rural people have only small plots of land, which need to be used for the maximum period with the highest productivity possible. Thus, the package to be utilised would include:

• Protection and replenishment of the fertile topsoil by giving back the fertility that is removed in farming by adding organic manure, utilising methods of crop rotation, etc;

• Retention of as much water as possible in the soil for the longest period possible by preventing soil erosion, planting trees, keeping the soil covered, increasing the biomass;

• Using non-chemical farming methods and integrated pest management in paddy and other crops where this has been proved to be possible; and

• Adopting methods of farming that would be as close as possible to the natural ecosystem; using the environment, conserving it in a manner that maximises the free food availability and availability of other requirements, such as fodder, fuel, etc.

Moreover, there is much potential to increase the water availability in most of our water resources, tanks, reservoirs, wells and in the soil if these methods of conservation are applied sufficiently. Tree planting very widely, not only in the forest reservoirs or in areas identified for reforestation, but also in our home gardens, village surroundings, hills, catchment areas, etc, is quite possible. The idea could be to bring the forests into the village using agro-forestry to reverse the process that has currently taken place in which villages expand into the forests and destroy them.

How to Create Attractive Livelihoods in the Rural Economy

There is serious rethinking needed in working out strategies to ensure the survival of large sections of the world population who are rejected as unacceptable or unnecessary to the "globalised market" that has been so rapidly developed today. Many of them cannot survive unless viable alternatives are worked out. In Sri Lanka this could well be about half or more of the total population. The development of science and technology production processes, consumption patterns and attitudes, for quite some time, have been influenced and "distorted" by the requirements and dictates of the market forces. As a result, most of the scientists, technicians, scholars, etc, decide on their subject matter on the basis of the possibilities and potentials they would have in selling their knowledge in the market that pays them well. Thus, the contribution that they make towards some of the latest requirements in scientific and technological developments needed for those who are not effectively in the market is minimal. This is one of the reasons why some of the latest advancements in the fields of alternative sustainable agriculture, organic farming, ecological approaches, protection of bio-diversity, etc, have been very slow in coming to Sri Lanka. Almost a total ignorance or a total rejection could be seen, some of these latest developments are taking place throughout the world as necessary for future survival and for solving the serious development problems that have arisen today.

The approach that we have described as necessary to meet the food, nutrition and poverty alleviation needs of the poor in general and those of the rural areas in particular should be based on this alternative science and technology. Since much of this is based on the historical, traditional knowledge that our rural farmers have for centuries and since it is a science that can easily be grasped by any person who simply uses his/her experiences with nature, it can easily be given to our people. The large numbers of young people who are now rejected after some years of schooling, or at the university entrance level or even after university education as unemployable could become a very useful and effective vehicle to take these changes to the village communities. In fact, the contribution they could make to the increase in productivity both at national level as well as at the village household and community levels would be so high that they could easily be sustained by this additional enrichment that they would bring to the lives of the poor.

When compared with the massive investments that successive governments have made to provide infrastructure and other incentives to potential investors with very little returns and results, this absorption of the youth for this task, even if they are to be given some remuneration by the government, is fully worthwhile. This can be a very well recognised occupation if it is done with the necessary education and training in the new developments of science and technology for sustainable development, food security, sustainable agriculture, etc. The last 20 years of effort at "job creation" through export industries have only succeeded in creating a limited number of low-paid jobs in garment industries, which have already become insecure and could become even more so in the near future when terms of GATT, WTO, SAPTA, etc, are implemented. We are once more moving towards a situation that may conclude with a repetition of a violent rebellion by the youth and others who are discarded as unwanted by the globalised market that is designed for greater profit for those who are already rich.

Since we are now engaged in working out educational reforms, they should not be for the purpose of creating a large population of young people who are only waiting to be chosen by rich businesses (and only if they need them), forming a massive reserve army of cheap labour within a "free labour market." Instead, they could easily be a very valuable support force to the poor rural people to build themselves up as self-reliant contributors towards a healthy nation living in dignity. It is possible to envisage a process of giving this orientation a scientific background and practical training, either in school or as they leave school, and of the youth providing their services to the village communities for which a small remuneration could be given either by the community or even by utilising the funds of the government that are available for poverty alleviation or from the Global Environment Facility that already provides such funding to environmental projects or through the proposed Special Programme for Food Security under the Food for All Campaign.

Mahatma Gandhi, when introducing the wide use of the spinning wheel, was thinking of the serious injustice in reducing millions of people to a degrading and dehumanising state of not providing them their right to fruitful occupation. The above activity and process of motivating possibly hundreds thousands of people to be engaged in the noble task of ensuring food to the hungry from their surroundings, enriching and protecting nature, and in an activity aiming at stopping the present shameful and criminal situation of destroying the right of babies to nutrition and the right of mothers to give birth to healthy children would certainly restore their dignity even if they may not become terribly rich.

Sri Lanka today has become a country of death, destruction, violence and hatred. It is time for us to think seriously of regaining our values of non-violence, non-greed, compassion and of developing this compassion towards all beings. If planting trees, protecting them and nursing them, if protecting soil and water to feed our hungry and the weak could give us these values, should it not be a sufficient challenge and an incentive? We must demand an immediate stop to the "killer war" and embark on a "war to end the pain of hunger."