• Economic crisis has had a significant impact on agricultural sector
• Climate change forces us to open our eyes to new opportunities
• Women in agriculture often have extra challenges to overcome
• Numerous opportunities for New Zealand-Sri Lanka collaboration 

Despite the impact of the economic crisis on Sri Lanka’s agricultural sector, there’s a lot of hope and huge potential for the sector to grow once the country establishes the right frameworks and enables its people to create, innovate, and find solutions to the challenges they are facing, says New Zealand’s Agricultural Trade Envoy Mel Poulton.

Commenting on opportunities for Sri Lanka-New Zealand cooperation in the field, she asserted that there were numerous opportunities towards that end, including in food tech and food science, new product categories, or new sectors.

“There’s always opportunity. It’s about finding what we can learn together, what we can grow together, and what we can both benefit from together,” she noted, in an interview with The Sunday Morning during a visit to Sri Lanka earlier in the week.

Poulton also spoke about climate change, New Zealand’s agricultural success story, her own experience in farming, and shared challenges and opportunities.

Following are excerpts:

What does your role as New Zealand’s Special Agricultural Trade Envoy encompass and what does it translate into on the ground in Sri Lanka?

I am here as New Zealand’s Agricultural Trade Envoy and I represent New Zealand’s food and fibre sectors. As a food producer myself, I bring in the farmer’s lens for opportunities for collaboration and cooperation. I am trying to get an understanding of what is happening in Sri Lanka and how we can partner effectively in the coming years – that’s what I’m here for.

It’s been a privilege to be able to meet with fantastic people, including in academia – we visited the University of Peradeniya, we went up to the north west and met with some smallholder women farmers, and we’ve been to various farming systems, including a banana plantation – and it’s been great to meet people and innovative young entrepreneurs who are doing some great things in Sri Lanka. 

It’s been fantastic to get a bit of an overview on what is happening here and the potential of Sri Lanka.

What are your impressions of Sri Lanka’s agricultural sector?

It’s certainly been suffering. Clearly the economic crisis here has had a significant impact on the agricultural sector, but I see that there’s a lot of hope and a huge amount of potential for the sector to really grow once Sri Lanka establishes the right frameworks and enables the people to be able to create and innovate and find solutions to the challenges that they are facing.

The potential is enormous for Sri Lanka.

Could you briefly list the key aspects that have made agriculture so successful in New Zealand?

First and foremost it’s our people and then it’s the soft and hard infrastructure that has enabled people to innovate and create solutions, be it at farm level, in science, research and development, and academia, be it in the service support sector – accountants, bank managers, banking services – right through to seed companies and farming retail companies.

They have all been able to innovate and create new ways of doing business and working, through to industry level, where there are big groups that are engaging with Government and with farmers and steering the sector to success.

Then we have the Government itself, which has been playing an enormously important role in presenting New Zealand on the international stage and also having the regulatory frameworks in place to enable the whole food and fibre sector to thrive.

What are the lessons you bring from your own experience in farming that you could share with Sri Lanka, especially with women in agriculture?

Women in agriculture often have extra challenges that we have to overcome.

One of the things that I’ve learned over time is being very clear about your priorities and about taking a whole system integrated approach to what you do for running a sharp, profitable, effective business that is sustainable economically, sustainable environmentally, and sustainable socially, and having the ability to innovate and create solutions to the challenges we are facing, even if it includes climate change.

One of the things that underpins New Zealand’s agricultural sector is that we’ve removed subsidies, so it’s forced us to be really creative about how we run our businesses; it’s forced us to take full responsibility for all of the decisions we make and to ensure that we are proper stewards of the land and our natural resources, proper stewards of our crops and our livestock, and proper stewards of our people and communities.

The other thing that makes New Zealand really successful and that I’ve learned as a woman in farming is that we are market-led and market-driven, so everything that we do is trying to serve the needs of our customer and end consumer and being agile, nimble, and flexible to be able to meet those needs.

In terms of climate change, what are the shared challenges for New Zealand and Sri Lanka?

I think internationally all farmers around the world are facing the impacts of climate change and the opportunities of climate change.

The impacts of climate change could be pests and diseases in some places, it could be the lack of water, or it could be just the temperature changes affecting production. But at the same time for some people it might actually be an opportunity; it might force you to diversify your business into other things, which ends up creating an amazing opportunity for something totally different.

Climate change will force us to open our eyes to new opportunities and new ways of doing business. Change is always a process of evolution and we can see that at sector level and across nations, through the course of history.

Climate change is creating a catalyst for a new level of change and we’ve got to identify the opportunities and not be scared about it.

Which areas do you identify as opportunities for cooperation between New Zealand and Sri Lanka?

There has been a very long partnership between Sri Lanka and New Zealand, particularly in the dairy sector, and I think both Governments have identified that there is certainly an area for future cooperation.

Agriculture is broad for both of our countries and there are numerous opportunities for collaboration – food tech and food science, right through to new product categories or new sectors in which we have not done so much work together.

There’s always opportunity. It’s about finding what we can learn together, what we can grow together, and what we can both benefit from together. It’s not about one of us benefitting more than the other but how we can actually do this together.

What are your thoughts on Sri Lanka’s ongoing economic crisis and its impact on agriculture?

I’ve been travelling around the country and it’s obvious that the economic crisis is having an impact on everyday people and people in agriculture. 

One of the things that has been identified by a number of farmers and people working with livestock is the challenge around feed and the impacts around access to fertiliser that has an ongoing effect. We really empathise with the challenges faced by them and the cost of fertiliser, which New Zealand also shares. We’ve seen an enormous rise in the cost of fertiliser in New Zealand also, which has an ongoing impact. 

You’ve got the structures already in place and the people here are ready to be able to solve the problems, to solve the challenges; it’s really about having the heart, the vision, the will, and the determination to work together in ways that you might have never worked before.

It’s the same for New Zealand. We’re finding that with the challenges that we are facing right now, we are having to work together across sectors and even within sectors, across disciplines; collaboration needs to happen in order to solve the problems and challenges that we are facing.

For New Zealand and Sri Lanka, even though we are in different operating contexts, the principles apply that we have to bust the silos and work together more within our sectors, across our sectors, interdisciplinary, right through the whole ecosystem, and also do that internationally.

One of the things that our Minister of Agriculture talks about is ‘how can New Zealand be good for the world and good in the world?’ and I often talk about ‘how can New Zealand be a solutions partner with others where we share the same challenges?’ We need to work together to create the solutions to the problems that we share.

Which Sri Lankan agricultural products do you believe have global market potential?

I think anything has global potential; it’s how you go about it and whether or not there is a market that wants to pull that product. Where is the demand? We have to make sure that whatever we are doing is actually demand-driven. 

Oftentimes in agriculture throughout history we’ve grown things and then hoped that there was a market there. We really need to think about how we identify what the market is and how we can meet the market need. 

There is potential everywhere; it’s just identifying the opportunities and then shaping the value chain to be able to deliver to those opportunities.