While Sri Lanka is now fully committed to the election frenzy, as the Presidential Election nears, and the prospects of a General Election seems around the bend, the Presidential candidates and their supporters seem to have forgotten the painful journey the island has endured over the last few years.
From 2019, Sri Lanka has had to navigate one of its biggest security failures, with the Easter Sunday attacks, followed by a global pandemic and resultant shocks to health, trade and economy, a slew of poor governance choices, and ill-advised policies, which pushed many Sri Lankans to the brink. Facing a fully-fledged economic crisis, and having declared bankruptcy, Sri Lanka was also challenged with a food crisis.
Looking back, a year ago, Sri Lanka’s urban poor faced a serious food security crisis, while much of rural Sri Lanka was forced to find home-grown produce to sustain themselves. Between June 2022, and May 2024, Sri Lanka had a food security scare. Many food items were not freely available, or were priced beyond reach inflation and racketeering soared. Those who suffered from it most were the urban poor, and some communities in the low-income segment.
According to the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), food security in Sri Lanka was improving across all provinces, according to a joint report by multiple agencies in the third quarter of last year (2023). The report estimated that nearly 3.9 million people or 17 percent of the population is in moderate acute food insecurity which is nearly a 40 percent decrease from June/July in 2022. According to them, nearly 10,000 people are severely acute food insecure, which was down from 66,000 people last in 2020. Despite this positive trend, food insecurity remains high in certain districts last year, especially Kilinochchi, Nuwara Eliya, Mannar, Batticaloa, Vavuniya, and Jaffna. The highest level of acute food insecurity was found within the tea plantation communities in the Estate sector and among daily-wage labourers and households who rely on social assistance programmes, such as Samurdhi, as their main source of income.
As such, Sri Lanka can ill-afford to stumble into another food security crisis. However, the food security initiatives we heard of last year, have evaporated now, and so has the political will to address the matter. Singapore in 2019, announced a food security initiative ‘30 by 30,’ trying to reach 30% of food needs produced domestically in. Later when the pandemic hit, it gave Singaporeans an unfamiliar sight of empty supermarket shelves. However, today, with the passing of the five-year mark, Singapore is seriously questioning delays for the goal set in 2019, especially due to failures or re-configurations of high-tech farms; which the city state pinned their hopes on to meet the targets. Singapore’s problem is that they have a highly limited land mass which they can grow crops in. However, Sri Lanka, despite having three times the population, has ample land which can be used for food production, but is laying wasted.
In Sri Lanka’s case, there are serious shortcomings in strategic planning when it comes to food security. Sri Lanka cultivation, largely weather dependent, lacks a whole of Government approach to mitigate legacy issues. Further, Sri Lanka does not maintain a strategic national reserve of grains, like rice, mung beans and other cereals. State-owned storage facilities are derelict and prone to corruption, with many paddy farmers, refusing to store paddy in the ageing facilities citing poor environmental control and pest attacks which take a toll on the grains which are stored. Sri Lanka desperately needs to review its food security structure and put in place means to maintain mills and store rice and other gains to act as a buffer stock.
Given that Sri Lanka will continue to face challenging economic conditions in the foreseeable future, and with continued disruptions to global trade and supply chains likely to grow, Sri Lanka should make food security a national priority.