Political Rhetoric Or Sounding The Death Knell Of Lanka’s Agriculture?

By Chandre Dharmawardana –MAY 4, 2021

Dr. Chandre Dharmawardana

A quote attributed to the Greek play write Euripides says that “those whom the gods wish to destroy they first make mad”. Reading the news from Sri Lanka, one can only wonder if a prescient Euripides had Lanka’s successive rulers in mind.

The President has “vowed” to ban the import of fertilizers. Politicians are famous for vowing to bring rice from the moon. But they brought the consumer “Iti haal” and American flour. Australia worked hard on its organic agricultural content for THREE DECADES, but without keen-jerk bans. Even though some members of the “Viyathmaga” may be quite “Viyaru”, let us hope that there are enough sane people to exercise restraint, and be cautious with the ever precarious food supply of a nation.

You do not cut your supplies without alternatives on hand. The proposed alternative, “organic manure” is in extreme short supply. A hectare of paddy yielding even a mere five tonnes of grain needs 75-100 kg of nitrogen (N) depending on the soil. If you put more manure, it is a waste and a pollutant since plants absorb only a certain limit.  Even a hungry man cannot eat beyond his fill. A plant denied of any fertilizer uses what ever nitrogen found naturally in the soil, giving a very low harvest until the soil becomes totally infertile in a few years. But it may last till the next election, and that is good enough for the politicians and NGOs.

Organic manure, e.g., good cow manure, may contain 1-2 kg of N per tonne. So, to get 100 kg of N per hectare we need 50-100 TONNES of organic fertilizer. The mineral fertilizer that you bring on your tractor now needs 50 lorry loads in a 2-ton truck. Once in the farm, 100 tonnes (100,000 kg) of manure must be distributed. So the cost of labor for organic farming is orders of magnitude MORE than for normal farming, to get less of a harvest. Organic agriculture today feeds the elite, while the poor will face hunger unless the food is subsidized.

Such large mounds of humus-based fertilizer get washed away and add to asphyxiation of aquatic life in waterways, as always found near organic farms.

Sir Lanka has imported about 300,000 metric tons/year of urea, and this amounts to some 120,000 tonnes of N. So we need some 120 MILLION tonnes of organic manure once the ban is in place. This is close to the current GLOBAL OUTPUT of organic  manure! 

The Minister Amaraweera “proposes to implement organic farming instead of toxic agriculture which has led to an increase in the number of kidney and cancer patients here”. Apparently, “All the rivers, streams, wells and ponds in Sri Lanka are polluted due to use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides. No matter how much water there is, we cannot consume it without fear”. Minister Amaraweera has mentioned pesticides. Perhaps the ban includes pesticides like glyphosate! Again! 

Since the Lankan water is allegedly unsafe to drink, will the government import bottled water, perhaps from a European source like Perrier or Vittel? It may be cheaper to import water from the Holy Ganges, even with those floating cadavers, with its healing power imbibed by the Gods! 

But the scientists of the University of Tokyo, working with the Kandy Hospital scientists failed to find any of these toxins in the rivers, streams and ponds of Sri Lanka in their 2014 study?  Nanayakkara et al reported the work in 2014, in the Journal of Occupational Health 56:28–38, (2014). There were six Lankan scientists and nine Japanese scientists who diligently researched the matter. There was also the WHO study where near-threshold Cd was speculated upon. All these must be “Patta-Pal-Boru” Western Science!

There was the study led by SJP scientists and US scientists from North Carolina in 2016 (Levine et al., Environmental Monitoring and Assessment, 2016). There were seven Lankan scientists and six US scientists collaborating in the study. Another report came in 2020 by roughly the same team of researchers.

These scientists DID NOT FIND the dire situation claimed by the Minster.

A hardly publicized study was the investigation of the water from rivers and other sources fed into reverse osmosis (RO) plants, conducted by Dr. Padmakumara Jayasinghe under the aegis of COSTI. This was an all Lankan team that revealed the embarrassing fact that this water did NOT NEED any RO to make the water drinkable – it was very safe. Interestingly, the study was shelved and  never published. It would have upset many who made money by promoting RO plants, claiming that rivers, streams and ponds are polluted!

Although the Jayasinghe-COSTI study was not published, a Japanese study by Professor Takizawa, jointly with Dr. Oguma and Dr. Imbulana studied the water that are input to these expensive RO plants. They compared areas with chronic Kidney disease (CKD), and healthy areas. They found specific evidence to establish that the water was NOT contaminated by agrochemicals.  Instead, the water in the CKD areas was rich in fluoride and magnesium of geological origin. This research appeared in the prestigious journal “Science of the Total Environment” in 2020 under the title “Evaluation of groundwater quality and reverse osmosis water treatment plants in the endemic areas of CKDu in Sri Lanka”.

There are many other crucial studies, e.g., from Dr. Wasana et al from the Institute of Fundamental Studies in Peradeniya, and from Dr. Rohana Chadrajith and other in the Dept. of geology. The interdisciplinary group CERTKID includes Kandy Hospital Kidney specialists and University Scientists. Their research clarified the origins of the Kidney disease which is no longer “of unknown aeteology”. It has no established correlation with agrochemicals. Furthermore, the trace amounts of toxic agrochemicals found in Lankan waters are well below the thresholds set by even the most strict environmental authorities in the world.

Agrochemicals contain micro-quantities of toxic materials like Cd, As, and also large (macro) quantities of phosphates and nitrates that nourish plants. What HAS been found in Sri Lankan waters is the presence of runoff phosphates and nitrates from excessive use of fertilizers, a problem caused by deregulation introduced since 1977 under the “open economy Mudalali” politics.

The market dismantled the scientific control on fertilizers and transferred it to the merchant. If a government cannot even impose controls on the USE of fertilizers, how can it successfully impose a ban? The country will be awash with smuggled substandard fertilizers, at a higher price, as we know not only from the ill-fated ban on glyphosate, but even from turmeric or cigarettes.

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