Ensuring food and health security | Sunday Observer

Ensuring food and health security

18 December, 2022

Mid last week, 78-year-old Sangarapillai Naguleswaran of Jaffna, one of Sri Lanka’s senior most food preservation experts arrived in Colombo, taking three buses from the North, and somehow managing the sky rocketed bus fares which is now four times the previous price, and managing to stay in Colombo where the accommodation costs of hotels had also trebled.

He was attending an islandwide represented meeting at the Presidential Secretariat on national food and nutritional security. He was representing Kopay in Jaffna where he runs a food preservation and innovation unit, a home based health food entrepreneurship named Nutri-foods using traditional crops of the North. Despite his heavy work schedule, he was keen to contribute to the national level discourse, especially being a board member of the Northern Chamber of Industries that focuses on multi sector industries in the region including food, livestock and fisheries.

What he says is shaped by his dedication to food related research in practice and from observing how Jaffna, a self-reliant nature based agrarian hub was transformed through intense international sponsored propaganda, between 1970s and 80s into being dependent on chemical fertiliser.

Reversion to former glory

He is keen that Jaffna reverts to its former glory when the northern farmer, diligently preserving and channelling rainwater in diverse ways and varied other methods of nurturing the soil with the bounty of mother nature, had made an arid land a haven of agriculture. As the discussion progresses, his words recapture the Jaffna of the 1950’s and 60’s when the region was known to be able to feed even the whole of Sri Lanka with its naturally grown produce.

His life experience of the slow metamorphosis of Jaffna transiting from being mother earth reliant to being chemical fertiliser reliant is first hand. Being part of a family of senior agricultural officials, he had witnessed as a child and youth the major change within the Agricultural Department after the chemical revolution of the 1960s known euphemistically as the green revolution which paved the way for hybrid food creation, synthetic fertiliser and insecticide. These contravened the core of the Hindu philosophy of life.

Tamil culture holds the earth and all it produces as part of the divine manifest in nature and places much emphasis on pure foods, Naguleswaran said. To comprehend a rationale of contaminating the mother earth with ‘poison’ so as to ‘produce more’ was initially unthinkable by Jaffna farmers. This led to a wave of protests by Northern farmers, he said.

“Internationally funded propaganda was very strong in all rural areas. In the remotest of villages in Jaffna there were projectors set up showing films of how the farmers of other countries were benefitting after shifting to ‘scientific agriculture’ and how financially beneficial it was for farmers.”

New theory

“The Agriculture Department which till then was promoting the countless traditional and historically accepted ways of ecological, bio-dynamic natural farming suddenly adopted this new theory and launched local campaigns to convert the farmers.”

“My uncle’s house in Valikamam was turned into a chemical fertiliser promotion office of the Agriculture Department,” he said, adding that to draw farmers away from the current unsustainable norm of chemical fertiliser that the soil islandwide should be healed first.

“It took so much propaganda and years to fully change all the farmers of Sri Lanka into chemical farming that destroyed the soil. If we are serious about food security, health and safeguarding the economy we have to collectively work on similar but ‘reverse propaganda’ as I saw in my youth. The ‘propaganda’ now should be based on facts we culturally knew regarding nature and cultivation and aimed at earth and human saving. This is the way we can save dollars, save the soil, save our health, resurrect our indigenous crops and start a wave of health food based entrepreneurship that will stabilise the rural economy,” Naguleswaran said.

He said that the few farmers who were converted initially into adopting chemical fertiliser used to be very shy to admit that they were thus changed from the socio-cultural values they held.

“In the 1970’s, I remember seeing them covertly bringing the chemical fertiliser packets that the Agriculture Department used to distribute. Today, almost the whole of the North is dependent on chemical agriculture and we have Non-Communicable Diseases (NCDs) such as diabetes, cancer, obesity and kidney ailments which my parents and grandparents never had. They died healthy in their nineties with old age being the only cause of death. Today, youth are dying of NCDs.”

Self-sustaining mechanism

“Our food should be for life, not death. If we revert to valuing and re-learning the agrarian heritage of Sri Lanka, this will be beneficial to the nation as a truly self-sustaining mechanism of ensuring long term food security. I believe that this is a fundamental aspect we should consider when we talk of an economic crisis. Much of national revenue is spent on chemical fertiliser and medicines due to Non- Communicable Diseases (NCDs),” Naguleswaran said.

As a member of the Northern Chamber of Industries, he believes policies on food security should encompass the initiating and supporting of traditional health food entrepreneurship islandwide to combat joblessness among the youth.

“In 2016, there was a national exhibition organised by the State at the BMICH titled ‘Poison Free Nation.’ I was impressed with the traditional food based entrepreneurship showcased through products using many varieties of the traditional heirloom rice, the vast varieties of yams/tubors, fruits, medicinal flowers, indigenous vegetables and herbs.”

“I am researching the possibility of the medicinal value consisting commonly found plants such as the Hibiscus being cultivated on a large scale. There are Hibiscus flower health products such as bottled drinks that are being made by small scale manufacturers in Sri Lanka, but there is no mass scale cultivation of plants such as these. There is much potential for strategic cultivation of such plants and encouraging creative local entrepreneurship especially for exports.”

“Of Sri Lanka’s yams and tubors that hold high health value, the North and the East have amply the Elephant Yam and the Purple Yam, both of which hold very high nutrients and boost immunity. I make products out of both varieties, such as powdering them so that they can be used in soups or Kendha as in the Sinhala food culture.”

Health food entrepreneurship

He said that the hundreds of varieties of traditional yams and tubors found in the country are ideal to be promoted for mass cultivation for health food entrepreneurship by having them sun dried and using natural preservative methods.

In the premises adjoining his Kopay house, he has set up greenhouse solar dryers. He explained how all the main nutrients are kept intact and how the ultraviolet rays of the sun are kept away and in the 1970s, Jaffna was wellknown for its fruit preserving techniques. Many preserved food products, especially those made from the famed Jaffna mango, the Karuthakolamban, were exported.”

Naguleswaran said that a currently well-known fruit juice brand of the country was begun by a Jaffna food preservation expert under a different name and then later sold in the mid 1980s to a South based businessman.

Today, as part of his food brand, Nutrifoods, Naguleswaran produces rare dried herbs, powdered yams, rasam packets, neem flower vade mixture and many similar health optimising products that have an increased demand in Colombo and abroad.

He feels that national level reconciliation should come from increased people-to-people interaction through trade, entrepreneurship and industry.

He believes that the current attention on promoting home gardens as a measure of food security is praiseworthy as it attempts to bring the nation back to the home gardening culture that was prevalent during his childhood. However, he feels that this should be a micro economic endeavour and that equal or more emphasis should be on the macro picture that looks at nurturing the soil as done locally for centuries without wasting scarce dollars and bringing back the honour to what it meant to be a farmer traditionally in both Sinhala and Tamil culture.

Well versed in the global movements of organic /ecology based agriculture, he speaks of ‘The One-Straw Revolution by Masanobu Fukuoka,’ the plant scientist who very early realised the health/earth/biodiversity disaster the chemical industrial agriculture trend started by the Green Revolution was going to plunge the world to.

A fan of Sri Lanka’s heritage agriculture practitioner and author Thilak Kandegama, he said he has read the English version of his book on Nature based Astrology linked farming; the ancient science of farming of civilisations such as Sri Lanka.

He speaks of Subhash Palekar who introduced zero budget natural farming to India as an alternative to poisoning India’s agricultural lands through chemical fertiliser.

“The way forward is for Sri Lanka to use the current situation to link non-poisonous agriculture with creating a non poisonous dollar conserving health food industry by identifying and promoting the large number of hitherto forgotten or killed off indigenous foods that include fruit, yams, tubors, rice, grains and leaf herbs,” he said.

He said he used to eat as a child indigenous fruit which was being sold in the train from Jaffna to Colombo by vendors.

“We never saw the imported oranges that we see today. We used to see mountains of green native oranges which were in abundance everywhere. Do we see them now? What happened to them?,” asks Naguleswaran.

The Mahabharata stated, “He alone rejoices - who cooks a meal of greens in the evening or at nightfall, who is neither a debtor nor a servant of others.”

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