A turn in the weather, dysfunctional crop management and war could precipitate a rice crop crisis and famine. Even European occupiers of Ceylon – amidst their plundering – recognized the central role of rice farming success in rural areas. In 1796, Robert Andrews, Superintendent of Revenue of the British administration governing then Ceylon, proposed radical land reforms. He wanted to lift ‘Ceylonese’ farmers out of poverty. Giving them land and individual titles, he proposed, could achieve this. Andrews, the British administration claimed, had been carried away by ideals and failed to consider local customs and views on the matter.

For all their faults, the British were concerned about marginal economic opportunities in rural areas. Ceylon was also importing rice from India – during the early years of the British occupation – over two centuries ago. The British repaired and made usable many reservoirs after Indian rice prices rose following crop failures. At the turn of the 19th century, Sri Lanka’s exports were limited to commodities (coffee and tea exports were added to the export mix much later), so its ability to pay a higher price was limited. Governor Frederick North, who took office in 1798, later proposed individual property rights for rice farmers, expecting it to lead to greater farm productivity. Like the junior bureaucrat Andrews before him, North also believed improving rural economic opportunities was important for the sustenance of the vast occupied territories.

The British were industrious and wanted to improve the island’s productive capacity. They later invested in export agriculture like coffee and tea, however, their focus on improving rice farming productivity was to keep the population fed. Even for an occupier, the prospect of famine was a scary one.

Most parts of the Indian subcontinent were under British occupation at the time. Occupiers two centuries ago and current policymakers, however, failed to understand the relationship of rice growers with the farmland. Frederick North’s attempt to survey the extent of rice paddies and their ownership failed because many farmers considered land a communal holding. This is because rice farmers relied on manmade reservoirs being shared by everyone downstream to grow their crops. When water was scarce due to drought or flood, farmer communities had developed a complex system to share the limited arable land. As a result, many rice farmers were unable to clearly identify their land holdings when Frederick North’s surveyors met them.

Rice is a semi aquatic crop for which ideal growing conditions have been simulated by Sri Lanka’s reservoir and irrigation system. Water is scarce everywhere and Sri Lanka’s dry zone is the area best suited for rice farming. Rice is around three times more water intensive than other cereals. However, most of this water is used for levelling the paddies. Rice is most successfully grown in Asian river deltas where water year round makes it possible to grow three crops. More than 70% of Sri Lanka’s rice acreage receives water from one of 10,000 small and large reservoirs and grow two annual crops. The other 30% of rice paddies are rain fed and mostly grow one crop a year. A rice crop takes four months to grow, which includes a one and a half month period for aswaddumizing and harvesting. Rice farmers do not have much work the rest of the time.

Sri Lanka’s main growing season is Maha when all paddies are aswaddumized. Because water is scarce, crop from the second season called Yala is a third smaller. For four months, between seasons, all rice farms run fallow and famers have no work.

Despite feeding the entire nation in good times, Sri Lanka’s venerated rice farmers, eulogized by history, are in extreme poverty

Over the centuries, policymakers have somehow mistakenly concluded that granting outright land ownership is the most effective way of lifting rice farmers out of poverty; but it is not the most pressing need. There are three other challenges that need to be addressed first.

In the vast swathes irrigated by the Minneriya reservoir in Sri Lanka’s North Central province, rice fields shine emerald with just weeks to go before harvesting ahead of the midApril traditional new year. Soon, the community will come together in this timeless activity embedded in the Sri Lankan psyche.

Rice farmers are celebrated because they grow a crop that has singularly stood between people and famine for centuries. As many as 897,000 separate land plots growing rice existed according to a census department farming survey in 2002. There are not as many vegetable and fruit famers although that sector of agriculture adds more than twice the economic value as do rice farmers.

Almost 957,000 hectares were planted with rice in 2019 compared to 545,000 of other field crops and vegetables (includes cereals, fruits, and vegetables, but excluding tea, rubber, and coconut).

The importance of rice farming is declining rapidly from 2% of GDP 12 years ago (2002) to 1.2% in 2014, falling further to 0.9% in 2019.

THE DECLINING IMPORTANCE OF RICE FARMING

Rice farming’s contribution to GDP fell 55% in 17 years

2% of GDP in 2002

0.9% of GDP in 2019

Rice fortunes impact many families in some of Sri Lanka’s poorest districts like Ampara, Kurunegala, Polonnaruwa and Anuradhapura where over half the crop is grown.

Secondly – because of the long history of rice growing and Sri Lanka’s phenomenal record of innovation around reservoir-irrigated agriculture – the crop is associated with a period in the island’s history when it was a global leader. Every fifth grader knows this history, and a problem for farmers or a shortage of affordable rice quickly inflames national sentiment.

However, this romanticized notion about rice farming is also an important reason for holding back the entire sector. A rice farming recovery that started during the British occupation accelerated after independence and yields have since tripled. Sri Lanka now grows as much rice as it can consume.

In isolation, these gains look impressive and growing rice is often analysed with an insular view because of the romanticized notion of rice self-sufficiency being an important achievement. Sri Lanka may have had been a pioneer and innovator in rice farming in the past, but today it is a laggard.

The contribution of rice farming to the economy is falling because farmers are unproductive. Productivity is relative and growing two crops a year when plentiful work is limited to three months is not good enough anymore. Non-rice farmers work year round, as does everybody with a fulltime job.

In 2019, Sri Lanka produced 4.6 million MT of rice, enough to cover domestic supply for more than a year. However, supply short falls and price fluctuations created by private millers necessitates some rice imports. Sri Lanka has imported 20,000MT of milled rice annually from 2018-20. However, imports can increase sharply due to domestic supply disruptions. For instance, Sri Lanka imported 623,000MT of milled rice in 2014, 506,000MT in 2016 and 491,000MT in 2017.

Despite feeding the entire nation in good times, Sri Lanka’s venerated rice farmers, eulogized by history, are in extreme poverty. Educated young people do not opt to become farmers anymore. The young are rejecting the vocation, and not only because of its unattractive earning potential.

“Farmers don’t spend much time in the rice field,” one farmer in Polonnaruwa said, offering an uncanny glimpse to their lifestyle. “They are usually chatting at the village boutique or meeting alongside small bridges spanning irrigation canals.”

Because of the venerated position associated with rice farming, no one would discuss the low productivity in small farms. At most, farmers have 90 days of hard work each year due to seasonality of rice farming and limited water availability. The debate about farmer productivity is intertwined with passion. Former Southern Province Governor and agriculture activist Hemakumara Nanayakkara says farmers abandon rice because it is not profitable enough and the drudgery of the work.

Rice farming is challenged at many levels and poverty is just a symptom of those challenges. Productivity here is lower than those of other successful rice producers like Thailand because rice strains used here tend to be of low or middling quality – in contrast to premium ones used elsewhere. Rice yields per hectare climbed from 1.58 tons in 1952 to 4.7 tons per hectare by 2019.

Farmers are victims of their own lack of enterprise. It is a double whammy because their indolence scuttles opportunity for an exploration of other opportunities while they continue to farm.

Yield gains of around 1.75% a year till about late 1990s’ were only enough to keep up with population growth. In other parts of Asia, average yields are five to six tons – or 25% to 50% higher than those achieved here.

When Sri Lanka introduces higher quality seeds and better farming practices become widespread, its crop will be more than the country can consume.

For one farmer, called Jayatissa – whose lifetime in the fields has yielded neither wealth nor a comfortable retirement – echoes widespread dissatisfaction about the declining status for rice farmers. “Public sector workers have job security, a pension and benefits,” he points out. “We feed the nation but receive nothing.”

However, government and private sector workers – even after discounting annual leave – will spend 220 days at their office desks every year. Unlike rice farmers who expect government bailouts for drought and flood risks, all other citizens plan to pay for their contingencies.

Elsewhere in the world farming small plots is not productive – even when there is enough water for three crops. However, farmers have developed a simple solution for this. In major rice exporting markets like Thailand, farmers simply have a second job like driving a taxi. They work the fields during sowing and harvesting. Sometimes even these are outsourced, and farmers turn up to just supervise the work.

Despite the whining, Jayatissa’s circumstances are not desperate either. His wife is a career public servant at provincial level, and of their children, one is a teacher and another is employed in a farm in South Korea. His youngest son is loath to taking over the farm from the father and is keen to become a chef.

Rice farmers’ low incomes force them to the margins of society. Their low incomes also require the government to intervene because rice farmers themselves cannot absorb a shock like a crop failure. Floods and droughts are annual occurrences and frequently destroy some rice crops.

“There is no point in farming,” Jayatissa says. “If our crop fails, we don’t receive adequate compensation, if there is a surplus and prices fall there is no protection either,” he says. Because rice farmers see themselves as a special class of agriculture entrepreneurs, they make demands, like those made by Jayatissa, which would seem absurd if they came from any other Sri Lankan industry.

Farmers are victims of their own lack of enterprise. It is a double whammy because their indolence scuttles opportunity for an exploration of other opportunities while they continue to farm. As Sri Lankan culture venerates them, a broader debate about low rice farm productivity will lack objectivity and be immediately mired in an emotion backlash.

Although it is not possible to grow tea in rice fields, the smallholders in that sector are showing that an alternative model can work well. Tea smallholders often have fulltime employment elsewhere and manage their backyard tea plantations part time. Smallholders account for 70% of the tea crop and have earnings more than double rice’s achievement.

Challenging low productivity and an unenterprising attitude towards their circumstances is not straightforward. However, without an open discussion about their coddled status, it would be difficult to start addressing the sector’s challenges.

Secondly, government policy panders to rice farmers – an important vote base. An agriculture survey estimates that almost 900,000, mostly small plots, grow the crop. Ninety two percent of the country’s rice is produced in fields less than five hectares in extent.

Governments often buy rice direct from farmers at prices above the market rate. This may seem to benefit small scale farmers in some of Sri Lanka’s poorest districts, and key constituencies are swayed by fortunes of the one crop.

What may appear a bounty for farmers will be disastrous for the sector over the long term. Interventionist policies have distorted rice production for decades. Interventions have ranged from subsidized rice for families, free of-cost irrigation, subsidized fertilizer, and higher-than-market guaranteed prices. The non-transparent government’s rice buying binge risks further distorting the market.

Market-distorting interventions have isolated the sector as probably the only one to not see private investment. Sri Lanka’s export agriculture sectors tea and rubber, filed crops like cereals, vegetables and fruit crops all receive private investment. Investors demand higher risk premiums for entering sectors where government intervention distorts markets.

Rice is a classic example of this, and intervention has also made prices more volatile and markets thinner.

High domestic prices are also bad for the economy and impose heavy costs on consumers. In a country where one in five children is malnourished and anemia is widely prevalent, policies that push food prices up are counterproductive

Rice farmers have seen a remarkable transformation of their industry over the past 50 years because yields have tripled. In just the last decade, mechanization has been leading the transformation..

Competition also fosters innovation and the push for faster, better, and more productive techniques. Intervention achieves the opposite by blunting entrepreneurship and reducing farmer incentives to invest in new machinery. It will also drive wages up and reduce the competitiveness of other industries, because too much labour may stick with rice.

Policymakers in the past have mistakenly concluded that fuzzy land title laws somehow contributed to poverty among rice farmers. There is no evidence that this is absolutely the case, although some freedom around land could do the sector and the country a whole lot of good. This is the third challenge facing the sector. In 2003, the government proposed a Land Ownership Bill to liberalize the land market by removing restrictions on land grants to rice farmers. Farmer cooperatives and pro-farmer groups objected, contending that this would allow the private sector to displace farmers. The Supreme Court squashed the proposed act on the grounds that it threatened the way of life of rice farmers. Vast swathes of land ended up with the government because the British usurped them through the Crown Land Ordinance of 1840. Large tracts in the wet zone (Western and central mountainous regions) acquired were then sold to Europeans, creating the plantations economy

A century after Governor Frederick North proposed individual property rights for rice farmers, the British land policy is now the polar opposite. In 1897, a harsh Waste Land Ordinance was introduced, which displaced many peasant farmers from their lands because they could not prove ownership. When the British occupied Ceylon, farmers held land in commune, and attempts to survey and establish ownership proved futile because there were not enough officials to conduct the survey and local reticence towards invaders. Since independence, governments have been granting a limited title to small plots of fertile land around Sri Lanka’s reservoirs. These grants have stopped short of awarding complete property rights because those upstream first receive water from the reservoir, which they release to those downstream. Limited property rights do not allow other crops to be grown instead of rice or for the land to be sold.

Rice farmers have seen a remarkable transformation of their industry over the past 50 years because yields have tripled. In just the last decade, mechanization has been leading the transformation. Buffalos pulling a yoke – the only way previously to prepare soil for planting – are now a rare sight. Tractors have taken over and when the crop is ready, combined harvesters do the job. Farmers do not do as much physical labour as they used to.

Advocates of land reforms presented two arguments. Firstly, that larger farms would lend themselves to mechanizations unlocking greater productivity; and secondly, that private sector investment would be attractive. Policymakers making these pronouncements were admiring the astonishing scale of farming in the US and thought that model could work here. However, something just as interesting was happening in Asian rice fields over the past few decades, where like in Sri Lanka, rice farms are small holdings.

Even the small plots mechanization has completely transformed farming, because families would rent the machinery by the day or even hour when they needed it. Machines have taken over at every smallholding where there is a labour shortage or when a farmer is unwilling to be knee deep in mud. Elsewhere in Asia, mechanization has also enabled farmers to hold a job in the city. As a result, farmers have been able to keep pace with the change without having to create huge farms.

However, the land use policy, as it relates to rice, is still messed up in ways that impact society negatively. Agriculture is governed by 39 laws and over 60 state institutions that enforce them. “The confusion has resulted in people opting to do as they please with their rice lands,” says Dr Parakrama Samaratunga, a former Department of Agriculture official and current Fellow of economic policy think tank Institute of Policy Studies. A huge informal market has sprung up. Although they are not supposed to, farmers rent their rice paddies so others could farm, earning a rent. Although they do not have full title, they have devised systems to use the land as collateral to obtain loans.

With investments picking up in the Western Province, demand for space to locate factories, buildings and roads are rising. When complex irrigation is not compromised – as is the case in many wet zone rice lands – the system should consider how they could be put to more productive use. Many wet zone rain-fed rice fields are fallow. It may make no sense to deny businesses space to build factories and for people to have residences closer to main cities and protect paddies.

Land reforms have thus far focused on avoiding famine and protecting livelihoods. But now they seem to have outlived their usefulness. Already a crucial window for reforms has passed since the liberalization of the economy and another window will soon close when the services sector grows, creating better opportunities than rice farming offers now.

Land reforms have thus far focused on avoiding famine and protecting livelihoods