Lessons of the recent floods

By Sarath Fernando

What lessons can we learn from the recent floods in Sri Lanka? Severe damage has been caused to agriculture and land in over 11 districts. Over a million people have been affected. Many houses have come down; many earth slips have killed many people. The heavy rains came at the time when paddy was flowering and the crop losses would be very heavy. Reduced yields would lead to very high increase in food prices and would create food shortages. The international situation is not helpful either and dependence on imports is risky. Price increases in the essential foods have been serious already and further increases would be unbearable. It is reported that loss of cattle due to floods and extra ordinary cold has been very severe too. Already there are demands from companies to further increase imported milk powder prices.
It may be possible to blame nature for all these but it does not solve the problems. Natural disasters have to be expected and with increased intensity due to global warming and climate change. Many more climate change calamities are to be expected. It is necessary to provide relief to those who cannot face this situation on their own. But relief alone is not enough, but we have to learn the lessons that need to be learnt. The disaster is not over, it is just beginning. Crop losses and food shortages are to come. Diseases caused by floods are likely to increase, many reservoirs have been damaged and broken, they need to be repaired. More water shortages are likely to take place. Much of the top soil would have got eroded and many rivers, streams and reservoirs would have got silted. Can we remedy these sufficiently rapidly to reduce the damage.
Will the Government have enough money to do this? Can we borrow more without further burdening people with unbearable debt. Are we going to learn the lesson that we should not be intensifying the risks of disasters by causing further damage in trying to accelerate economic growth?

Manmade additions to disaster

Clearing more forests for further expansion of monoculture plantations, whether it is sugar cane plantations, banana plantations, pineapple, tobacco or cut flower would further increase disaster risks or growing more maize for animal feed, building express highways for facilitating faster transport for investors, growing more tobacco plantations to meet the needs of companies is another damage that further increase erosion, loss of soil fertility and other environmental losses. If we borrow more money we will have to do more exports to repay the loans, we have to obey advice and dictate of lenders and do what they want to exploit nature's resources and people more intensely.

A Vicious Circle

So, this is a vicious circle. We decide to provide more facilities to investors to exploit our people and our nature more extensively. It makes people poorer and nature more susceptible to disasters. Then we borrow more and make the cost of living worse. So, we have to give more concessions to investors. To do this we have to drive away more people from their land, from beaches, from cities and from villages. Can we push the poorer people from their village lands and also poorer people from cities at the same time? Where are they going to live and how are they going to survive?

Created Disaster

We were advised to give people opportunities to sell their land in villages, give up their food production replacing it with growing more crops for export or for alcohol and agro fuel. We were told to encourage more people to sell away their little plots of land to allow land accumulation in the hands of rich businesses for production of export crops instead of domestic food at affordable cost. We were advised to allow more space and facilities and tax concessions to private businesses, asked to privatize water and allow water marketing, Told to push fisher people away from their beaches and fishing livelihoods to allow tourism to expand and big fishing industry to take over. There were attempts made to utilize moneys received for relief to Tsunami Victims for development of tourism facilities, such as those in Arugambe, Paanama, Kalpitiya etc. Health was privatized compelling people to pay unaffordable prices for their medicines, doctors and private hospitals. Flexible or free labour markets were proposed to allow already employed labour to be discharged with less compensation.

Similarly, education has been privatized compelling people to spend much more on private tuition, Private universities were proposed. Finally around 4 million children compete in education aiming for higher education opportunities, but many of them are dropped off half way. Out of over 250,000 students sitting for advanced level exams about 120,000 get sufficient marks to enter universities, but universities can admit only about 17,000 every year. So, over a hundred thousand students who are very intelligent and hard working are dropped off, no future plans. Worsening food situation will only increase the already too high a number of malnourished children and anemic mothers, thus preventing proper brain growth and physical growth of children destroying their future potential, the future of the whole nation.

Thus, we see that more manmade disasters add on to the natural disasters. The way agriculture is done today is another serious manmade disaster. We cut of trees and forests and reduce the effective use of sunlight that is absorbed by leaves of trees converting them into food for trees and for all living beings, this also worsens erosion that destroys the top soil that takes thousands of years to regenerate. We also add poisonous inputs such as chemical weedicides, pesticides and fertilizer, thereby weakening the ability of the soils to regenerate soil fertility through microbial activity; we kill insects and create much stronger and more resistant pests. All this destroys the natural process of sustainable and regenerative agriculture which is the only sure way of ensuring survival of life. Destroying natural agriculture is practiced as the main stream agriculture. Thus we prevent nature's free contribution to agriculture. This goes on all the time even at times when weather is good. This may be more destructive than the natural disasters that happen only from time to time. In doing this we also make the impact of natural disaster much worse. Fewer trees make the rain fall much more aggressive and erosion much more intense. Loss of top soil reduces the ability of soil to absorb and retain water making the droughts more frequent and losses more aggressive. Killing away microbes weakens the natural cycle and killing away insects weakens the natural pest control.

All this is known, but no serious attention is given by the policy makers and implementers to any of these. So, manmade disasters of all this type may be much more serious than the natural disasters.

If policy makers are unwilling to attend to these the people who are victims of these have to take it upon themselves to solve these. All these disasters are preventable.

How ?

People must begin to find their food from nature if they do not have enough money to buy them. Learn how nature gives free food. Protect and improve soil fertility by preventing erosion, begin with your small plot of land by building ridges, mulching and growing trees for soil fertility. Recycle all your organic matter, the leaves, branches and also animal dung and urine.

Maximize the absorption of sunlight by growing more trees to fill your land, growing trees to different canopies is the best way to maximize sunlight. This can also enhance your energy supply, fodder, timber and medicinal plants in addition to food.

Recycle all organic waste and organic matter after use. Save your natural seeds and set up plant nurseries to reduce the need to buy seeds and plants, Avoid using F-1 variety seeds because they cannot regenerate seeds. Use animal dung and urine to produce natural fertilizers and improve natural fertility.

Increase diversification of crops and use mix cropping to reduce pest attacks and improve natural control of pests. Improve food diversity and nutrition by growing a multiplicity of food crops, use the indigenous knowledge of use of medicinal plants to prevent ill health and cure diseases where possible.

Apply principles of agro forestry to improve forest cover and catchment areas.
Avoid using destructive, poisonous chemical inputs to prevent pollution of food, soil , water and environment.
organize marketing of products directly between communities of producers and communities of consumers, thereby reducing the losses made in trade through middlemen.
Teach children in schools, and at higher levels the principles of natural farming and the necessity of shifting to natural farming and to recover the ability of regeneration of nature and its resources.

Struggling to prevent destruction.

It is high time that we take up measures to protect scientific agriculture of the right type. Companies are given a free hand to propagate and market very destructive poisonous chemical pesticides, weedicides and fertilizers. They also freely market seeds that do not produce fertile seeds and are in the process of promoting genetically modified seeds and foods. All kinds of artificial foods that cause diseases such as diabetes, cancers and a host of other diseases are easily propagated, advertized and marketed. As explained already these are causing major disasters in the country. It has now become fairly clear that chemical fertilizers increase kidney diseases, chemically contaminated food reduces immunity in the body thus making more people susceptible to all kinds of diseases. All these are done with the blessings of people at the highest levels. They have also introduced certain types of ethics in the media that prevents direct reference to companies that cause these problems. Many such companies make use of Government departments to propagate their markets.

It is necessary for people to take up direct battles to prevent these disasters. Disaster risk reduction should include these too. There is a need for people's plans to introduce these remedies. Forth coming paradeshiya shaba elections is a good opportunity for people to work out their plans at local level and present their advantages and campaign for these. Funds allocated for village level programmes such as the "Api Wawamu Rata Nagamu", "Gama Neguma", "Gemi Diriya", "Maga Neguma" are more than enough to meet the requirements of the above disaster prevention plans at village level.

Such a strategy could harness the full creative potential of the people and the regenerative potential of nature. The slogan should be;

" Restore the ability of nature to regenerate itself and its resources".

This is a principle that should guide the future of the whole world. Nature has created all life , protected it and provided sustenance all this time. Now we have begun to destroy its ability to do so by destroying regenerative ability of nature. Now it's necessary that the whole of humanity must restore this ability for their own survival in the future

Sri Lanka has all the advantages of such a plan. We have good sunlight, good rain fall, good diversity of plants and bio diversity, very suitable geographical setting to develop natural irrigation systems, still remaining indigenous knowledge of natural agriculture and natural health ( ayurvedic medicine ), very high diversity of medicinal plants and food plants, Indigenous knowledge of cooking and preparation of herbal medicines. We also have a rich knowledge of working out agricultural technology utilizing nature's ways.

Indiginous philosophical resources

The Buddhist understanding of non attachment and non greed and the futility of accumulation of profits gives us very valuable guidelines to plan our ways of dealing with nature and dealing with other living beings. Combining these valuable resources of Buddhist Philosophy, indigenous natural farming and indigenous medicine is a valuable combination of resources that can guide us away from disasters.

Posted in floods , natural disaster