6:18 AM
Movement for National Land and Agricultural Reform,
As the floods are yet to recede, the estimates of losses are being released by various sources of the government.
Sri Lanka government has roughly estimated that the floods have caused a damage worth of Rs. fifty billion to the economy while affecting people of 18 districts.
Minister of Disaster Management Mahinda Amaraweera says that thousands of acres of cultivations, around 450 small and big irrigation schemes, at least 75,000 cattle and many thousands of poultry and other animals were destroyed in floods.
Sri Lanka Minister of Peasants' Services and Wildlife S.M. Chandrasena says that 300,000 acres of paddy cultivations were completely destroyed due to recent floods.
Floods inundated 500,000 acres of paddy fields, damaged 458 big and small scale reservoirs, broke around 1000 irrigation canals and binds, the Minister stated.
Nine Peasants' Services Centers and seven fertilizer warehouses are also among the damaged property, he said.
Ampara, Batticaloa, Trincomalee, Anuradhapura, Polonnaruwa, Vavuniya, Kilinochchi and Mannar districts are the worst flood affected areas.
However, Minister of Agriculture Mahinda Yapa Abewardhana said to media that no scarcity of rice would be experienced by the country although floods hit the paddy cultivation hard. He said the country has buffer rice stocks for eight months. But the other government Ministers also contradict him and the rice mill owners have already rung the alarm by telling that they cannot supply rice at the government controlled prices due to the effects of the bad weather.
Meanwhile, the prices of vegetables has escalated to historical records in Sri Lanka. About 32 thousand hectares of vegetable cultivation have been destroyed due to the inclement weather says Secretary to the Ministry of Agriculture K.E. Karunathilaka.
Nearly 1.2 million people were affected by recent floods in Sri Lanka. Reports say the affected people are facing severe shortage of food commodities. Malnutrition will definitely follow the natural disasters.
One problem createsmore problems and the world is in a vicious circle of effects of climate change.
World has begun to pay the costs of capitalist plunder of nature in the past few centuries. After all, all the rhetoric of the scientific and technological advancements of the capitalism has gone to dead silence before the embarrassing helplessness of the system.
Asian Development Bank has launched a project to improve the understanding of climate-induced migration, and stimulate policy debate on how to tackle the anticipated movement of millions of people due to changing weather patterns in the coming years.
ADB says that the ultimate aim of this is to encourage the adoption of responsible, foresighted policies and practices that improve management of human displacement due to climate change, and where practical, enable communities to stay where they are.
It is interesting to examine why the ADB had to take the climate change as a serious issue. Densely populated Asia Pacific region of the world has become the most vulnerable area of the Earth. ADB says that 207 million people were affected world wide due to natural disaster and of them 87% are from Asia. South Asian countries like Pakistan, Bangladesh, India, Sri Lanka and Maldives are facing serious adverse effects of climate change. Rarely a day passes without reports on massive destruction caused by adverse effects of climate change.
The situation is no doubt the pay back of plunder of nature for two centuries under capitalist production. The system has failed to prevent further plunder and to initiate remedial measures to heal ailing nature. The crisis proves that the human society needs a better production system than the present system that plunders man and nature to satisfy the greed of some.
-Ajith Perakum Jayasinghe
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