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Hayleys Agriculture Holdings Managing Director Jayanthi Dharmasena
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The commitment of Hayleys Agriculture Holdings Ltd. to promote Good Agricultural Practices (GAP) among all stakeholders of agriculture was fittingly conveyed through their training arm Hayleys Agriculture Training School (HATS) as they organised a free webinar on the subject on 30 September.
The webinar helped industry experts and resource persons to share their knowledge and experience on how to develop and boost the production of safe and quality food items through proven good agricultural practices.
Hayleys Agriculture Holdings Ltd. Managing Director Jayanthi Dharmasena stated that HATS wanted to engage a wide audience at the webinar and provide solutions and not just pose the problems.
“First of all, we conducted the webinar in Sinhala, therefore, we were able to reach farmer communities as well. We did not want the webinar to end up only discussing problems that the agriculture sector is facing today,” Dharmasena explained.
“We know what the challenges are; it is time to focus on good agriculture practices rather than only the issues.” The webinar focussed on what GAP certification is all about, the history of Global GAP, history of GAP implementation in Sri Lanka, certification process, requirements, and benefits of the certification of GAP.
“We managed to get 231 individuals to register for the webinar, and the participants consisted of officials from Department of Agriculture, officers from agriculture research institutes, private companies, university students, students from agriculture schools, individual growers and farmers, and even school teachers,” Dharmasena said. “In fact, the Sri Lanka Accreditation Board Director/CEO thanked Hayleys Agriculture for organising the webinar,” she added.
The webinar was organised by the Training School of Hayleys Agriculture Holdings Ltd. (HATS) and was chaired by A.S.M. Roshan, who holds a B.Sc. in Agriculture (Hons.) and M.Sc. in Agriculture Science from the University of Western Australia, and is a Member of the National Subcommittee on SL-GAP and of the SL-GAP Steering Committee, the Assistant Director of the Agribusiness Counselling Division, Department of Agriculture, University of Peradeniya.
