Every Sri Lankan can initiate national food and health security

When you put poison in the land to cultivate ‘food’ you poison that food. So you consume to live the poisonous food so that it can slowly, torturously and untimely, sicken you

By Surya Vishwa 

In early July 2019, Indian Finance Minister (and economist), Nirmala Sitharaman addressing the Lok Sabha in her budget speech, called for a ‘back to basics,’ in agriculture, referring to the zero budget farming model developed by Majarashtra origin agriculturist Subhash Palekar. This method draws knowledge from India’s traditional farming heritage.

We quote below her address to the Lok Sabha:

“We need to replicate this innovative model, through which in a few states farmers are already being trained in this practice. Steps such as this can help in doubling our farmers’ income in time for our 75th year of independence.”

Sri Lanka will celebrate its 75th independence day on 4 February 2023 and it will do so while continuing to be in depenence on the international chemical fertiliser and insecticide industry. These multinational industries along with the Western medical industry, swallows up the scarce revenue of this dollar parched nation. The results that it has to show for all this expenditure is the ever increasing curse of NCDs (non communicable diseases) which in turn amply heightens the exodus of dollars through the need for imported alopathic medicines.

We pride in our modern Western origin education as superior but somehow the basic common sense a five-year-old would have seems to elude us. Comprehend this; when you put poison in the land to cultivate ‘food’ you poison that food. So you consume to live the poisonous food so that it can slowly, torturously and untimely, sicken you.

With the green revolution rationale that you need poison to coax the earth to produce (forgeting that this same earth has produced food for the past four billion odd years), you abort the earth, kill the birds along with all the insects and the web of biodiversity. You poison the water bases of the land. Thus fully and gradually poisoned you spends your hard earned money on hospital bills and spend over one half of your life with either diabetes or pressure or obesity or kidney malfunction or heart ailments. 

The traditional food and medicine (Sinhala wedakama or Deshiya Chikitsa, Siddha-Ayurvedha and Unani do not even figure in the picture where State policy is concerned in securing public immunity when the nation is confronted with a health crisis. 

Thereby the biggest health challenge of the century – COVID-19 was allowed to cost the country another set of monies for foreign vaccines. Vaccines were justified as boosting immunity and we spent our money for those or accepted ‘donations’ of such, while our own immunity boosting food and herbs were ignored as were the voice of the traditional physicians of the land. The recording on phones that adviced people on preventing the virus was limited to arousing fear and asking the people to remain indoors. It did not even vaguely mention about the local methods of immunity boosting.

This, in a backdrop where scores of traditional physicians were proving their research and cures of hundreds of COVID-19 patients, with one physician Kalutharage Sampath curing several patients between the ages of 85 and 95, within four days, without the use of oxygen. They were not lauded or even given basic formal recognition by the State. 

Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic there was no national discourse rationally connecting the dots that chemical fertiliser kills immunity and how this should be rectified in an era of dubious global viruses and bio weapon warning by vaccine research funder, Bill Gates. 

We were and still remain deaf, blind and dumb

Thus as one of the oldest civilisations in the world that held and still hold encyclopaedic knowledge that could positively impact the economy, we were and still remain deaf, blind and dumb to how a shifting to traditional knowledge in farming, medicines and traditional water/earth resource management could economically compliment the nation and save thousands of dollars. The ‘organic’ fertiliser we controversially purchased from a foreign nation last year cost us a few billions and we still scoff at the mere mention that traditional knowldge of the nation is linked to the macro economy.

Our micro and macro forums on ressurecting the economy have not included such discussions because our post colonial rote learning/brain washing has taken place within an education system where indigenous/traditional knowledge and its relevance to the modern economy is not taught/analysed/discussed or debated. 

Hence, Sri Lanka, even as it commences a national drive towards food and health security, has not realised that it is still in auto gear, yearning for and lapping up whatever ‘expertise’ available in the globe, without even realising that the entire gamut of expertise that it requires is within this nation. 

The wealth of this nation abounds. In its gems, its seas, its inland water bases, its forests, its quality of soil. Its soil which even after five decades of being suffocated by the chemical agriculture industry still manages to produce crops such as the world’s best cinnamon and is home to thousands of traditional food plants which double as medicine. Some of these food plants are destroyed as ‘weeds’ or ‘wild plants’ by those tasked to protect agriculture.

Hence, in a monetarily competitive industrialised world glorifying in breeding sickness under diverse guises, medicine and food are global money making/draining, ventures where the global economy is in the hands of a few nations. Yet any nation that has got its strategic thinking correct and whose belief is unshaken in its own national knowledge as assets, could sail through these murky waters and sell this (non harmful) knowledge to our tired world. 

As Ranjith Seneviratne, the 86 year ‘youth’ (the co founding member of the organic movement in Sri Lanka with Ranjith Silva) who staunchly refused to be vaccinated along with his 83 year old wife told the Public Health Inspector (PHI) who visited him coercing vaccination; “Mama Lankikayek and mage saukya thahawuruwenne mea rate Hela wedakamin (I am a Sri Lankan and my health is assured by the Sinhala wedakam medical science of the land). Seneviratne had also taken the visiting health official on a tour of his ‘living earth pharmacy,’ a term that aptly describes the small garden of his Kollupitiya home. It has almost every conceivable leaf, fruit and herb which consists of his daily food. Seneviratne and his wife live their lives like teenagers and sickness never visits them. Even if a flu floats about trying to enter human domain, making their throats itchy, the symptoms are usually gone overnight or in a few hours.

Health should not be a torturous, expensive nightmare

Who is going to teach the nation that health should not be a torturous, expensive nightmare that bleeds the individual and national economy?

Last Wednesday as I was returning from the home of Ranjith Seneviratne with a bagful of Tulasi plants and jostling in a crowded bus, a woman who was seated offered to hold the plants for me.

She inquired what the plants were and when I explained to her its basic medicinal value and offered her a plant she came out with a teary testimony of how two relatives in her family (still in their early thirties) had their legs amputated owing to diabetes. Seneviratne had told me a long story of how he had got his wife fully cured of diabetes 10 years ago by shifting to a staunchly traditional Sri Lankan diet but my short bus journey to my destination did not provide enough time to brief my co-passenger adequately.

What is clear to all of us is that Sri Lanka is at crossroads. Faced with acute financial challenges imports of many everyday used products are banned on account of them costing dollars.

In this backdrop Sri Lanka has initiated the national food security and nutritional council which last week summoned a national level meeting headed by the President to which State officials from around the country participated.

As one of the members who took part pointed out, the farmers, especially the farmers of the North of the country had received a good paddy harvest this year but were unable to market it on account of the rice imports. The President had responded that there would shortly be a gazette notification announcing that Sri Lanka would suspend the current importing of rice.

Meanwhile there is a current national discourse about rice fortification with vitamins and minerals which will enable multinational companies to import or manufacture locally these ‘fortified’ rice for the purported cause of assisting in thwarting anaemia and vitamin deficiencies. While the pros and cons of this synthetic nutrititionalising of rice may be assessed diversely, what is not spoken about in the platforms that discuss such steps, is that Sri Lanka has hundreds of traditional rice varieties which hold high medicinal value especially against diseases like diabetes and obesity. These rice such as Kaluheeneti, Suwandel, Pachaperumal, Maa wee, Kuruluthuda and many other varieties remain upon the land despite no formal national policy to safeguard these heritage crops. 

An academic work by Appuhamilage Sanjeewanie Ginigaddara and Sampath Priya Dissanayake of Rajarata University, using Anuradhapura as a case study found out in 2018 farmers are willing to cultivate traditional rice varieties as they are adaptable to the natural environment. 

Forge a better link with food sourcing

Hence it remains the duty of the discerning Sri Lankan to independently research, seek out the traditional ecological/bio dynamic farming experts such as Tilak Kandegama and the many others who are committed to saving Sri Lanka’s traditional crops from extinction. Each Sri Lankan can create time to forge a better link with their food sourcing by reaching out to farmers who cultivate hundreds of traditional food varieties including yams and tubers which double up as immunity boosting nutrients.

This article is best ended with quotations from two Sri Lankans from the North and South respectively who attempt to preserve and use for public good the heritage of traditional food and medicinal knowledge. 

From the South of Sri Lanka the head of the Deshiya Waidya Krama Surekime Sanvidanaya, Waidya D.B. Rathnayaka who hails from a family of traditional medical practitioners and based in Kandy, calls me up and appeals for an educative article on how citizens can seek traditional cures through food and medication from the current wave of throat related dry coughs.

This are his comments:

“Please write that they should not ruin their immunity by taking diverse medication and consequently over medicating themselves and then finally when their bodies are totally resistant to such substance, come to us and demand for a herbal tonic. Traditional cures is not just in a ‘tonic’.”

“Please advice that they should refrain from immunity debilitating foods such as bread and seek to eat as much as possible the grains and food consumed as part of the indigenous diet.”

“Please highlight that waves of flu like conditions spreading now across the population will be debilitating for the economy as all these medications are purchased with dollars we are trying to save. The hospitals are full with patients with these conditions. Please tell them that they can easily go to a Sinhala Beheth kade or an Ayurveda outlet and obtain the basic medications used for colds such as coriander, veniwel and pas panguwa and obtain treatment from a traditional physician. Why can’t this nation which did not use traditional medicine in the time of COVID-19 at least now open their eyes? Not just Sinhala Wedakama, there is Siddha of the Sri Lankan Tamils and Unani of the Sri Lankan Muslims and these are all in accordance with nature and non harmful to the body.”  

Concurrently one of the senior most food natural preservation experts of the North of Sri Lanka, Sangarapillai Naguleswaran of Jaffna appeals for common sense to reign in the current endeavours for food and health security.

Being a health food entrepreneurship pioneer and a board member of the Northern Chamber of Industries that covers a multi sector range that include agriculture, fisheries and livestock, he points out that food security should be multi-dimensional so that it connects soil nurturing, human health, micro and macro economy and links agrarian sustainability with entrepreneurial innovation.

“Every Sri Lankan should initiate the steps to establishing national food and health security. Each Sri Lankan should consider it his duty,” he emphasises.  

(Note: The below references were used to source the related information in this article. https://www.thehindu.com/sci-tech/agriculture/what-is-zero-budget-natural-farming/article28733122.ece

https://www.intechopen.com/profiles/212150.)