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Protecting food crops in Sri Lanka’s Mid-Country

I have at various times referred to the problems encountered by those seeking to grow and harvest food of one kind or another in that part of the country in which I live.

For starters, let me say that I can claim some knowledge in this area as I have worked in agriculture in various forms for a significant part of my life both in the land of my birth and in climes very different where the scale of production was beyond anything encountered in our country both in crop and livestock production.

But what I’d like to revert to is the matter of food production on a very small scale, even by Sri Lankan standards, referring to possibilities in the area of home gardens producing food, even if it means no surplus for disposal outside that home.

Community gardens

At a time that I was engaged with the needs of immigrant and refugee populations in an urban setting in a north central part of Canada, one of the matters that we dealt with was community gardens. In that particular case (successful) efforts were made to obtain the use of vacant city lots for groups of people to grow food – mostly vegetables that could be harvested during the summer and consumed throughout that season or, as in the case of potatoes, harvested in the fall and stored for consumption throughout the season(s) that followed. 

This proved to be an economically viable enterprise, apart from the pleasure it provided people with limited means and little opportunity for self-expression.

What I most remember from those times though is one very important fact:  a very large proportion of the world’s food is, in fact, produced in home gardens, not on the prairies of North America or the steppes of Eastern Europe.  Surprising, but true.

But where am I going with this seeming trivia?  Give me a moment and I’ll tell you.

Sri Lanka, and particularly its mid-country, by virtue of its climate provides a source of food production that should make a significant impact on our current predicament, particularly with climate change impacting so negatively on such huge food producers as Australia.

No, I am not suggesting that our mid-country peasants look for varieties of Red Spring wheat that will thrive in the vicinity of Kandy.  What I’d like to suggest is something far less romantic or dramatic: develop and, most important, save from the depredations of vermin, those vegetables and fruits, many of them perennials, that either can be grown and harvested or already exist, such as jak, breadfruit, mangoes etc.

In many cases, small peasant landholdings already contain fruits and vegetables which the land-owners are familiar with, know how to look after and harvest.  However, a huge part of the problem is the depredations of pests and these are far more widespread than any city dweller from Colombo or points south would imagine.

Problem of pests

The primary pests are wild pigs, porcupines, monkeys, flying squirrels and giant squirrels.  The damage that the first two can do to anything at ground level has to be seen to be believed.  I planted three acres of coconut seedlings and the end result was about ten seedlings surviving after a year, thanks to the depredations of wild pigs and porcupines.  There is virtually nothing that one would want to plant in the ground that either of these animals don’t consider a delicacy it seems.  And none of the preventive measures, inclusive of the really bizarre one of strewing hair from a barber-shop around coconut seedlings, works!

As for such root vegetables as manioc and sweet potatoes, just forget it because you will find that, just as the tubers begin to grow, one or the other of these menaces will plough up your yam patch and take care of your crop.

As for monkeys, the only thing I know them to have spared is the lovi-lovi fruit which appears to be too acid even for a macaques palate!  Jak, mangoes, coconuts – from the most tender to the kurumba stage – and any and everything else is fair game for our simian friends.  And what they don’t eat they will destroy completely.  For instance, I have a rather large clump of breadfruit from which we have not harvested one single fruit for the past three seasons because the monkeys choose to attack the tender shoots and the emerging breadfruit (del ballo).

As another example of their depredations, a couple of years ago I returned from Canada with more than $50 worth of high quality vegetable seeds all of which I knew would do well in my home garden.  I had very nearly 100% germination, only to have a troop of monkeys descend upon the tender plants and destroy everything in that garden in the space of a couple of unguarded hours.

Plantains

If one is to save bunches of plantains the only (partial) protection possible is to encase every single bunch of plantains in poly flour sacks.  Apart from the cost of the sacks, the expense in putting them on the bunches etc., they don’t always work because the monkeys, very often, will use their fingernails to rip open the sacks to get at the plantains even before they are ripe.

The giant and flying squirrels? The land that I am trying to make agriculturally productive again has been owned by my family for more than a hundred years and, certainly 30 years ago did not have any giant squirrels on it.  Now, they are a very serious constraint on growing fruit crops of any kind and, even more so than the monkeys, they appear to destroy more than they eat.

As one who saw his first (and till my return to Sri Lanka a few years ago) only flying squirrel on this land in 1947 (more than 60 years ago!)  I am astounded by the fact that virtually no fruit is safe from their depredations now.  I would not, in my wildest dreams, have believed that these extremely attractive furry creatures could do so much damage, upto and including on the durian fruit of whose spines even the monkeys are leery until the flying squirrel make an appropriate incision.

All of this might seem like some claptrap from a Sri Lankan horror movie except that it has huge economic implications.  People who exist on very small incomes, more often than not generated by casual, irregular work somewhere in the vicinity of where they live cannot harvest for their own consumption so much as a jak fruit from their garden, leave alone get a bunch of plantains or grow a few simple vegetables for their use.  The only way they can get anything off their little plots of land is to stay home and drive away the pests such as monkey and giant squirrels in the day.  And even if they can afford to forego their daily cash income, how about the night?  How do they keep the pigs away from anything the porcine predators find appetizing? Or the porcupines?

Some of these pests, such as the large squirrels, are off limits, protected by legislation.  Guns are needed if pigs or porcupines are to be destroyed.  And the authorities will not issue firearms easily and certainly not to seniors (ask me about that!)

In any event, while the entirety of peasant holdings yield economically significant amounts of food, it is not practical for the occupants of those small holdings to stay home to protect the produce that the land yields in the present circumstances.

The problem does not have the larger issues that the human-elephant conflict contains.  This is far simpler and deserving of a simple solution: give the peasant the means of protecting food that he already grows on his land and that which he will grow once he is assured of a means of protecting it. 

Stop this romanticising of animals that have a serious negative impact on the survival of the poorest of the poor.  Wild pigs, porcupines, giant and flying squirrels and monkeys are certainly not endangered species and, until some other practical means of protecting their sustenance is available, let the mid-country poor get rid of those pests that are, literally, taking the food out of their mouths and those of their children!