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Sri Lanka Changing Patterns
Since the beginning of the twentieth century, agriculture has
been dominated by the four principal crops: rice, tea, rubber,
and coconut. Most tea and rubber were exported, whereas almost
all rice was for internal use. The coconut crop was sold on both
domestic and international markets. The importance of other crops
increased in the 1970s and 1980s, but no single crop emerged to
challenge the four traditional mainstays.
Tea, rubber, and to a lesser extent, coconut are grown on
plantations established in the nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries. Before the plantations existed, villagers carried out
three main types of cultivation. The valley bottoms and lowlands
were occupied by rice paddies. These paddies were surrounded by a
belt of residential gardens permanently cultivated with fruit
trees and vegetables. The gardens in turn were surrounded by
forests, parts of which were temporarily cleared for slash-and-
burn cultivation, known as
chena (see Glossary).
Various
grains and vegetables were grown on chena lands. The
forests were also used for hunting, grazing for village cattle,
gathering wild fruit, and timber. In some villages, especially in
the dry zone, there was little rice cultivation, and people
depended on the gardens and forests for their livelihood
(see Sri Lanka - Land Use and Settlement Patterns
, ch. 2).
Under legislation passed in 1840, the title of most
forestland was vested in the government. In order to stimulate
the production of export crops, the colonial administration sold
large tracts to persons who wished to develop plantations. At
first most buyers were British, but by the end of the nineteenth
century many middle-class Sri Lankans had also acquired crown
land and converted it to plantation use. The early coffee and tea
plantations were often situated at high elevations, some distance
from the nearest Sinhalese villages, but as time went on more
estates were developed on land contiguous to villages. The
precise impact of the plantations on village society remains
controversial, but it is widely believed in Sri Lanka that the
standard of living of villagers suffered as they lost use of the
forestland.
Although the large coffee, tea, and rubber plantations relied
mainly on Tamil migrants from southern India for their permanent
labor supply, Sinhalese villagers were employed in the initial
clearing of the forests, and some performed casual daily labor on
the plantations in seasons when there was little work in the
villages. The coconut plantations, being spatially closer to
villages, employed considerable Sinhalese labor.
By the early twentieth century, there was no longer much land
suitable for the expansion of cultivation in the wet zone, and in
the 1930s the focus of agricultural development shifted from the
wet zone to the dry zone and from plantation crops to rice. There
was ample uncultivated land in the dry zone of the north-central
region, but three major obstacles had to be overcome--the
prevalence of malaria, the lack of a reliable supply of water to
carry out rice cultivation, and the absence of farmers to
cultivate the soil. The first of these problems was solved by the
success of the antimalarial campaigns of the 1940s. The others
were tackled by government policies that sought to restore and
build irrigation works and resettle peasants from the wet zone in
the newly irrigated areas. In the 1980s, the pace of this program
was quickened by the Accelerated Mahaweli Program
(see Sri Lanka - Government Policies
, this ch.).
The most important change in agriculture in the forty years
after independence was the increase in rice production. This
increase resulted from better yields and the enlarged amount of
land under cultivation. In contrast, with the exception of rubber
in the 1950s and 1960s, the principal export crops showed only
modest gains in productivity, and the amount of land devoted to
tea and rubber fell. After around 1970, there was growth in the
production of other crops, including onions, chilies, sugar,
soybeans, cinnamon, cardamom, pepper, cloves, and nutmeg.
Fishing, a traditional industry in coastal waters, accounted
for 2.1 percent of GNP in 1986. Government efforts to offer
incentives for modernization had little impact. The civil
disturbances of the 1980s badly affected the industry. Before
1983 the northern region produced nearly 25 percent of the fish
catch and around 55 percent of cured fish, but in the mid-1980s
fishing was not possible there for long periods. The value of the
fish catch off the northern coast fell from Rs495 million in 1981
to Rs52 million in 1986. Production off the southern and western
coasts and from inland fisheries grew during this period, but not
enough to prevent a decline in the island's total catch. In 1987
the government announced plans to provide funds for investment in
fishing in the North and East, but implementation was likely to
depend on improved security in these areas.
Data as of October 1988
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