Small-scale farming

Sarath Fernando, founder and co-ordinator of MONLAR, works to improve the livelihoods of the rural poor across Sri Lanka [CAFOD]

“As a Christian, I believe that the world has to be just and I believe a just world can be created," says Sarath Fernando, founder and director of Sri Lanka's Movement for National Land and Agricultural Reform.

Sarath has worked closely with CAFOD for more than 20 years.

In 1978, he began working with the Socio-Economic Development Centre, the official Catholic relief and development agency in Sri Lanka. Then in 1990, he founded the Movement for National Land and Agricultural Reform (MONLAR), a long-time CAFOD partner that works to improve the livelihoods of the rural poor across Sri Lanka.

MONLAR is a network of more than 70 grassroots organisations that encourages small-scale farmers to adopt sustainable low-cost agricultural practices so that they can become more self-sufficient.

By eliminating fertilisers and using low-cost ecological methods on their rice fields, small-scale farmers can save one third of their production costs.

“If one million small-scale farmers were to adopt more sustainable methods on just one acre of land each, it would save 8,000 million rupees [£44.5 million] every year,” says Sarath. “This money would go directly to the farmers.”

Grow your own

“Our major involvement is educating people on the causes of poverty and making people aware of the need for alternative solutions,” says Sarath.

For example, MONLAR encourages the rural poor to cultivate small vegetable gardens, to provide low-cost fruit and vegetables on their own doorstep.

In his own garden, Sarath grows 25 different fruit and vegetables -- from papaya to avocado. He saves waste water from his house to water the plants and uses leaves as environmentally-friendly compost. It costs him very little to run the garden that supplies his family with fresh fruit and vegetables all year round.

“If that’s done in bigger communities, together the cluster can produce much more food and it becomes a viable system,” explains Sarath.

In one year, MONLAR helped to start 500 new home gardens and set up 40 model gardens in just one province of Sri Lanka.

Challenging inequality

Sarath founded MONLAR 14 years ago in response to the serious political and economic crisis that emerged in Sri Lanka at the end of the 1980s.

“Sri Lanka went through a long period of deterioration, increasing poverty, malnutrition and unemployment,” he explains. “It had the biggest increase in rural poverty in the world.”

Today, Sri Lanka has the biggest disparity in income between rich and poor after Brazil. Nearly 40 per cent of Sri Lankans live on less than 18p per day.

According to Sarath, the interference of international organisations like the World Bank has only served to increase poverty in his country.

With plans to privatise water, electricity, health, education, banks and railways, Sarath fears that World Bank’s ‘poverty reduction strategies’ will only make life even more unaffordable for Sri Lanka’s poor.

Giving the poor a voice

MONLAR is campaigning vigorously to help the people of Sri Lanka to challenge the way their country is being run.

Until now, many of the decisions affecting Sri Lanka’s future have been made behind closed doors. But MONLAR is working hard to raise the concerns of Sri Lanka’s poor in the corridors of power.

Their work seems to making an impact. For example, there has been a lot of resistance across the country to a government bill to privatise water supplies.

“In Sri Lankan cities, poor people had water pipes in the street. Now there are meters for a nominal charge,” says Sarath.

“The public taps have been closed down and the poorest people don’t have any water. There are situations where people have to collect water from someone else’s drains.”

“In Sri Lanka, I can’t imagine normal people selling water as a commodity,” he says.

“I have a well in my garden and it’s normal to share water with my neighbours if they need to. We have never given a monetary value to water.”

'The most important value is greed'

“Sri Lanka has been Buddhist for a very long time, but I don’t consider it Buddhist anymore because the Buddhist values are no longer meaningfully looked upon,” says Sarath.

“The most important value is greed and the only way to success is through greed. You have to be ruthless in your accumulation.”

“In the long-term, we feel that poor people in most countries will have to adopt low-cost farming to sustain themselves. It’s a growing trend,” says Sarath.

“We don’t believe in competing on the global market. There are a lot of people who can’t even enter the market. There is no need to compete if poor people can make the most of their natural resources, their land, their water. But we have a big struggle on our hands to stop these resources from being taken.”

Joining hands

“I’m really very happy that CAFOD has begun to join hands with many others across the world,” says Sarath.

“CAFOD can make a big difference towards building the faith that change is possible, even though it seems impossible. And I believe that change is possible.”

“If CAFOD can work with us to help us to produce our food at lower cost, people would be very happy. Sri Lanka could become a country that exports food after producing enough for everyone to eat.”

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