Gift Horses

By Ranil Senanayake –February 2, 2017

Dr Ranil Senanayake

In the national tragedy that is the health of our faming families, no one seemed to have asked the question ‘was the health of our faming communities always like this? After all, with a farming history of over two thousand years, such a dire situation within the farming community should have been recoded. The fact is there is no such record of the massive numbers of the rural population afflicted with Kidney failure, liver problems, cancers, diabetes etc. Problems that plague the farming communities today. The problems are of relatively recent origin. In fact, it was only in the 70’s that their problems began to be recorded. The obvious question that arises is ‘did we affect any change to our traditional agricultural systems around this time? And the answer is ‘yes’ we began changing our systems of agriculture to the chemical driven ‘Green Revolution’ that was promoted to ‘modernize’ our agriculture.

But there is still no recognition of this fact. The death and misery of the rural population becomes a quest for the origin of this ailment or that. We spend an inordinate amount of energy in researching if such and such a chemical was responsible for this or that condition. No one wants to look at the overall picture. That the fact is the health of the faming community has degraded with the implementation of the ‘Green Revolution’. No one wants to recognize that the gift of the ‘Green Revolution’ was actually a gift of disease and energy dependency for the farmer.

Much like the gifs of Mega cities, Ports and airports, that we are so eager to receive, we were once treated to the ‘gift’ of the agricultural ‘Green Revolution’. ‘Doubling the crop’ and ‘feeding the world’ became the catchphrases. Even at that time, the promise of a free lunch (doubling of crop) seemed suspicious. But in the heady days of foreign trips, conferences and highly paid research to ‘feed the world’; no one wanted to examine the aid packages that were promoting the ‘Green Revolution’. So in Oct 1977, I published the article below in the Observer:

A Closer Look at Aid

“Do not look a gifted horse in the mouth” – So goes an old adage. The import of this statement would seem to be: except a gift with gratitude and do not question its value for after all, it is a gift. It would seem that we have as a nation accepted many gifts in this spirit. A fleet of tractors or a thousand tonnes of pesticide does indeed seem to be a generous expression of friendship. These offers are made by the donors in a genuine effort to help the least privileged nations and our accepted in gratitude with the hope that these gifts will help lighten our national load. But, it may be time for us to question such gifts however well intended they may be.

A case in point is the “miracle rice” that gives an immediate manifold increase in crop over traditional varieties. This would seem indeed a welcomed gift, if not a virtual godsend in troubled, food scares times like this. The reckoning is simple, if we have an acre of paddy with a yield of 30 bushels, then all we need to do is transform to the new intensive varieties that give twice the original yield and we have 60 bushels with the same acreage. Presto! The problem is solved. Not quite: there is an important feature called energy that we often fail to take into our accounting.

Energy is one of the most important features of an ecosystem. At the human level, the food we eat represents the source from which we derive energy for all our functions. This food too, whether animal or vegetable in origin, requires energy for its organization. Animals like us, derive their energy from plants and other animal (heterotrophs) and most plants derive their energy form the sun (autotrophs). Therefore, as we are so dependent on energy, it would bode well for us to examine the sources and cost of the energy available to us.

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