Introduction
According to the data from the Department of Census and Statistics the countries’ poverty level has projected 14.3% in 2019. The data indicated 14.2% of women and 16.8% of children are under poverty rates.[1] However due to the covid 19 impact, economic crisis and the unrest in the political situation there is increased food insecurity to over 6.3 million people and it’s about 38% of total households of the country.[2] The plantation people / Malayaga Tamil people, especially women and children are suffering form a significant level of poverty, malnutrition, underweight and food insecurity comparing with other rural and urban sector people. The World Bank report indicates that some urgent action is needed to reduce these high rates of malnutrition and underweight among the plantation community.[3] The poverty headcount denotes that plantation sector poverty percentage is very high (33.8%) comparing with other urban (6%) and rural poverty (15%) line in Sri Lanka.[4] Nuwareliya District, home to more than half of the plantation population, is listed as 4th most impoverished districts in Sri Lanka. according to data from the Department of Census and Statistics 26.3% of the population lives below the poverty line in the Nuwareliya district.
The people who were migrated from south India in colonial period have been subjected to various oppressions and exploitation by colonial rulers and post-independence rulers and are still living in a state where their basic needs and rights are not available. More than one million people who are living in the planation sector are landless and homeless, that makes them a highly impoverished and malnourished community in the country. Food insecurity is more prevalent in plantation sector as compared to other areas in Sri Lanka. Lack of land for food production is a major problem and with employment only in the plantation sector, additional income and alternative activities are very limited for these people. The Bogawandalawa area in which this study took place is entirely built up of tea estate-based livelihoods. The contribution of women in this economic and livelihood system is very high. While most of the men have gone to work in cities, women bear the full burden of the family. Due to the limited access to land, there is a need to both advocate for land rights to increase access to agriculture and housing, to strengthen networks to increase awareness and sharing of knowledge as well as increase their collective influence and to engage with alternative forms of agriculture, all of which strengthen food security and food sovereignty.
Project Implementation
LST has provided 8 trainings to women farmers from 2020 – 2022 on economic social and cultural (ESC) rights. The women farmers and activists were selected throughout all of Sri Lanka. These trainings were on women’s issues and how they can be overcome, how to apply a collective model to agriculture, how to do small-scale production and agroecology, how to develop marketing strategies, and on food security and sovereignty. Arulappan Idayajothi was represented by Bogawandalawa in these trainings. She talked about the existing livelihood activities in her village and what the gaps and shortcomings are. Moreover, she spoke about and encouraged ways that women farmers and activists can collectively engage with these issues which they then collectively developed into a proposal. This proposal is used to reach out to the government, INGOs, and other interested individuals who can support in the implementation of the proposal.
A training session for the Bogawandalawa women framers provided by Vikalpani National Federation
LST has worked collaboratively to create spaces in the national, provincial, and local level for women farmers and activists to get involved and strengthen their role in politics. For example, video campaigns were created for women famers and activists running in the local election, including Arulappan Idayajothi, to spread their platform to wider audiences, to create visibility and to provide opportunities for them to get involved in politics which can create change and allow for advocacy through new avenues and spaces. Moreover, the women farmers who were trained, other women’s organizations and LST worked collectively to establish the National Women Economic Forum in 2020 which provides women farmers with training and networking opportunities. LST also hosts national-level discussions, symposiums, media conferences and more to strengthen the rights-based movements on land rights, housing rights, women’s rights, and food security rights and to strengthen the involvement of women farmers who actively participate and lead discussions in these gatherings.
Results
In Bogawandalawa we have seen results from the work LST has carried out and the work the village does in three key areas: networks, land rights and agriculture.
- Networking
There are two ways that we have seen networks being strengthened in Bogawandalawa. We have seen it both internally within the community and externally with other communities and stakeholders. We have seen the strength of collective work and sharing of resources among women farmers. Arulappan Idayajothi, who attended our training, went back to her village and restructured and reactivated an existing but inactive women’s organization. She reached out to them and gathered the 60 women and shared the training she had taken on ESC rights, food security, food sovereignty and agroecology with these women farmers. Through this work she was able to reignite the network amongst the community and utilized that network to share knowledge and work on collected farming and marketing, which has led to improved food security for the community. She didn’t stop there. Arulappan Idayajothi continued to engage the women farmers of her community by taking them to conferences, workshops and other opportunities that took place across the country and connected their local women’s group to ones in other areas like Vavuniya, Polonnaruwa, Wellawaya, and more. This has helped them build relationships, share knowledge and experiences, share resources and advocate together for their rights. The Bogawandalawa Women’s Society is also working with the National Women Economic Forum which allows them to receive training and be connected to women farmers nationally, giving them the space to work collaboratively and advocate collaboratively. This connection to external networks not only increases their knowledge, awareness, resources, and opportunities, but it also increases their power and influence which are key to their movement to acquire their land, housing, and agricultural rights as women. Moreover, since Arulappan Idayajothi will be running for the local elections, there is also an increase in reach to more stakeholders and the possibility of accessing a platform that would allow them to have more decision-making power and influence to ensure that women farmer’s issues are being addressed.
- Land Rights:
The strengthening of internal and external networks has a positive impact on the communities’ efforts to acquire land rights that they do not currently have. By strengthening and engaging with local, provincial, and national networks there is more dissemination of information on land rights and how to access and advocate for them. Arulappan Ithyajothi’s efforts to engage her community and external stakeholders through campaigns, media conferences and more have led to more women farmers who voluntarily join these programs to advocate for their rights. In Bogawandalawa, during the economic crisis, there was a decrease in income with an increase in food insecurity, particularly for women and children, which prompted the community to work together collectively to approach plantation management to request land that they can use for collective use to address their food insecurity. They organized and advocated for their rights and were able to successfully acquire a quarter acre of land to collectively work on and to share the harvest with the community.
- Collective agriculture:
After receiving the land, they needed physical and human resources, such as seeds, tools, water, training, and more. The Bogawandalawa Women’s Society used their existing relationship with national women groups to do trainings on how to do agroecology, and how to use traditional seeds and practices from other farmers groups who are already engaged in agroecology. These training and knowledge exchanges allowed them to start planting agroecologically in 2023 to combat their food insecurity through alternative agriculture. This allowed them to harvest 9 types of vegetables in December and January which was distributed amongst the community. However not all plants were harvested, some were left to harvest for the traditional seeds for future use. This allows them to slowly build towards a seed bank that will leave them less vulnerable and as a means to locally produce resources they need for agriculture. These were not practices they used before and since engaging in traditional agroecological practices they have moved the community towards food security and sovereignty.
Women farmers with traditional seeds provided by Vikalpani National Federation
Project Sustainability
The training, knowledge exchange, resources, network building, and advocacy work all support long-term change and sustainable change. We can see this in the way capacity has been built and in how the Bogawandalawa Women’s Society takes the initiative to engage and create alternatives to address the hardships they face as a community.
One of the plans for the society is that their practice with collective farming will build their experience to apply this type of agroecological farming and traditional farming practices at their individual line houses in the limited space they have available to them. They can utilize their increase knowledge and access to networks to make the most of the limited access they have, to do individual farming to take care of their needs. The seed harvesting and the seed bank they are building will provide resources to the community to allow them to engage in individual farming with decreased costs. The Bogawandalawa Women’s Society currently has a membership of 60 women farmers but they are actively gathering and engaging more women farmers with the goal of reaching 150 members. Increased membership will increase their collective power and the number of people who benefit from agroecological practices and from collective farming. They are also engaging neighboring villages to share existing resources and knowledge, which means that LST’s work in Bogawandalawa is reaching other villages even without direct involvement, and it’s expanding the network of women farmers.
Conclusion
Bogawandalawa is a community that faces immense hardship due to being landless and houseless which severely affects their food security, however through the work LST has done and the work of Bogawandalawa Women’s Society and leaders like Arulappan Ithyajothi there has been a significant increase in the reach and strength of both their internal and external network allowing for sharing of knowledge and skills and strengthening of their advocacy capacity for acquiring their rights. Through strengthening their networks, they are better able to campaign for their land rights collectively and have successfully acquired land for collective farming and use, which has provided vegetables and seeds for the community. They have used agroecology and traditional practices and seeds to farm for the first time. Using alternative agriculture methods is particularly important to a community with limited resources. We foresee more growth in Bogawandalawa as they run for elections, practice agroecology in their line homes and increase membership. They have made large strides in food security and sovereignty that are sustainable and serve the entire community. Bogawandalawa provides great insight into ways that other similar plantation communities can engage in collective agroecological farming.
By Madasamy Vijayakanth & Borrsha Kanapathipillai
[1] Poverty indicators-2019,Department of census and statistics, Ministry of Economic policies and plan implementation_http://www.statistics.gov.lk/Poverty/StaticalInformation/PovertyIndicators-2019
[2] Urgent response to a food crisis, Asian Development bank, 2022, https://www.adb.org/multimedia/partnership-report2022/stories/urgent-response-to-a-food-crisis/
[3] World bank, 2022, Tackling Chronic Undernutrition in Sri Lanka’s Plantations, https://www.worldbank.org/en/country/srilanka/publication/tackling-chronic-undernutrition-in-sri-lankas-plantations
[4] Department of census and statistics,2019, http://www.statistics.gov.lk/Poverty/StaticalInformation/PovertyIndicators-2019
