• Says organic farming no longer a choice as global buyers seek tough compliance
• Predicts tougher EU and U.S. compliance requirements for agri exports
• Says organic farming offers best opportunity for SL to build brands, fetch premium prices and uplift farmer livelihoods

While underscoring the need to help farmers make a gradual shift towards organic fertilizer usage from chemical fertilizers to overcome the short-term difficulties confronted during the transition, the Export Development Board (EDB) Chairman Suresh de Mel recently defended the government’s organic fertilizer policy as such could help Lankan agri exporters to make inroads into premium markets. 

Sri Lanka’s sudden organic pivot in agriculture announced in April this year has caused severe difficulties to the country’s farming community—both commercial and non-commercial—and others in the supply chain, potentially threatening both the domestic food security and the export capacity. 

But de Mel is of the belief that while the initial transition must be supported by the government and by all other parties in the agricultural supply chain, this is a necessary shift, which will determine the success of Sri Lanka’s agricultural exports and enhance farmer livelihoods in the next 4 to 5 years. 

“Organic inputs for fertilizer are going to be a phased out process. We can see that happening already. But we must not go in the other direction,” de Mel told a forum recently.

“I am almost certain, in four to five years the compliance for chemical-free imports is going to be very tough in European and American markets, where we export most of our products to. I think even China is starting this. After Covid, this will become mandatory and it will also be part of the environmental, social and goverance (ESG) requirements,” he added.

Strict compliance with ESG standards by all commercial entities or the extent to which their business operations are sustainable is increasingly becoming a key parameter when attracting capital, sourcing resources for production and 
finding buyers. 

It is evident that buyers are getting more selective on the companies that they patronise and the product they consume, depending on how best companies are treating the environment and the society at large.  

Sri Lanka has for centuries been an agriculture-based economy and agricultural products make up the bulk of the merchandise exports. However, the sector remains the poorest and the most unproductive. 

The short term trading mentality as opposed to the entrepreneurial mindset and the deeply entrenched entitlement culture, partly created by successive governments through various subsidies in return for votes have for decades left farmers impoverished and as laggards compared to their counterparts in developed markets. 

Hence, de Mel who himself an exporter of value added organic spices said Lankan farmers have missed the crucial trifecta— quality, volume and price—required to win the export markets, which comes through knowledge on market segmentation. 

“We have to understand that we cannot export everything to everybody,” he added.  Therefore he said the organic pivot in farming offers, “a fantastic opportunity four years down the road when we will be the first country in the world to be 100 percent chemical-free,” which will allow Sri Lanka to penetrate the premium markets to gain premium prices. He said the higher prices would be passed down to famers to enhance their living standards. “When you look back after 200 years, growing the best tea in the world, we cannot be happy with the livelihood of the tea plantation workers today,” EDB Chief said.  

“Now if that is going to change, we have to make a big difference in the market, in selling our products because obviously we have to get more money, for that money to trickle down to the growers,” he added.  Last week, the tea planters and the tea traders took a swipe at the sudden decision by the government to go organic and said it could bring down the country’s tea crop by 30 to 40 percent. 

They said it takes at least 3 years to convert the fields, which have got used to chemical fertilizers and the cost of production too rises exponentially as organic pivot demands additional manpower, the scarcest resource in Sri Lanka, yet found wandering in abundance in State institutions and three wheeler driving . 

  
Without directly referring to the tea industry, de Mel said there are over 12,000 organic certified growers and over 350 exporters of organic produce in the country, some of whom have been in business for over 30 years.  While there is consensus that Sri Lanka’s agriculture must be sustainable and toxic-free for the betterment of all stakeholders, there is widespread discontent over the manner in which the government has executed its push towards organic fertilizers. 

Juts a few weeks ago, the Chairman of Sri Lanka Agripreneurs’ Forum Rizvi Zaheed requested the government to impose the ban on chemical fertilizer usage only up to 50 percent in the first year before making the full transition in the next five years in a phased approach. 

“No doubt everybody in the agricultural sector is aware that Sri Lanka needs to move towards sustainable agriculture, whether it is in the cash crops or whether it is in the perennial crops,” Zaheed said.