Minister Amaraweera: please spare North-East forest land - EDITORIAL

The forest cover of Sri Lanka which stood at 50% in 1949 is today reduced to 18%. 
Last November Minister of Agriculture, Wild Life and Forest Conservation Mahinda Amaraweera, vowed to increase the country’s forest cover to 30% by 2025. However a few days back the same minister came under heavy criticism by the Forest Officers over a pledge made to release North and East forest lands; which are illegally occupied by farmers during the war and in the aftermath of tsunami.  These lands were taken over by the Forest Department later.

The General Secretary of the Forest Conservators Union and Deputy Conservator of Forests Lalith Gamage in a letter to Minister Amaraweera had alerted the minister that a move to release forest land to people will set a bad precedent and is very likely to be used by organized groups to take over forest land in the guise of paddy cultivators. The Deputy Conservator had reminded the minister that releasing land would also make a mockery of all the hard work by the forest officers who preserved those plots of land under difficult circumstances all these years. 

The war in the North and East saw thousands of people taking over forest land in the absence of forest officers in the LTTE controlled areas. In the aftermath of tsunami, tens of thousands of people from the East, especially businessmen, rushed to occupy forest land illegally. This was mainly prevalent in the district of Ampara. During the past couple of decades or so the Forest Department has been making valiant efforts to re-annex those plots of land to department.
Perhaps the minister was not aware of this background by the time he made the statement.

If Minister Amaraweera goes ahead with his plan to release land which now comes under the Forest Department, the prospect of Sri Lanka reaching 30% forest cover by 2025 certainly would be dim. Worse, the percentage of existing forest cover is certainly likely to plummet further in such an eventuality. 
However there’s no denying of the fact that there’s an urgent need to increase the paddy harvest in Sri Lanka to face the impending food crisis triggered by the dollar crunch. The food security no doubt is already in dire straits here in Sri Lanka due to poor harvest caused by shortage of inorganic fertilizer in the last season due to 
government policy. 

Interestingly Minister Amaraweera’s latest declaration comes at a time when nearly 50% paddy land in Kurunegala district and 40% in Anuradhapura district remain abandoned due to lack of fertilizer and water. If Minister Amaraweera is keen on increasing the paddy harvest in the country he should make efforts to provide fertilizer and water to the owners of these plots of land and get them to cultivate paddy again in those abandoned fields.

In the 2019 Global Climate Index Sri Lanka ranked second among the countries hit by extreme weather patterns during the past two decades or so. Sri Lanka was only behind the Caribbean Island Puerto Rico in the index. This is no surprise given the extreme weather conditions like recurrent floods, droughts and heat waves that the country has been during the past twenty years or so. The dwindling forest cover no doubt played a significant role in this phenomenon.

The countrymen had been witnessing mass scale clearing of forest land including those in national parks like Wilpattu during this period. Country’s only primary forest Sinharaja and the beautiful knuckles range faced a slew of threats. Sri Lanka was going through this crisis while countries like France, China and even India have been busy planning forests even in cities. Depletion of forest cover all over the world has made a major contribution to extreme weather patterns experienced globally. 
It goes without saying that there’s an urgent need to increase the forest cover here in Sri Lanka and one only hopes that Minister Amaraweera acts prudently and reverses the decision to release the North and East forest land to people.