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Photos: For Sri Lankan farmers, president’s escape is bittersweet

At the root of problem lies a controversial overnight ban on chemical fertilisers by the government in April last year.

Rohan Thilak Gurusinghe
Sri Lanka faces its worst economic crisis since independence in 1948. Farmer Rohan Thilak Gurusinghe, 56, struggles to make a living since a chemical fertilisers ban last year halved his tea estate’s output. [Sebastian Castelier/Al Jazeera]
By Sebastian Castelier and Margaux Solinas
Published On 14 Jul 2022

President Gotabaya Rajapaksa, whose clan’s alleged corruption and mismanagement plunged Sri Lanka into ruin after a two-decade-long hold over Sri Lankan politics, has escaped the country.

For the island’s bankrupted farmers, the fall of the Rajapaksa dynasty has a bitter-sweet taste.

“My country is very beautiful but politicians destroy it,” said Rohan Thilak Gurusinghe, a tea farmer in Kandy district, one of Sri Lanka’s tea-growing strongholds.

Walking across his distressed tea estate, Gurusinghe expresses sadness over the collapse of his once flourishing business.

“Six employees used to work here but I had to let go three of them as farming yields had crashed,” he told Al Jazeera.

The production of rice, another staple, also dropped by 40 percent during the growing season that ended in March. The island is now gearing up for a 60 percent drop in rice yields during Yala, the most significant cultivating season in Sri Lanka that lasts till August.

At the root of the problem lies a controversial overnight ban on chemical fertilisers by the Rajapaksa government in April last year in a bid to make agriculture fully organic.

“We told the government a sudden ban on fertilisers would destroy our income but no one listened to us, even less so the president who knows nothing about agriculture. It took them months to realise their mistake, that is insane,” Gurusinghe told Al Jazeera.

In April this year, a year since the ban, President Rajapaksa admitted that the abrupt move was a “mistake”.

The collapse of Sri Lanka’s agricultural sector and the $4.4bn tourism industry during the COVID-19 pandemic were early warning signs of an impending catastrophe.

The island of 22 million people ran out of foreign exchange reserves in the following months and could not pay for imports of fuel and other essentials, including fertilisers, the bedrock of agriculture.

As fuel reserves dried up, people began to queue up, sometimes for days, hoping to get a few litres of petrol. Skyrocketing inflation kicked in – reaching 55 percent in June – and desperate Sri Lankan farmers finally hit the streets once again, forcing the president to flee.

Sri Lanka
Sri Lanka, one of the world’s largest tea producers, in the first quarter of 2022, recorded its lowest tea exports in 23 years. The shrinking of its biggest export commodity - $1.3bn trade annually pre-crisis - dried up its foreign currency reserves, forcing the government to suspend repayment of foreign loans in April this year. [Sebastian Castelier/Al Jazeera]
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sri lanka
The Indian Ocean island, self-sufficient in rice production before the crisis started, imported 300,000 tonnes of rice in the first three months of 2022, compared with just 14,000 tonnes in the same period in 2020. In May, Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe estimated that $600m would be needed to import fertilisers. Two months later, he declared the country bankrupt. [Sebastian Castelier/Al Jazeera]
Sri Lanka
Vegetable farmer Anindha Weerasinghe told Al Jazeera: 'The unplanned overnight shift to organic farming is the dumbest thing the government ever did. Like many others, I imported hybrid seeds from Japan, the US and France that cannot grow without fertilisers. Last year, Weerasinghe had to sell farmlands to pay for his children’s education. Struggling to make ends meet, he plans to migrate to the UAE. 'I feel sad to leave, but there are no viable options out here.' [Sebastian Castelier/Al Jazeera]
Sri Lanka
About 20 tea plantation workers in Kadugannawa voiced their concerns about shrinking yields. Rohan Thilak Gurusinghe, who heads the local farmer association, believes the tea business cannot run without fertilisers. 'Tea plants can grow without fertilisers, but it is not fast enough; they are stuck in the infancy stage, which is hardly compatible with modern agriculture,' he said. Farmers look for organic compost as an alternative to fertilisers but said it requires 10 times more manual labour and affects profits. [Sebastian Castelier/Al Jazeera]
Sri Lanka
Baratha Ratnapala, 45, has owned a tea estate since 1994. He says the output dropped by three quarters in a year, forcing him to look for another job. 'My friend works in Dubai. He already built a house and suggested I follow his path,' Ratnapala told Al Jazeera. [Sebastian Castelier/Al Jazeera]
Sri Lanka
The Sri Lankan government expects to present a debt restructuring plan to the International Monetary Fund by late July to win approval for a bailout package. 'The IMF should never give a penny to our government but rather hand it over directly to people because Sri Lankans politicians are like crocodiles. They have three tongues: one for banks, one for people, one for members of parliament. Their speeches vary according to who they speak to,' says tuk-tuk driver Kashim Bawa Mohammad Iqbal. [Sebastian Castelier/Al Jazeera]
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Sri Lanka
Farmers are also struggling with human-wildlife conflicts, including tensions over resources with 7,000 wild elephants. Before Sri Lanka plunged into economic despair, farmers already used improvised explosive devices to kill crop-raiding pachyderms that feed in their fields. Sri Lanka records the world’s highest number of elephant deaths, which stood at 405 in 2019. [Sebastian Castelier/Al Jazeera]
Sri Lanka
Ajith Wijitha Kumara, 45, is on guard every night in a tree house overhanging farm fields he cultivates since the age of 15, occasionally firing crackers when he spots a herd of elephants. 'Sometimes I fall asleep and elephants come and destroy everything. It is even more of a problem now that prices of everything have gone through the roof - food, fuel, farming equipment, fertilisers are on the black market,' the farmer said. Sri Lanka has spent millions to build electric fences to prevent elephants from entering the field, but farmers say the measure has proven to be largely ineffective. [Sebastian Castelier/Al Jazeera]
Sri Lanka
'Elephants cannot stick to arbitrary boundaries that humans have put on their paths. They follow the natural way of land, roaming from one watering hole to another,' Vinod Malwatte, director of NGO Lanka Environment Fund, told Al Jazeera. Experts say over the past six decades, elephants' natural habitat shrunk sharply, while the share of total land area under agriculture jumped from 27 percent to 45 percent. [Sebastian Castelier/Al Jazeera]
Sri Lanka
Crisis-hit Sri Lankan farmers, such as Kaburu Bandage Rambanda (in the picture), load up firecrackers provided by local authorities to bar elephants from raiding their crops. The Asian elephant is endangered, and killing them is punishable. 'Throwing crackers at elephants to scare them away is shortsighted politics. Truth is people have lost touch with nature and how they used to coexist with elephants,' says Malwatte. [Sebastian Castelier/Al Jazeera]
Sri Lanka
The skyrocketing inflation rate has left 6.3 million Sri Lankans food insecure, the UN estimated. The World Food Program (WFP) said nutritious foods, such as vegetables, fruits and protein-rich products, are now “out of reach for many low-income families”. The food security situation hit households working in the farming sector even harder - more than half of them are food insecure. In June, the UN agency launched a $60m programme to assist the Sri Lankans. “We must act now before this becomes a humanitarian catastrophe,” WFP Director David Beasley said in a tweet. [Sebastian Castelier/Al Jazeera]
Sri Lanka
Sri Lankan farmer MA Arushka Roshan, 40, sprays his crops with glyphosate-based herbicide bought in the black market. The quest for greater yield has led farmers around the world to believe that chemical fertilisers are vital to agriculture. 'More efficient use of animal manure and greater use, in rotations, of nitrogen-fixing crops – such as legumes which convert nitrogen from the air into a form that is biologically useful - will be crucial to replace synthetic nitrogen,' UNEP reported. [Sebastian Castelier/Al Jazeera]
Sri Lanka
Priyanga Vishwajith, 35, was among thousands of protesters who stormed President Gotabaya Rajapaksa's official residence on July 9, forcing him to flee the country. 'To break into Sri Lanka’s political powerhouse is a miracle; no words can express how I feel,' he told Al Jazeera. 'The Rajapaksa gang is brutal and cruel. They have fooled us for so long. They are hypocrites who robbed the country’s money. Today, we have gathered to chase the Rajapaksas out of Sri Lanka politics,' he said. [Sebastian Castelier/Al Jazeera]
Sri Lanka
Gotabaya Rajapaksa, along with his wife, escaped to the Maldives on a military plane hours before he was expected to resign. PM Ranil Wickremesinghe was appointed the acting president, but thousands gathered outside his office, demanding his resignation. 'Sri Lanka’s independence in 1948 did nothing good to us; corrupted politicians came and stole our dreams. Today we fight for future generations, this is our revolution,' said Nasser Mohammed, 56, outside Wickremesinghe's office. Rights groups have criticised the Sri Lankan government over alleged discrimination against minority Muslims, who account for roughly 9.7 percent of the total population. [Sebastian Castelier/Al Jazeera]
Sri Lanka
Ethnic Tamil farmers say they were also impoverished by the chemical fertilisers ban. Gotabaya Rajapaksa, dubbed 'the Terminator' by his family, oversaw the crushing of armed Tamil rebels in 2009 as defence secretary to end a 26-year-long bloody civil war. The UN estimated that 40,000 Tamil civilians, many of them farmers, were killed. Supiramaniyam Pusparani, 48, (in the picture) remembers her son, who disappeared at 16 during the last days of the civil war. 'I believe my son is still alive, but who can give me a clear answer? We do not believe the government. Sinhalese like to destroy us Tamil,' she told Al Jazeera. Gotabaya Rajapaksa had said in a 2020 statement: 'The missing persons are actually dead.' [Sebastian Castelier/Al Jazeera]