Cooperative concept to enhance farmer yield

To overcome food shortage, increase export:

Sanjeevi Jayasuriya

A model cooperative concept will be introduced to the farmer community to enhance product yield and quality to capture the export market. This model will highlight the need for land ownership for farmer families to ensure greater participation in economic development.

“We do not have an agricultural sector that could have a major impact on the country’s GDP. This move will ensure growth in the sector,” National Chamber of Exporters of Sri Lanka President Sarath de Silva told Daily News Business.

Measures will be taken to enable people to utilize cleared land in the North, East and the Central provinces to fuel agricultural sector development.

“This would enable to overcome the food shortage and double export volume in future,” he said.

Sri Lanka does not have any organised orchard cultivation and sufficient agricultural raw material for exports.

This situation should be corrected and priority should be given to local agricultural products preserving green landscape.

The development of agro based industries will benefit a wider cross section of society as still the majority are involved in agricultural related activities.

Plans are under way to reduce the waste of natural resources, over exploitation and over use of fertilizer.

“We are organizing farmer cooperatives with the collaboration with leading companies in Sri Lanka to operate purchasing and processing centres and also to set up farmer education centres with 24 hour communication network. The facilities will add cold chain storing and post harvest machinery to this unit which covers over 1,000 farmers and 1,000 ha in one unit,” de Silva said.

The products will be purchased through these units and processed and exported. These units will function according to an Israeli model. This will upgrade the agriculture sector in the country.

“We will experiment the best global planting methods available to find out the most suited for the country. The latest technology will be deployed to increase yield and quality as Sri Lanka records low rate of yielding in agriculture at present,” he said.

The produce will be improved to reach high yield and hybrid. However, GM method will not be used in increasing the produce.

We need to improve yield and efforts are been made to achieve green revolution through the organic system,” de Silva said.