The golden colours of the morning illuminate this photograph of the fields near Far Cry a few days ago, making it reminiscent of a painting by John Constable. The harvest this season promises to be a good one, with the weather gods looking benignly upon farmers’ endeavours. The sleeping “Bhoothaya” (the affectionate endemic term for a mechanized harvester) is symbolic of progress that local agriculture has made from traditional manual harvesting of rice. Romance aside, it nevertheless underlines a serious problem facing the industry. Mechanisation has arrived, but has not gone far enough to offset the acute shortage (and cost) of labour faced by farmers. Still very much a smallholder driven crop that has been an inherited generational practice, today’s youngsters have aspirations that go far beyond the prospect of the physical labour required to bring a crop to fruition.

Mechanical methods are best suited to large scale cultivation, and the current legal and administrative framework for paddy (rice) lands is mired in a pre-colonial era that does not encourage scaling up. Once the current generation of farmers dies out, will Sri Lanka depend on imported rice, or can the authorities drive a strong programme of modernization to mitigate this threat?

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