Going back in time: small enterprise development project for rural women, Moneragala

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photo by PANAP

 The article by Buddhima Padmasiri -Structural Adjustment of Women’s Labour in Agriculture in Sri Lanka in Polity, January 17, 2023 unearthed some very early memories.  Buddhima uses a case study from the Moneragala District  to illustrate the exploitation and commodification of women’s labour in agriculture.   

I was working for the Lanka Mahila Samiti in the early 1980s as a Project Coordinator for their Small Enterprise Development Programme for Rural Women (SEDP) funded by USAID, and was charged with developing revolving fund schemes in all of the districts in which we were working, and encouraging the women members of the Samiti to use the funds to engage in income generating projects. With hindsight, I can see the many, many shortcomings of that project, but it was my first ever ‘development’ job and I was terribly keen and  learning by doing (reading, attending conferences, talking to people etc).  To our credit we were not into promoting enterprises that stereotyped women’s role as seamstresses, or beauty culturalists, but rather focused on the economic activities that the women were engaged in (with some exceptions like introducing poultry farming - but that is another story).  So we supported coir producers in the Matara DIstrict, and in the areas around Gallewela in the Matale District, in Anuradhapura and in Moneragala DIstricts, we supported women farmers.

Though I didn’t know it then, Moneragala, as Buddhima Padmasiri points out in her article, was one of the first districts subjected to foreign capital investment under a state-sponsored agrarian development programme, which led to the establishment of Pelwatte Sugar Company. I do remember the take over of villagers’ land for sugar cultivation did cause a furore in the district with several farmer protests. It was at the same time that I believe the Prima Factory for milling flour was set up in Trincomalee as part of the US government’s Food for Peace or PL480 grant.  The Pelwatte Sugar Company was an 'import substitution' programme that expected to help Sri Lanka reduce its import of sugar. An objective of the PL480 grant was to make maximum use of surplus agricultural commodities in the furtherance of US foreign policy, and to stimulate the expansion of foreign trade. Critics viewed this as "a means of disposing of costly domestic agricultural surpluses”. I mention both Pelwatte Sugar and Prima because they both had an impact on the work we were doing under SEDP in Moneragala.  

When we first started working with the women in Moneragala, they were very angry about Pelwatte.  Before the company took over their lands, they used them to grow a season of paddy, and then at other times chena crops such as cowpea, mungbeans, chillies and other subsidiary vegetable crops, including small extents of sugar cultivation.  There were some indigenous sugar mills, producing what we call ‘sukiri’ (cubes of partially refined sugar) and mostly the mungbeans, cowpea and other agricultural produce were consumed rather than sold.   Moneragala was a sparsely populated agrarian district with not the best infrastructure, so the market for farm products was largely local.  The consumption of so much vegetable protein combined with the physical exertion in the fields and the walking that needed to be done to collect water or access services,  meant that the villagers were strong and healthy! Pelawatte upset the villagers' food supply so they started cultivating bigger plots of chena land to make up for the loss of the rice fields and compromised on keeping it fallow.   The consequences to the local forest cover was significant as I recall. When the sugar company started encouraging them to become outgrowers, many of them were outraged.  

The loan scheme that we were implementing was managed collectively by the Samiti women themselves, who met every month to monitor loan repayments and make decisions about giving out new loans to their peers.  Initially they were adamant that no one should be given any incentive to grow sugar cane because they knew that commodifying their agriculture was not in their best interest.  Besides, there was pressure on available land, and sugar cane could not be harvested till after 12 (or was it 18?) months - so as one of them remarked “ what do we do till then? we can’t eat sugar”.  

But the company wore them down and by the third or fourth year of the SEDP programme we were giving out loans for sugarcane cultivation. Meanwhile the flour that was being produced by Prima in Trincomalee was used to make sliced bread that became readily available in Moneragala. With farmers shifting to become outgrowers of sugar cane, the numbers growing the traditional chena crops decreased and  families began shifting their diet from pulses and rice to bread.  It would be interesting to know what long term impact that had on the nutritional status of the people of Moneragala.

In the SEDP we tried to capitalise on that shift in eating habits.  Moneragala then had an abundance of fruit trees, and much of the fruit was wasted, since it was too perishable to take to market.  I remember the Moneragala women visiting the markets in Colombo as part of the project and being amazed at the retail prices of papaws and limes. In Moneragala the price for "a hundred" limes was the same as in Colombo except that there they were talking about hundred fruit, and in Colombo they meant a hundred grams!!! As for papaws, the price it fetched at local markets was so low that villagers rarely plucked the fruit for sale. We thought maybe we could use the fruit to make jam, that people could eat with their Prima bread.  We started by making a calendar of the seasons for different fruits to convince ourselves that we would have a steady supply the year through.  We had a VSO volunteer food technologist who came in to work with us on making the jam.  Our ‘market research’ suggested that bottling the jam in traditional jam bottles would make them too expensive for villagers to buy, so we decided we’d put smaller quantities into yoghurt cups and seal them with aluminium foil.  The Lanka Mahila Samiti centre in Moneragala town was our production centre.  We had just begun production when the 1989 JVP insurrection broke out, the VSO volunteer was evacuated out of the district, there were 'hartals' and reprisals and our work in the district came to an end….I moved on..

I don’t know whether I should be proud of what I did  with the women in Moneragala.  Reading Buddhima Padmasiri’s work and the work of other authors who have written about women’s labour in the sugar industry in Sri Lanka (1), having the analysis that I have now, I believe I could have been more conscientising, mobilising and activist.  However, this is how history happened and so I am sharing it with some regret but no apologies.  

(1) Nandini Gunewardene: Sugar Coating: the gender of structural violence in Sri Lanka’s sugar industry https://books.openedition.org/iheid/6764