Towards the fortification of nutritional sovereignty

 

When the then US Ambassador to Sri Lanka and the Maldives, Teresita Currie Schaffer, insisted in the early 1990s that Sri Lanka’s food security lies in the wheat fields of North America, it was obviously a part of a general anti-rice rant with a view to propping the American wheat farmer. This is not surprising for Schaffer had served in the State Department as Director of the Office of the Office of International Trade in the early 1980s.

It made sense as per certain dubious economic theories: you can grow or you can buy, so if you have purchasing power it doesn’t matter whether or not you grow whatever it is you may want to eat. Just imagine if the Russia-Ukraine crisis had happened in a context where few if any Sri Lankans were bread-dependent!  

The 1990s was full of that kind of rhetoric which of course was dutifully regurgitated by some politicians, academics and officials. It was complemented with a lot of anti-rice ‘expert’ opinions. Some pointed out that the world needs to get out of rice because the crop emitted greenhouse gases. They didn’t say that the world’s biggest industrial polluters, including the USA, should shut down factories. Some said ‘wheat tastes better.’

Absent in the entire discourse was the issue of health. What was recommended was wheat bread; rice was rubbished. Well, not exactly the hybrid varieties that made the big boys and girls of the seed industry and those in the agrochemical business very, very rich.

Privatisation of water resources in the guise of democratising management a la user-control was another attempt to wrest control of water and thereby what could be cultivated.

The question is one of food sovereignty but that’s not enough either. It’s nutritional sovereignty that counts.

Today, three decades later, those who made a living out of vilifying rice and promoting wheat seem to have realised that rice is a hard habit to kick. It’s not all bad news for the businesses that benefited from the kind of policy-regime that ‘experts’ wanted to establish. The seed industry will continue to thrive. The chemical fertilizer industry will continue to thrive. The agrochemical producers will continue to thrive. Those who benefit from recommending policies that necessitate such inputs will probably continue to reap benefits in terms of luxury holidays and kick-backs. The paddlers who have for all intents and purposes play the role of agriculture extension officers will continue to thrive. Meanwhile Sri Lankans will continue to be exposed to all manner of health risks including non-communicable diseases such as diabetes.  

And now, they’ve come up with a new strategy, again wrapped in the rhetoric of good intention - fortified rice. The argument is quite simple and could be persuasive: if Sri Lankans cannot kick the rice habit and if rice is not contributing to nutritional sovereignty, let’s do fortified rice!  

What are these ‘fortified rice’ varieties? What kind of hybrids are they and who develops them? In other words, who will grow and sell the seeds? Are they the kinds of seeds that need to be purchased every year or can farmers, farming collectives and nations create their own seed banks? Will they need pesticides and weedicides and if so who produces the same? Or are we to imagine that no one is interested in profits and that economic benefits have not played any role whatsoever in designing these proposals?  

So there are issues. There’s national security. There’s national food security. There’s national food sovereignty. There’s national nutritional sovereignty. There are also issues about the dangers typical of single-option solutions. What’s required, experts critiquing India’s fortification strategy claim, is to look for balance.

So let’s talk about balance then. What is important is to see rice as one of many foods that make for a good, nutritious meal. In such a situation, rice works as a staple best when it is complemented by fruits, vegetables, yams etc., that make for 'balance.' For this, we need to know what's out there, what is grown, what grows wild and recover memory of all this.

Even as of now, Sri Lanka lacks a comprehensive food inventory or, more accurately, a comprehensive mapping of available foods. The focus has been on commercially grown foods. Now had the ‘experts’ thought about such things, then volume wouldn’t be larger-than-life, volume would not be the be all and end all of policy-making. Complementarity would have been accorded some value. Nutrition would have been factored in. Medicinal properties too.

Back to rice. There are 300 traditional rice varieties stored in Gannoruwa, apparently. The number of varieties ‘gifted’ to the International Rice Research Institute is probably greater. IRRI has over 11,000 rice varieties. Today, traditional rice varieties are grown only in small quantities by a small number of farmers who have, despite many challenges, operated as the guardians of these seeds and the knowledge associated with them. Here’s a fact that should open eyes: the nutritional density of traditional rice varieties is far superior to that of the high-yielding varieties that have been made to become more popular.

But yes, there is a concern about volume as in how much per hectare. The problem is that the moment nutrition is thrown out of the equation, we are left with only volume. That’s bad science which is probably good for certain kinds of businesses.

There are eight universities with agriculture or agriculture-related faculties. Each faculty probably has over 1,000 students. In addition, almost all universities have departments covering subjects such as economics, sociology, geography, statistics, plant science etc. Even if just 1% of students were persuaded to study traditional rice varieties, map food complement of villages, assess nutritional densities etc., we are talking about a corpus of knowledge hitherto absent in policy-making.  

That, ladies and gentlemen, would be ‘fortification’ of the kind that multilateral agencies and ‘experts’ drafting policy briefs for politicians would never want to see the light of day.

So we want food sovereignty on the table. We want nutritional sovereignty on the table. We want science to be informed by a full consideration of all relevant factors and a concerted effort to obtain such information. Any ‘fortification’ proposal that tries to transplant theories that shy away from such an exercise has to be read as mischievous. And any politician or official saluting such recommendations be seen as an enemy of the people.

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Back to TRADITIONAL rice

['The Morning Inspection' is the title of a column I wrote for the Daily News from 2009 to 2011, one article a day, Monday through Saturday. This is a new series. Scroll down for previous articles]   

 
Sometime in the year 2003, a bumper harvest saw rice prices plummeting in Sri Lanka severely affecting the paddy farmers of the country. The government of the time decided that a concerted communications campaign was necessary to increase the demand for rice. The advertising company Phoenix-Ogilvy was given this task.

It coincided with one of my first conversations with Irvin Weerackody who was instrumental in initiating me into the fascinating world of advertising, a venture which I believe helped considerably improve my writing skills among other things. He asked me to come up with a line. So I did: ‘යලි සහලට (yali sahalata)’ and the English version, ‘Back to rice.’ The idea was accepted and of course considerably enhanced by the Phoenix creative team.

At that time, as had been for several decades, the focus was on obtaining food security. Interesting term. Although it has connotations of self-sufficiency, what it really implies is the ability to either grow all the food a country (or a household or an individual) needs or possess the means to purchase the same. For those who believed that the former was the better option, which would make the term 'food sovereignty’ more appropriate, it was about volume. In short, it was about growing all the food needed in the island itself.

There’s something missing though. Nutrition. New ‘improved’ rice varieties introduced with the Green ‘Revolution’ (the quotation marks are significant, please note) were hailed as miracles. Shailesh Awate, co-founder of OOO Farms, a social movement in India, argues, however, that the term ‘improved' was misleading ‘because it suggested what people were eating before was underdeveloped.

The new varieties did help countries become self-sufficient but they also brought with them a lot of problems. They were thirsty for chemical fertilizers, demanded insecticides and pesticides and required farmers to buy new seeds every year. Traditional rice varieties had been developed over centuries and were adapted to specific environments.  Most importantly, their nutritional benefits were immense.

So ‘back to rice’ on the face of it addressed a particular problem and did justice to the brief submitted by the then government — necessary but not sufficient, one has to conclude in retrospect.

The self-sufficiency drive was launched in a context of the above ‘miracle’ as well as more than half a century since Japan developed technology to separate the inedible outer husk of rice grains which polished the grain so much that the bran got removed and turned brown rice into white.  The removal of fibre and nutrients through polishing, it is now acknowledged, has affected the health of populations with rice-heavy diets. Dr Vasanti Malik of the University of Toronto, points out that ‘white rice, because it lacks fibre and other nutrients, is absorbed quickly, prompting rapid spikes of blood glucose and insulin levels which, over time, increases the chances of developing diabetes.’ Asia, unsurprisingly, is projected to see the biggest rise in diabetes cases by 2045.

Strangely, though, the World Health Organization in its report on non-communicable diseases such as diabetes, has recommended as long ago as 2002 that it would be prudent for countries to shift to traditional foods. It seems, then, that the subjects of agriculture and health (and within it, nutrition) have existed like two countries separated by oceans, mountains and massive chasms.

The problem is a fascination or even fixation with improving yield density at the cost of virtually abandoning nutrition density and along with it traditional rice varieties. Dr Sirimal Premakumara of Colombo University, after studying brown, purple, red and gluteus varieties of rice still grown in Sri Lanka, concludes that their nutritional density is superior to even that of the iron-fortified ‘breakthrough rice’ developed by Thailand.

The ITI (Industrial Technology Institute) data shows that traditional varieties such as Pachchaperumal, Kalu Baala Vee, Rath Suwandel, Kalu Heenati, Rathu Heenati, Gona Baru, Kahavanu, Madathavalu and Beth Heenati are considerably richer in protein, iron and antioxidants than the modern, hybrid varieties that have been pushed over so many decades. They have superior anti-diabetes and anti-cancer properties, higher fibre content, improve immune systems and are far more nutritious.

The argument can be made and indeed is often tossed around that traditional varieties will not help the cause of achieving self-sufficiency. That’s bad science, isn’t it? First of all, they were rubbished by ‘experts’. Then they were deemed to be useless in the context of the yield-mantra, a gain proposed by experts who didn’t seem to think that nutrition needed to be considered. It was always about volumes, never mind if the population was forced to eat tons of unhealthy rice. Never mind if the Treasury had to allocate more and more money to deal with patients with non communicable diseases such as diabetes.

An unhealthy population is ok as long as they aren’t hungry, it’s ok if they suffer, it’s ok if they die young, seems to be ‘expert thinking’. All ok as long as manufacturers of so-called miracle seeds, agrochemicals and paddlers of such things profit and prosper, we might add. And the current call for ‘fortified rice’ is not about shifting to a different culture of consumption, it’s not about promoting traditional rice varieties or research on the same, perhaps towards improving yields, or about communication campaigns on eating better and on the severe risks of bad food habits. These things need to be talked about.  

Back to rice. Good. Not good enough. Back to traditional rice. Better. Much better. Maybe the Government can consider commissioning a communication campaign along these lines. It could be a simple, four-word brief: 'Back to TRADITIONAL rice.'

[Note: the author owes much to an article titled ‘Back to brown: how a shift away from refined white rice could cut diabetes,’ published in ‘The Guardian’]

Other articles in this series:

Sisterhood: moments, just moments

Chess is my life and perhaps your too

Reflections on ownership and belonging

The integrity of Nadeesha Rajapaksha

Signatures in the seasons of love

To Maceo Martinet as he flies over rainbows

Sirith, like pirith, persist

Fragrances that will not be bottled 

Colours and textures of living heritage

Countries of the past, present and future

A degree in creative excuses

Books launched and not-yet-launched

The sunrise as viewed from sacred mountains

The ways of the lotus

Isaiah 58: 12-16 and the true meaning of grace

The age of Frederick Algernon Trotteville

Live and tell the tale as you will

Between struggle and cooperation

Of love and other intangibles

Neruda, Sekara and literary dimensions

The universe of smallness

Paul Christopher's heart of many chambers

Calmness gracefully cascades in the Dumbara Hills

Serendipitous amber rules the world

Continents of the heart The allegory of the slow road

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