The agricultural policy of Sri Lanka symbolizes far-reaching ‘awareness’ of policy makers on ‘global change’ and ‘sustainability’. Nevertheless, the poor social identity of farming communities, adverse environmental externalities,and declining profitability depict how agrarian development efforts have fallen short of its goals thus placing sustainability of farming systems in a great jeopardy. Failures visible in the context of aging farm population, youth departure from agriculture, poverty, malnutrition, health issues of pesticide use (CKDU), poor living conditions of farmers, clearing of forests, soil erosion and excessive use of subsidized fertilizers points to ‘awareness’ of policy makers alone is inadequate to translate the policies into sustainable practices. The role of researchers in guiding them to adopt ‘systems perspective’ while making them equipped with smart agricultural policy transformation tools is vital for the allocation of resources between sustainable farming options. This collaborative project aims to build the capacities of different stakeholders in the agrarian sector; train national level researchers in constructing such tools, indices of sustainability as proposed in this exercise,interactive research-policy dialogue to provide a scientific input to policy formulation process aided by the above tool; training of grassroots level farmer educationists and farmer leaders towards greening of major farmlands in the country.
Project • CBA2016-08SY-Weerakkody