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Modernization versus Sustainability: Disintegrating Village Agro-ecocomplexes in the Dry Zone of Sri Lanka

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 August 2009

Rohana Ulluwishewa
Rohana Ulluwishewa
Affiliation:
Senior Lecturer, Department of Geography, Sri Jayewardenepura University, Nugegoda, Sri Lanka.
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Extract

The agro-ecocomplexes of traditional villages in the Dry Zone of Sri Lanka included four major components, namely crop cultivation, animal husbandry, fishery, and forestry. While these four components collectively provided practically all the food and other needs of the village inhabitants, the ecological interactions between these components contributed to the sustainability of the village agro-ecocomplex. Thus the livestock were used to provide draught power for farming, and were fed on crop residues and straw, their dung being used to fertilize the soil. Fishery was mainly on irrigated paddy fields and in the irrigation system, while the fish on the paddy fields consumed harmful insects and worms, and provided fertilizer in their excreta. The village forest on the catchment area, and the trees sparsely grown on the cultivated area and in the irrigation system, substantially contributed to maintain the natural productivity, yielding firewood, timber, and various foods. In this manner, the village agro-ecocomplex functioned to satisfy the needs of its human inhabitants without impairing its own sustainability.

This village agro-ecocomplex system is now in the process of disintegration owing to structural, technological, and institutional, changes brought about by modem development. The reason is that these modern development strategies were basically designed to raise the production of the land-area rather than to preserve the productivity of the given agro-ecocomplex. For while farm mechanization displaced the draught animals, the increased population pressure of more and more humans reduced the grazing lands. Both modern development and population pressure had destructive effects on the forest cover, while increased utilization of agrochemicals adversely affected the fish culture on paddy fields. In this way, livestock, fishery, and forestry, all became insignificant or at least insufficient, and were de-linked from crop cultivation. In consequence, the village agro-ecocomplex has become de-stabilized, and dependence on external inputs has increased so greatly that self-sustainability of the village agro-ecocomplex has ceased to exist except in some remote areas.

Type
Main Papers
Information
Environmental Conservation , Volume 18 , Issue 2 , Summer 1991 , pp. 103 - 109
Copyright
Copyright © Foundation for Environmental Conservation 1991

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