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Case Study and Lessons from Northern Sri Lanka

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Case Study and Lessons from Northern Sri Lanka IFPRI Discussion Paper 01644 May 2017 Building Resilience for Food Systems in Postwar Communities Case Study and Lessons from Northern Sri Lanka Hamsha Pathmanathan Suresh Chandra Babu Chandrashri Pal Director General’s Office INTERNATIONAL FOOD POLICY RESEARCH INSTITUTE The International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), established in 1975, provides evidence-based policy solutions to sustainably end hunger and malnutrition and reduce poverty. The Institute conducts research, communicates results, optimizes partnerships, and builds capacity to ensure sustainable food production, promote healthy food systems, improve markets and trade, transform agriculture, build resilience, and strengthen institutions and governance. Gender is considered in all of the Institute’s work. IFPRI collaborates with partners around the world, including development implementers, public institutions, the private sector, and farmers’ organizations, to ensure that local, national, regional, and global food policies are based on evidence. AUTHORS Hamsha Pathmanathan is a graduate of the Master of Environmental Science program in the School of Environment, Resources, and Sustainability at the University of Waterloo, Canada. Suresh Chandra Babu ([email protected]) is a senior research fellow and head of the Capacity Strengthening Unit in the Director General’s Office of the International Food Policy Research Institute, Washington, DC. Chandrashri Pal is a recent graduate from the School of Environment, University of Toronto, Canada. Notices 1. IFPRI Discussion Papers contain preliminary material and research results and are circulated in order to stimulate discussion and critical comment. They have not been subject to a formal external review via IFPRI’s Publications Review Committee. Any opinions stated herein are those of the author(s) and are not necessarily representative of or endorsed by the International Food Policy Research Institute. 2. The boundaries and names shown and the designations used on the map(s) herein do not imply official endorsement or acceptance by the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) or its partners and contributors. 3. This publication is available under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0), https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. Copyright 2017 International Food Policy Research Institute. All rights reserved. Sections of this material may be reproduced for personal and not-for-profit use without the express written permission of but with acknowledgment to IFPRI. To reproduce the material contained herein for profit or commercial use requires express written permission. To obtain permission, contact [email protected]. Contents Abstract v Acknowledgments vi 1. Introduction 1 2. Conceptual Framework 3 3. Case Study of Postwar Northern Sri Lanka 6 4. Methodology 7 5. Results and Discussion 9 6. Lessons for Postwar Rebuilding of Resilient Food Systems 32 7. Concluding Remarks 34 References 35 iii Tables 5.1 Factors affecting the policy subsystem and its contribution to a resilient food system 10 5.2 Factors affecting the institutional subsystem and its contribution to a resilient food system 18 5.3 Factors affecting the production subsystem and its contribution to a resilient food system 24 Figures 2.1 Conceptual framework for transformation into a resilient food system 4 2.2 Conceptual framework for building a resilient food system under war and conflict 5 3.1 Map of Kilinochchi District 6 4.1 Communities chosen for qualitative interviews 7 Box 5.1 Summary of the policy subsystem’s evolution toward improved resilience 13 iv ABSTRACT Prolonged civil wars can have long-lasting adverse effects on food systems, leading to poverty and food insecurity. Overcoming food insecurity and land inequality is particularly difficult because of the highly politicized nature of conflict. This paper builds on the existing literature on food sovereignty to ensure sustainable livelihoods and community ownership of a resilient food system. We identify components of community food security to be strengthened in a post war reconstruction context. We study the impacts of the civil war on food and land administration systems, farmer struggles and current transitional justice process in relation to community food security in the Northern and Eastern Provinces in Sri Lanka and identify the technological, institutional, organizational, and infrastructural setbacks caused by conflict. It explores how such setbacks could be rectified and a resilient food system could be built in the postwar scenario. Keywords: resilience, food systems, community food Security, food sovereignty, individual capacity, organizational capacity, system capacity, Sri Lanka v ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This paper was undertaken as a part of, and funded by, the CGIAR Research Program on Policies, Institutions, and Markets (PIM), which is led by the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) and funded by CGIAR Fund Donors. The authors would like to thank the farmers and regional government officials of northern Sri Lanka who were willing to be interviewed for the study. The authors also thank Mahika Shishodia and Sylvia Blom for their editorial and production support in preparation of this paper. This paper has not gone through IFPRI’s standard peer-review procedure. The opinions expressed here belong to the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of PIM, IFPRI, or CGIAR. vi 1. INTRODUCTION Prolonged civil wars, along with climate change, intensify the vulnerability of food systems to natural disasters such as droughts and floods. Although there have been considerable efforts to reduce the effects of such shocks at the global level, rebuilding the resilience of local food systems after war or conflict deserves greater attention for several reasons. Building resilient food systems is key to reconstruction after internal conflicts since community food security is inextricably linked with land issues and to mitigate the negative effects of natural disasters. Yet little is known about the social, institutional, and policy capacity challenges faced in building these resilient food systems. This paper presents the case study of northern Sri Lanka, which suffered one of the longest civil wars in recent history to identify policy and program options for building resilient food systems and to draw lessons for other postwar communities. Postwar agrarian societies experience a sharp decline in their agricultural productivity. A common negative effect of war in agrarian societies is the impact it has on the degradation of natural ecosystems. War and conflict degrades land integrity through destruction of natural biodiversity, deforestation, contamination of land and water, massive displacement of the local people and disruption in practicing traditional methods of cultivation that would strengthen resilience (McNeely 2003; Vanasselt 2003; Breisinger et al. 2014). All these factors in turn diminish resilience of land agroecosystems to environmental and climatic stresses. Less resilience negatively influences the structure and functioning of natural ecosystems, impacting the productivity of local food systems. For example, degradation of land, along with loss of financial assets during periods of conflict, poses a serious problem in agrarian communities that have limited or no access to inputs for soil fertility (Özerdem and Roberts 2012; Sarvananthan 2007). These constraints along with disrupted access to their traditional lands and degradation results in depleted soil nutrient stocks and low levels of land productivity. Furthermore, war and conflict result in frequent blockages and dangers of using local infrastructure, such as roads and bridges (Gates et al. 2012) and destroying water infrastructure (Fraser, Mousseau, and Mittal 2017). The inability to use existing infrastructure prevents farmers from accessing local markets to sell their produce to earn an income, further stressing income potential and thus affecting their ability to harvest more in the next growing season (Kulatunga and Lakshman 2013; Immink and Alarcon 1993). In addition, conflicts result in precarious living conditions, in which civilians live in constant fear of death. Building resilient food systems requires the application of resilience thinking to the challenges food systems face related to major and prolonged disturbances (Walker and Salt 2012). Study of resilience in the food system and post war context also involves understanding the political, socioeconomic, and technological factors that produce primary and secondary effects during the process of reconstruction. Understanding the changes that shocks cause in food systems and developing strategies to make systems resilient requires addressing the following questions: What factors contribute to food system changes under normal conditions, and how do they differ in the context of prolonged shocks, such as war and conflict? How can we ultimately build the resilience capacity of these components over time while mitigating the current challenges encountered by participants within the food systems? The paper addresses these questions by extending an existing conceptual framework and applying it to the postwar context in northern Sri Lanka. One of the agricultural systems most impacted during and after war is paddy cultivation. Rice is the primary agricultural product in the country, including the Northern Province, which was the epicenter of the conflict. The Northern Province includes the
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