|
W.M.Kalubanda earns 3,000 rupees (£30) a
month from hill slopes once given up as useless. He
is one of 90 farmers at the hamlet of Dadayampola
in Sri Lanka’s high hills who have taken up SALT,
sloping agricultural land technology, with the help
of the Ceylon Tobacco Company (CTC), a member of
British American Tobacco.
Planters used to plant their tea and coffee
bushes up and down slopes without terracing. Where
tea-growing ceased, peasants moved in and sometimes
grew tobacco. But the soil washed down the slopes
and the land became too poor. With no income from
tobacco, people became impoverished. Then Ceylon
Tobacco took up SALT to help some of the farmers
who had once supplied it with tobacco.
SALT was introduced to Sri Lanka from the
Philippines by Ray Wijewardene, an aeronautical
engineer and environmentalist. Earlier, the
government, and Ceylon Tobacco, had tried
terracing. This was expensive and it did not
restore fertility to the soil.
Wijewardene had little luck with SALT until
Ceylon Tobacco took it up.
As
applied in Sri Lanka, SALT means planting
fast-growing hedges of gliricidia, a Central
American plant, across the slopes at five-metre
intervals. This stops the soil from washing down
hill. Gliricidia also fixes nitrogen. Farmers can
cut off leaves and branches and use them to mulch
and add fertility to the land between the hedges,
which also provide fuel for cooking.
Leucaena, used in the Philippines, is easier to
establish but unsuitable. Ceylon Tobacco had to
devise ways of propagating gliricidia and
distributing it to farmers who had no motorable
roads. To persuade them to plant, it paid 3,250
rupees a hectare.
Three years after the gliricidia was
established, there was a noticeable build-up of
soil. Farmers began growing coffee, pepper, bananas
and maize. The next stage is to introduce farm
animals.
Success at Dadayampola, a barren area, was
particularly convincing for the farming community.
CTC has begun another demonstration with 21
families at Serupitiya. It has encouraged the use
of SALT on 3,000 hectares in all.
CTC has worked closely with farmers’
organisations and local communities and held
training programmes to tell people about SALT. The
technique is now spreading, thereby curbing the
washing of silt from the hills into the Mahaweli
hydroelectric scheme which produces over half of
Sri Lanka’s power. SALT has become an accepted part
of Sri Lankan farming.
CTC, 70 years old in 1997, employs directly or
indirectly 400,000 people. Apart from tobacco, it
has interests in insurance and in the export of
houseplants and foliage to Europe and Japan.
British American Tobacco, of which CTC is a
member, operates in over 50 countries where
small-scale farmers grow tobacco for it.
Conservation of the environment is a key policy of
the group.
|