Socioeconomic Trends of Traditional HomeGardens in Pitekele, Sri Lanka

This post is part of Ismini Ethridge’s 2022 Global Food Fellowship.

Throughout my childhood, I spent many summers on extended visits to family in Sri Lanka. Some of my first and most poignant lessons around environmental and social justice involved food; watching my grandmother carefully wrap every grain of leftover rice in banana leaves to avoid waste, noticing food availability tied closely to seasonal changes and environmental constraints, and witnessing hunger to an extent that I had never seen at home in the US.

The year I began graduate school, a national crisis in Sri Lanka provoked by a ban on agro-chemical inputs presented a unique opportunity to examine the complex entanglements of food systems with socio-political and economic imperatives. Sri Lanka’s President, who was eventually forced by civilian protest to resign, announced the abrupt ban on imports of agro-chemicals in April 2021, citing environmental and health concerns arising from the overuse of chemical fertilizers and pesticides, such as water pollution, soil depletion and erosion, and increased risk of colon, kidney, and stomach cancer due to excessive nitrate exposure in farming communities. The policy change, arguably motivated more by Sri Lanka’s diminishing foreign exchange reserves, brought global attention to the harms of modern agricultural systems devoid of environmental and social considerations.

A paddy field surrounded by forest/forest gardens.

The reaction was an outcry from farmers and the general public regarding the scant planning and lack of support to make the transition to organic farming, coupled with rampant inflation in food prices, and fears that the country could collapse into famine. The government ultimately rolled back many of the policies, but farmers’ harvests had already fallen by 40-70% percent due to lack of access to fertilizer when they needed it, and the concurrent economic crisis, the worst since independence, made it nearly impossible to import food items and other essential goods such as fuel.

Sri Lanka’s story, though perhaps the first to culminate in such dramatic effects, is not unique. Sri Lanka is one of many countries continually facing the deleterious consequences of colonial restructuring of food and economic systems, structural adjustment policies that pushed for the liberalization of agriculture, and a Green Revolution that fueled a dependence on imported chemical fertilizers and cash crop production.

In my nascent explorations aimed at trying to understand how Sri Lanka could move towards a more ecologically and socially integrative food system that bolstered local food sovereignty, I found immense inspiration and hope in learning about Sri Lanka’s deep history of traditional homegarden-agroforestry practices, often referred to as “tree gardens” or “forest gardens”. Homegardens are generally considered part of an agro-socio-ecological system that comprises domesticated plants and/or animals, as well as people, and produces a variety of fruits, vegetables, and non-timber forest products, that contribute to a family′s diet and may even provide additional income (Soemarwoto and Conway, 1992 cited in Mohri et. al 2013;124).

A new lookout hut being built after villagers began to re-adopt paddy cultivation amidst the national food crisis. Villagers take turns watching for animals from the lookout hut.

During the summer of 2022, I had the privilege, thanks to generous funding from the Yale Sustainable Food Program and the Tropical Resources Institute, to conduct research on homegardens in a small village in south west Sri Lanka adjacent to the Sinharaja Forest Reserve. Previous studies conducted in the area about 30 years ago revealed a rich practice of homegardening, as well as an encroaching influence of tea cultivation. The focus of my research was therefore to better understand the role of traditional homegardens in these smallholder livelihoods, how communities living in particularly precious ecosystems and landscapes were balancing subsistence food production with cash crop production, and more broadly, what could be learnt from these practices that are of national and even global relevance?

I spent the better part of two months living in Pitekele, learning about homegardens and changing land use practices through household interviews and ethnographic research. The lives of the villagers are far too rich and complex to be encapsulated in one summer study, but a few trends and moments stood out as profound learnings. Nearly all households engaged in some form of cash crop production, usually tea, but homegardens remained an almost sacred staple for every household. One of the eldest villagers described caring for her homegarden as similar to loving and caring for a member of the family. Despite the increasing prevalence of tea cultivation, villagers rarely reported sacrificing homegarden land for cash crops, and the majority reported growing more food items in their homegardens since the last formal study was conducted 30 years ago, indicating that homegardening practices were still a stronghold in the community.

Villagers had an acute awareness of the role homegardens played in their food sovereignty as well. They took pride in being self-sufficient in growing many staple items, such as jackfruit, breadfruit, manioca, coconut, and a variety of fruits and vegetables. Many noted that despite losing jobs amidst the economic crisis and decreased tea yields due to the fertilizer ban, families were generally able to furnish their basic needs from their gardens. The intimate level of social integration required by village homegardens also helped ensure the economic and social security of the villagers, and played an integral role in the social cohesion and culture of the village. The rich diversity of plants and crops grown in homegardens, for example, was largely due to seed sharing amongst the community. Children not only played in the homegardens, but knew nearly every plant—vegetable, herb, medicinal—growing in them.

Pristinely clean water in the main river that flowed through the village.

Still, villagers faced challenges with their land and cultivation. While homegardens generally didn’t require any inputs, chemical fertilizers and pesticides were used on nearly all tea land, and crops suffered when the sharp rise of fertilizer prices restricted access. Forest laws that restricted hunting of animals and the use of forest products such as wood for fuel, timber, and fences meant that villagers were facing increasing pressure from wildlife threatening their vegetable crops. Local government offices made subpar attempts to support homegarden cultivation by providing some vegetable seeds and occasional workshops on how to make organic compost.

These villagers demonstrated traditional agroforestry as a practice that afforded remarkable resilience amidst compounding national crises, yet there remains a clear opportunity for both localized and national policy efforts to more effectively support smallholders to maintain their traditional homegarding practices and have viable livelihoods.