Conduits of Change
A market stall of dreams
It is 5.30 in the morning and 35-year-old Hilda Diles is the first one up. She prepares breakfast before heading to her family’s cultivation site located a few meters away from her home in Pandiwirichchan in Mannar. Hilda irrigates the brinjal, cassava, chilli, banana and mango plants and returns home to take her 7-year-old daughter to school. She then travels by bicycle to open the market stall for business at 8.30 am. The market stall is one of several stalls constructed under the European Union Support to District Development Programme (EU-SDDP) and faces the Madhu Road which leads to the sacred Shrine of Our Lady of Madhu.
Emptying bags of fruits and vegetables into baskets and cardboard boxes, Hilda pays attention to making the goods visible to passers-by. “If people see what is inside the shop, they will stop and buy” says Hilda. “Many customers come to the stall on weekends and specially during the Madhu pilgrimage.” Hilda was appointed to run the market stall by the Pandiwirichchan Women Development Society in February this year and she started operations by selling a few eggs, coconuts and passion fruits produced from her field.
After two months of operations she is already commercializing around 10-15 percent of locally produced fruits and vegetables, and is expecting to increase at least up to 60 percent. Hilda explains: “At the beginning we had to go directly to the farms collecting the products by ourselves. Now the farmers from the Society bring the products to our home. My husband and I take the goods to the market stall every day and we pay the farmers once we sell the goods.”
Now Hilda’s market stall is retailing lime, pumpkin, egg plants, chili, tomato, papaya, mango, banana, green gram, coconuts and eggs. A bottle of fresh bee honey, spice packs, biscuits and savories are also regular items at the stall. “I want to expand the stall and include more shelves to display the fruits and vegetables better” says Hilda, “I also have plans to make and sell fresh juice at the stall for devotees who visit the Madhu Shrine,” adding with a smile that she did receive positive comments on the fruit juice she had made for the farmers who attended a training held last year.
The training on bookkeeping and account maintenance for farmers engaged in fruit crop cultivation was facilitated by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO). It was at this training that Hilda grasped the financial aspects of operating a small business. FAO which linked Hilda to the market stall also provided her TOMEJC mango saplings, pruning equipment, and technical training in cultivation, harvest and post-harvest practices. She also received funding to construct an agro-well in her farm.
In Pandiwirichchan, now farmers can send even small quantities of their fruits and vegetables to the local stall market and get a better income. Local producers have developed a marketing system tailored to their specific situation, and this endeavour is making a difference for the local families and their agriculture livelihoods.
Withstanding the weather
A kilometer away in the same village in Pandiwirichchan, S. Kanagasuntharam is inspecting the TOMEJC mango cultivation that is starting to flower. Kanagasuntharam received the mango saplings from FAO through the EU-SDDP in 2015. A paddy farmer most of his life, 58-year-old Kanagasuntharam described how due to the scarcity of water during the Yala season he is unable to continue with paddy production. Therefore, he decided to start growing different temporary crops that require less water and have a good market price. Intercropping groundnut, cassava and green gram with the mango, he is able to cultivate all year around and reduce soil erosion, increase soil fertility and crops yield. In addition, Kanagasuntharam grows fodder in the mango cultivation to feed the four cows that provide his family milk.
Persistent annual droughts and unpredictable weather patterns are plaguing farmers in the Mannar district. This too is forcing farmers to re-think their irrigation practices. “I was irrigating the mango cultivation and the other crops with water from the well in my garden,” explains Kanagasuntharam.
“I fixed a motor and used flood irrigation. Now there is less water because of the drought so I use sprinklers to irrigate. But I think drip irrigation is the best way to save water.”
With these simple adaptation measures, Kanagasuntharam is resilient to the consequences of increasingly unpredictable weather patterns and is also an example to others in his village.
Within the framework of the European Union Support to District Development Programme (EU-SDDP), FAO aims at increasing income generation among rural population by supporting agriculture, livestock and fishery economic activities, and rehabilitating productive infrastructure to enhance sustainable and profitable livelihoods.