'Record rice harvest' for Sri Lanka

Sri Lanka has gone from drought in 2001 to floods today

Sri Lanka's record-breaking rice crop for 2002-3 is the result of the peace process, the Agriculture Ministry says.

In an interview with the state paper, the Daily News, Ministry Secretary Dhanesena Hettiarachchi said the harvest for the Maha season - the main growing season in Sri Lanka - was 1.93 million metric tonnes, a 15% increase on the year before.

The reason, he said, was that the ceasefire with the Tamil Tiger rebel force had freed up paddy in the North and East of the country which had been lying unused and inaccessible for 20 years.

"The number of paddy lands cultivated throughout the country has increased by 20%," he told the Daily News.

The peace process is currently stalled, as the government and the Tamil Tigers argue over whether enough economic assistance is making it to the North.

And the Prime Minister, Ranil Wickremasinghe, is coming under pressure from President Chandrika Kumaratunga, who has been briefing against the peace process since her party lost its parliamentary majority in December 2001.

Opening up

Independent observers confirm that there has been an increase in cultivated land since the ceasefire began over a year ago.

About 100,000 extra hectares are thought to have been made available in the areas previously off-limits in the North, according to the Economist Intelligence Unit.

But not all the increase can be put down to peace, noted EIU analyst Kilbinder Dosanjh.

"In 2001 and the first half of 2002 Sri Lanka was suffering from a severe drought, so the increase since then has to take into account the return to normal weather," he told BBC News Online.

Not that Sri Lanka's weather has been entirely normal, he said: recent flooding has damaged infrastructure across swathes of the south of the country.

But the additional cultivated land is real, and may well produce much more next year.

According to Mr Dosanjh, even though roads between government- and rebel-controlled areas have opened up, agricultural chemicals have yet to make it to the North in bulk.

Once they begin to arrive, the productivity of the previously fallow paddy could well soar, he said.