Drying paddy on roads
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Drying paddy on the road.
Today’s image—paddy drying on a rural motorway in Sri Lanka’s North Central Province—captures a scene all too familiar during harvest season. Whether in the North Western, Eastern, Southern, or North Central provinces, this practice is common-place across paddy-growing regions.
Many have witnessed such sights when travelling beyond the Western Province. Yet how often do we pause to consider the underlying economics and politics behind them? What forces compel farmers to use public roads as drying platforms? Is it simply convenience—or a symptom of deeper structural neglect?
Is it justifiable to cause public disruption in this way? Why are local authorities silent about an apparent breach of law and public safety? And why do motorists, inconvenienced yet accustomed, pass by without questioning the legitimacy or implications of the practice?
This simple act—drying paddy on tarmac—embodies a larger truth about rural life, infrastructure deficiencies, and the invisible politics of survival. It calls for more than a passing glance. It demands reflection.
Surprised by AI
Without reporting from my own intuition, today I did something different: I submitted this image to an Artificial Intelligence (AI) app for economic analysis. Surprisingly, the AI observations might resonate with many of us.
The drying of paddy on roadways, while an ingenious cost-saving measure by rural farmers, underscores a deeper reality: the inadequate state of post-harvest infrastructure in Sri Lanka. Such informal uses of public infrastructure reflect both the resilience of rural communities and the structural deficits they face.
The image also points to a wider systemic issue—land fragmentation. Generational subdivision has resulted in increasingly small and scattered plots, making operational coherence and capital investment nearly impossible. This fragmented landscape stifles the potential for mechanisation, efficiency, and scalability.
Altogether, what appears to be a mundane roadside scene is, in fact, a vivid economic portrait of the challenges that underpin Sri Lankan agriculture: infrastructural deficiency, constrained farm economics, and the silent erosion of land productivity.
Weak governance
Small plot sizes inherently limit the use of agricultural machinery and prevent farmers from accessing economies of scale—benefits that favour larger producers engaging in mechanised threshing, automated drying, and other efficiency-enhancing practices. On small farms, inputs such as fertiliser, irrigation, and labour become disproportionately expensive per unit of output, further eroding profitability.
Moreover, smallholders face logistical and economic disadvantages in transport, storage, and marketing. These activities are fragmented, costly, and often inefficient, restricting opportunities to scale production or integrate vertically across the agricultural value chain.
Quality control is another casualty of these constraints. The widespread use of public roads and open spaces for grain drying exposes crops to weather, vehicle emissions, and contamination—compromising output quality and lowering market value. This practice reflects a deeper issue: limited access to capital for modern post-harvest technologies and processing infrastructure. Agricultural financing remains shallow and unevenly distributed.
Perhaps most concerning is the governance dimension. Use of public roads for farming practices poses serious questions about governance and law enforcement. The roads are ‘public goods’ for travelling without restricting anyone’s access to them. Their ‘private use’ depicts weak governance and weak law enforcement by the authorities.
Cycle of survival
Finally, I asked the AI whether farmers could truly thrive under Sri Lanka’s prevailing agricultural conditions. Its response was sobering: while smallholder households manage to survive through informal networks, seasonal adaptation, and multipurpose land use—as the roadside grain-drying scene illustrates—these are coping strategies for survival, not pathways to prosperity.
To ‘thrive’ implies upward mobility: higher incomes, improved education, better healthcare, and genuine economic opportunity. Yet current practices reflect the opposite—thin profit margins, exposure to climate and market shocks, limited technological access, and poor scalability. These are structural constraints that trap farmers in a cycle of subsistence, not progress.
With fragmented, minuscule plots, farmers are locked out of economies of scale. Mechanisation, bulk purchasing, competitive pricing—all remain out of reach. Policy gaps in credit access, crop insurance, and rural infrastructure further amplify the disadvantage. Without stable pricing or reliable market channels, income security is tenuous at best. Thriving, in this context, is simply not possible.
Remarkably, the AI arrived at these conclusions by analysing just a single image. And its insights weren’t limited to economics—they extended to the systemic roots of the problem, including governance failures and disregard for the rule of law.
Dutch agriculture
Last week, we explored the Dutch agricultural model—a remarkable case of a “small country miracle.” Despite having just 36,000 square km land and a population of 18 million, the Netherlands has emerged as the world’s second-largest agricultural exporter.
Trailing only behind the United States, the Netherlands has outpaced land-rich nations like Brazil, China, Russia, Canada, and Australia. The question is: how did such a small country achieve such outsized agricultural success?
The answer lies in a strategic transformation powered by fewer than 200,000 farmers—less than 2 per cent of the national workforce—cultivating just 18,000 square km of agricultural land. In stark contrast, Sri Lanka has over 2.5 million farmers (more than 25 per cent of its workforce) working on 28,000 square km of farmland.
Economies of scale
The Dutch achievement hinges on large, consolidated farm plots that enable economies of scale and the adoption of modern technology. With average farm sizes now reaching around 100 acres, land consolidation has paved the way for innovation, mechanisation, and operational efficiency.
This foundation has propelled the Netherlands to the forefront of global agriculture—excelling in precision farming, greenhouse cultivation, and agritech innovation. Dutch farmers are not only economically empowered but also educated and skilled, benefiting from a competitive, export-oriented agricultural ecosystem.
Institutions like Wageningen University serve as hubs of research and education, driving breakthroughs in sustainable and high-tech farming. Many of the world’s leading agricultural R&D companies are located in the Netherlands.
Dutch farms routinely deploy drones, artificial intelligence, and hydroponics to optimise yields and resource management. For instance, they produce over 20 tonnes of potatoes per acre—more than double the global average of just nine tonnes.
Too many and too small
Yet none of this is feasible under Sri Lanka’s prevailing reality of small farm holdings and excessive labour inputs. When too many farmers derive too little output from too small plots in size, the prospect of investing in modern machinery or technology becomes impossible. These households, barely surviving under current conditions, cannot achieve competitiveness—even within domestic markets—without substantial government support and import protection.
Reliable data on current average farm size remains elusive, but estimates suggest that average farm size in domestic agriculture is about one acre. Even in the plantation sector, a significant share of crops originates from fragmented smallholdings.
Sri Lanka’s universities house faculties of agriculture that impart valuable knowledge and skills across various subfields. Yet ironically, graduates seldom find their expertise reflected in the realities of the sector. How could they? Engaging in less-productive and less-rewarding agriculture risks potential impoverishment, thereby discouraging the professionalisation of agriculture.
So what has prevented the formation of economically viable, larger farm plots over the past 75 years? While regulatory constraints—particularly around government land ownership—are part of the equation, cultural and perceptual barriers play an equally significant role. Traditional attachment to land and inherited fragmentation practices reinforce the status quo.
Primary constraint
Nevertheless, the primary constraint is neither legal nor cultural: it is the lack of industrialisation and urbanisation capable of absorbing excess rural labour. Without broader economic development that generates non-agricultural employment, land consolidation remains politically and socially fraught. In this context, agricultural transformation cannot be divorced from the country’s overall development strategy.
Sustainable agriculture
Interestingly, AI analysis points to another key limitation in Sri Lanka’s agricultural evolution: despite efforts to adopt nature-inclusive practices like analog forestry and mixed cropping, the country still struggles with chemical dependency and land degradation—factors that hinder global market integration.
Global research consistently shows that countries with predominantly small-scale farming often rely more heavily on agrochemicals than those with larger-scale systems. Alarmingly, many such nations even subsidise these practices with taxpayers’ money, inadvertently deepening ecological harm.
The Netherlands pioneers sustainable farming with goals like “twice as much food using half as many resources”. This phrase became a guiding principle for their national strategy on sustainable farming—essentially, maximising output while minimising ecological impact. The country has become a world leader in agriculture exports, not only due to greater productivity and higher quality, but also due to its sustainability practices.
In conclusion
If Sri Lanka seeks to emulate the Dutch agricultural transformation, it would be misguided to focus solely on surface-level attributes: the intelligence of the farmers, the sophistication of the technology, or the modernity of the systems, or the sustainability practices. These are outcomes—not origins.
Such advancements are built upon two essential foundations: economies of scale and sustained global exposure. Without addressing these fundamentals, any attempt to replicate the Dutch model will remain cosmetic and ultimately ineffective.
(The writer is Emeritus Professor at the University of Colombo and Executive Director of the Centre for Poverty Analysis (CEPA) and can be reached at sirimal@econ.cmb.ac.lk and follow on Twitter @SirimalAshoka).
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