No abstract

In Sri Lanka, home gardens ensure to some extent the stability of household food security at the village level. Home gardening, which is an age-old practice in various parts of the country, varies on the basis of plant growth influenced by the seasonal weather changes, the composition of the soil and the structure of the locality. This paper attempts to identify the contribution of home gardens to food security with a focus on species richness and the availability of annual food supplement for family nutrition, as identified in a study carried out in four Agro Ecological Zones: the Kariyamadiththa and the Dambethalawa GN in the Intermediate Low Country (ILC); the Kumbalgama and the Silogama GN in the Intermediate Mid Country (IMC); the Vidulipura North and the Vidulipura South GN in the Wet Zone Up Country (WZUP); and the Dammala and the Pannimula GN in the Wet Zone Low Country (WZLC). The sample consists of 200 village level home gardens. While the sampling was random, the data analysis was carried out by means of SPSS 17.0 and the Shannon Diversity Index. According to the sample, the highest number of fruit varieties was found in the WZLC while the highest number of vegetable types was found in the WZUC. Most of the home gardens were maintained for both family consumption and marketing in the ILC. Animal husbandry was practiced sparsely but mostly in the ILC. Shannon diversity index shows that there are large variation in diversity and evenness among home gardens. The survey revealed that most of the householders did not have a reasonable knowledge about the seasons in which crops were available in their home gardens. The study highlights the importance of giving continuous incentives and identification of the potentials of the home gardens for increasing production to minimize the household food insecurity.

ABSTRACT

Participatory Irrigation Management (PIM) was introduced in the 1990s as a problem-solving mechanism for addressing poor irrigation system performance in many agricultural areas of the world. However, there is some uncertainty as to whether this policy has achieved successful overall irrigation scheme performance in those places where it has been implemented. The emergence of head-tail differences in the water supply along the canal network has frequently resulted in irrigation system failure, causing this issue to become a subject of heated debate among scholars. Sri Lanka is one of the countries that adopted the PIM policy, where it was implemented in 1992. Therefore, this provides the opportunity to find out if head-tail disparity exists in the irrigation schemes of Sri Lanka too, as in other countries. For that reason, this article conducts a review to assess whether a head-tail difference is present or not in Sri Lanka, by determining if the problems and challenges faced by the tail-end farmers are significantly greater compared to those of the farmers in the head reaches. Of the 32 empirical studies on irrigation management done in Sri Lanka, the results of 10 studies suggest a head-tail asymmetry from the socioeconomic and technical perspective. This paper identifies the knowledge gap and then provides insights that would help to overcome the existing problems and challenges of head-tail disparity in irrigation management in Sri Lanka.