Sri Lankan rice farmers vow to fight Chinese investors

BERAGAMA, Sri Lanka, (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - T hese days, Vimalabudhi Thero, head monk at the Beragama village Buddhist temple, is consumed more by worldly concerns than matters of the soul.

With news that Chinese investors are eyeing the fertile plains he calls home, villagers worry this could end generations of family farming in their verdant corner of southern Sri Lanka.

“My biggest fear is that I will be left with a temple and a bunch of Chinese donating alms to me,” the monk said from the veranda of his living quarters, surveying the vast paddy fields stretching before him . His whitewashed temple is now a protest command centre, used by villagers to mobilise against change.

They fear that local farmland will be swallowed by a proposed 15,000-acre investment zone set up by the government to attract Chinese investment.

And that fear means Beragama is now in the throes of heated public protests.

Less than half an hour’s drive from the nation’s second biggest airport and port, its access to this key infrastructure and stable water supply has made the area a magnet for outside development.

Prime Minister Ranil Wickremasinghe and the Chinese envoy to Sri Lanka Yi Xianliang, announced on January 7 that work would begin to create the zone, which Chinese officials predict could bring as much as LKR750 billion ($5 billion)in investment funds to the region.

The money, however, does not impress Vimalabudhi Thero.

“It is not that we are against investments, we want investments in this region, but we don’t want to lose our ancestral lands.”

Beragama - which lies about 250 km from the capital Colombo - was itself born out of another government development plan, one launched nearly 80 years ago, when people were moved in to settle an area that was little more than jungle.

At the tail end of British rule, the thengovernment began shifting people into fertile areas to establish agriculture. The settlements attracted even more people after Sri Lanka’s declaration of independence in 1948, village elders said.

Since then, families have lived and worked productively in the area, growing mostly rice in vast paddies.