Mobile phone message services like one deployed by the financial news agency Reuters to over a million farmers in India, could help Sri Lankan farmers earn more for their produce, experts said.
Ranjit Pawar of Reuters Market Light, India said their SMS (short message service) in India provide farmers timely information and helps eliminate middlemen.
“A farmer told me, ‘If I had timely information I could have made 40 percent more money,’ when we launched the short message service in India,” Pawar told a seminar on knowledge based economies.
It was organized by LIRNEasia, a regional think tank based in Colombo, Sri Lanka.
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Inward or outward looking policies post COVID-19?
Today I participated in a Zoom meeting organized by the Nightwatchman Society attended by around 200 participants where the above question was discussed by a panel of four, including myself. The recording of the discussion is here.
Insights from our work on agriculture to inform current debates on post-COVID-19 economy
Now is the right time to rethink food-supply chains. As the expected shocks from climate change (longer droughts, more floods, etc.
Insights for current food security debates from our work on agricultural supply chains
In previous research going back to 2006, LIRNEasia has studied food supply chains, including, but not limited to, fruit and vegetable supply chains in Sri Lanka centered on Sri Lanka’s largest wholesale market in Dambulla which was recently shut down by the government along with several other wholesale markets. The closures were preceded by scenes of massive over supply, frustrated farmers throwing away unsold produce in large quantities, claims that the traditional traders were exploitative “middlemen,” and counterclaims that politicians were seeking to replace them, etc.
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1 Comment
Donald Gaminitillake
In Sri Lanka local language SMS or Local language usage in Computers is a distant dream. Sri Lanka has not done the basics. Sinhala and Tamil characters are not recognized in the SLSI. (Sri Lanka Standards Institute) Therefore only few Sinhala characters have proper utf values in the unicode database. We do not have a FEP or a IME correctly developed. These terms are not heard in the sri lanka.
Our elite in the IT field does not like to educate the masses. They want to have their own way and dictate terms to the public.
Donald Gaminitillake
Lets us change the standard