Agricultural equipment has been distributed to selected beneficiaries in the Nuwara Eliya District under a school gardening and nutrition programme run jointly by the Ministry of Rural Development, Social Security and Community Empowerment and the United Nations World Food Programme.
The handover took place on Friday at the Nuwara Eliya District Secretariat, Hiru News reported, under the patronage of Rural Development, Social Security and Community Empowerment Minister Dr. Upali Pannilage.
The programme is intended to meet the nutritional needs of schoolchildren, reduce malnutrition, improve farming livelihoods and increase local food production — objectives the scheme treats as a single chain rather than separate goals.
Pannilage said that with WFP support, steps were being taken to provide a nutritious meal to more than 300,000 students across 2,013 schools nationally. In Nuwara Eliya District alone the programme covers 400 schools. He urged recipients to use the equipment to strengthen household income alongside their children’s nutrition.
Production, not just provision
The rollout gives practical shape to a point the Prime Minister made to the WFP four days earlier. At a meeting at Temple Trees on Monday, Harini Amarasuriya told agency representatives that school nutrition must go beyond handing out free meals and should build dietary habits and address the causes of non-communicable diseases, which account for 83 per cent of deaths in Sri Lanka.
A school gardening scheme that supplies equipment to farming households sits on the production side of that argument rather than the distribution side. Neither report connected the two events.
Nuwara Eliya is a pointed choice of district. It is the heart of the plantation sector, where estate households have long recorded some of the country’s weakest child nutrition indicators, and where the President this week pledged to write estate community rights into future plantation agreements.
A discrepancy on the WFP’s country director
Hiru named the World Food Programme’s Country Director at the event as Abdur Rahim Siddiqui. That does not match the agency’s current representation in Colombo: WFP’s Representative and Country Director in Sri Lanka is Philip Ward, who attended Monday’s meeting with the Prime Minister in that capacity. Siddiqui held the post previously. The identification of the WFP’s senior representative at Friday’s ceremony should therefore be treated as unresolved.
Also present, according to Hiru, were Deputy Education and Higher Education Minister Madhura Seneviratne, Nuwara Eliya District Coordinating Committee Chairman MP Manjula Suraweera Arachchi and District Secretary Thushari Thennakoon.
No other verified Sri Lankan newsroom had published its own report of the ceremony at the time of writing.
