Prime Minister Harini Amarasuriya told the opening of the Global Conscious Food Systems Summit in Bhutan on Tuesday that the answer to the world’s food crisis lies neither in returning to the past nor in forgetting it.
Sri Lanka holds a deep body of food-related knowledge that allowed communities to feed themselves while staying in close relationship with the environment, she said, NewsFirst reported.
The wewa-gama argument
Her central example was Sri Lanka’s wewa-gama, or tank-village, cascade system — the interconnected network of reservoirs built across the dry zone and refined over nearly 2,000 years.
The system was never simply about storing water, Amarasuriya said. It was designed to sustain whole ecosystems: agriculture, home gardens, forests, livestock and rural livelihoods, on the understanding that human prosperity depended on the health of the environment around it.
She cited the principle attributed to King Parakramabahu the Great — that not a single drop of water should be allowed to flow into the sea without first being put to use.
That principle, she argued, reflected more than an interest in irrigation. It treated water as a shared national resource, matched crops to local climate, and ran agriculture, forests, biodiversity and settlements as parts of one interconnected system — stewardship rather than engineering.
The Prime Minister noted that the UN Food and Agriculture Organization has recognised Sri Lanka’s ancient tank-village civilisation as a Globally Important Agricultural Heritage System for its resilience, biodiversity and sustainability. She also pointed to traditional conservation practices that predated sustainability as a policy idea, including fishing methods using baskets with openings wide enough to let young fish escape.
The host’s question
Bhutanese Prime Minister Tshering Tobgay opened with a contradiction rather than a proposal.
The world produces more food than at any point in history and can move it across continents, he said, and yet hundreds of millions of people still go hungry while healthy diets remain out of reach for many families, NewsFirst reported.
“We produce more food than ever before, and yet hundreds of millions of people still go hungry,” he said.
He set out two further contradictions. Agricultural productivity has risen sharply over recent decades, yet many countries continue to degrade the fertile soil, clean water and biodiversity that future production depends on. And the farmers responsible for feeding the world’s population still struggle to earn a decent living.
“Something does not add up,” Tobgay said.
He argued that while science, technology, infrastructure, finance and market access should keep improving output, the global conversation has to move past output alone to a more basic question: what food systems are meant to achieve. Every technology, investment, policy and market decision reflects underlying priorities and values, he said — “this is where consciousness enters the conversation.”
Context
The summit runs in Paro from 31 August to 4 September and is jointly hosted by the Royal Government of Bhutan, the Conscious Food Systems Alliance and the United Nations Development Programme. It is billed as the first global gathering on the role of values, culture and inner transformation in building sustainable food systems.
Amarasuriya’s visit runs from 31 August to 5 September and is the first by a Sri Lankan head of state or government to Bhutan in 16 years, a detail neither Sri Lankan outlet reported at the time of her departure and which came from Bhutan’s foreign ministry. She is also due to meet Tobgay bilaterally.
The cascade system she described is not only heritage. A World Bank-funded programme is currently rehabilitating 296 minor tanks, most of them damaged by Cyclone Ditwah, while a drought has left 612 tanks in Anuradhapura below 5% of capacity. Neither NewsFirst report noted that the model being presented abroad is under strain at home.
