Young people are taking on leadership roles in the Indigenous community in Rathugala, Sri Lanka. Against a backdrop of historical displacement, low incomes and high debts, young farmers are making agroecology a practical reality. Community Elders were initially unconvinced, but when the yields came in, their resistance gave way.
Smallholder farmers form the backbone of Sri Lanka’s food production, sustaining the country’s daily food needs. Yet since the open economy took hold in 1977 and agriculture was liberalised, chemical fertilisers and agrochemical inputs have become deeply entrenched. The state has increasingly favoured commercial agriculture and large-scale agri-companies as the preferred model of development. The consequences for the food system have been significant: soil health has severely degraded, crop diversity has narrowed, and food security has weakened even within farming communities themselves.
For farmers, these shifts have been very personal. The spread of chronic kidney disease across paddy-cultivating districts has been rampant and can be linked to the excessive use of chemical fertilisers. Market prices for produce fluctuate often, while the cost of inputs continues to rise, forcing farmers to sell at a loss to private mills or middlemen. The resulting cycle of debt has pushed many farmers to the edge, with indebtedness and suicides a dire reality.
Our response is not to argue but to demonstrate, showing results, living by example
For youth, this landscape offers little invitation. Familiar complaints echo across Sri Lanka: farmers and fisherfolk lament that the younger generation no longer wants to work the land, and aging cultivators worry about who will carry on their livelihoods when they are gone. Low incomes, debt burdens, and the physical and financial demands of farming have led the younger generation away from agriculture. Even those drawn to agroecological approaches face a particular barrier; years of chemical-intensive farming have left soils depleted, and the transition back to organic, regenerative practices demands intensive labour, time and resources that young farmers are rarely positioned to absorb alone.
Indigenous communities and knowledge displaced
One of the clearest examples of this shift is unfolding in Rathugala, a small Indigenous village in Sri Lanka’s south-eastern dry zone. Nestled near the Gal Oya National Park, Rathugala is home to one of the country’s few remaining ‘Adivasi’ or Indigenous Vedda communities. The Adivasi are among the country’s earliest known inhabitants, and their presence predates recorded Sinhalese and Tamil settlements. In ancient times, these cave-dwelling communities cultivated close relationships with the surrounding forests, rivers and wildlife. The forest provided them with food, game meat, honey and medicine.
As for other Indigenous communities across Sri Lanka, this way of life was disrupted by colonisation, irrigation projects, wildlife conservation laws, and development schemes. For the Rathugala community, the decisive break came in the early 1940s, when a large Indigenous population living in the forests of the Daanigala mountain was displaced by the creation of the Gal Oya irrigation scheme. The community was involuntarily scattered, and Rathugala was one of the villages where a clan eventually settled.
Cut off from the forest that had sustained them for generations, the community turned predominantly to chena farming, a system of shifting cultivation in which a plot of land is cultivated for one season and then left to regenerate, while farmers move to another plot the following year. In addition, community members continued to supplement their livelihoods by collecting bee honey and harvesting small fruits and medicinal Ayurvedic plants from whatever forest access they retained.
For the youth of the Rathugala community, the transmission of traditional knowledge has long been woven into everyday life. Young people were taught the skills that defined their community’s relationship with the forest: honey collection, seasonal harvesting of Ayurvedic plants, shifting cultivation rhythms, and hunting practices passed down through generations. Rather than formal instruction, this was a lived experience where knowledge was transferred through participation and presence on the land.
However, this transmission has become increasingly fragile. Traditional practices have declined with displacement and the effects of industrial agriculture; traditional knowledge has been lost, and younger generations are growing more distant from the forest-based livelihoods that have shaped their community’s identity. Due to the absence of viable income within the village, many youth leave Rathugala for cities where they take up manual labour or find work in hotels.
It is against this backdrop that the Rathugala Indigenous Development Committee (RIDC) began its most recent and most significant chapter. The RIDC was first established in the 1980s, but over the decades it stalled repeatedly, each time lasting only for a short time before losing momentum. The reasons were largely internal. Governance became concentrated around the Indigenous leader, with close relatives appointed to key committee positions, which led to misappropriation of funds and resources. Decision-making remained arbitrary and personalised rather than collective.
Youthful energy comes to Rathugala
In November 2024, the RIDC was reinitiated, and this time something was different. For the first time, the committee reflected a genuine diversity of age and gender. The community leader was given an advisory role, making space for newer voices. Young community members took on leadership roles, with one youth member elected as president and another serving as secretary, and women were represented in the committee in greater numbers than before.
Today, the RIDC works across multiple dimensions of life in Rathugala: cultural, social and economic. It organises cultural events aimed at preserving and protecting the community’s Indigenous traditions and supports education initiatives for children within the community. Building food sovereignty, an effort rooted in agroecological principles, is at the heart of its economic work.
The newly appointed youth members of the RIDC were quickly invited to attend a series of workshops offered by the peasant network MONLAR (Movement for Land and Agriculture Reform, a member of La Via Campesina), where they met other farmers grappling with the same questions. These workshops extended beyond agroecology to cover land rights, media and the politics of food systems. This offered a framework for understanding struggles that had until then felt purely local and personal. For the young members, something shifted. They began to see clearly what was happening to farmers like themselves, and what food sovereignty could mean in practice. They were struck by the possibility of organic farming; something fundamentally different from the chemical-dependent agriculture their community had been pushed into over generations.
Mung beans were a practical and accessible entry point rather than an abrupt departure
Energised by what they had learnt, the youth members and the committee’s office bearers began to map out concrete steps for the future. Their first project was to encourage farmers in the community to transition toward organic cultivation. They deliberately chose mung beans; this legume requires minimal to zero fertiliser, and the only chemical input farmers had been using previously in its cultivation was a pesticide for worms, which they knew could be replaced by organic means. Mung beans, in this sense, were a practical and accessible entry point into organic farming rather than an abrupt departure from what farmers already knew.
The youth distributed mung beans for free to their members and asked them to grow them. When in early 2025 the harvest came in, they collected back 125% of the seeds they had originally distributed, enough to conserve for the next planting season and still have a surplus. With the small savings they had accumulated, they purchased 2,500 kilograms of mung beans directly from farmers in the area, bypassing the middlemen who typically dictated prices. They stored the harvest for eight months before releasing it to the market, ensuring that farmers would receive a significantly better price when it was sold than they otherwise would have.
The Elders in the community were initially unconvinced, doubting that the experiment would succeed. But when the results came in, their resistance gave way. The storage itself was also an experiment. The committee used Indigenous wrapping techniques, preserving the harvest using medicinal leaves that the farmers themselves identified and provided. It was a small but deliberate act: a reminder that traditional knowledge still has practical value.
Feeding Nyéléni
The committee’s most ambitious achievement came in September 2025, when Sri Lanka hosted the third Global Nyéléni Forum on Food Sovereignty, a ten-day event that drew nearly 800 participants from around the world. The youth office bearers of RIDC suggested they could provide organic watermelons for the event.
This proposal met with much scepticism from senior members of the RIDC, given that it was the dry season and Rathugala depends almost entirely on rainwater for cultivation. Undeterred, the youth office bearers identified eleven farmers willing to try. Six were young farmers themselves; five were over fifty. To address the water challenge, the community devised a collective solution; they gathered water from the village stream and nearby tube wells, carrying it by bucket to fill a tank positioned near the farming land. From this tank, water was distributed to the crops.
Nine of the eleven farmers succeeded. Together, they produced over 2,000 kilograms of watermelons, 800 kilograms of which were sent to the Nyéléni Forum, and the remaining 1,500 kilograms were sold at shops in nearby towns. Every piece eaten by the nearly 800 international participants at the forum had been grown in Rathugala by Indigenous farmers. Half of the income was added to the committee’s treasury. And the project’s success had a lasting consequence: having demonstrated that dry-season cultivation was possible, the committee received assistance to build five farming wells in the village.
Youth leadership
The RIDC currently has 104 members, 50 of whom are below the age of 40. Women’s representation, while still lower than men’s, includes 35 young women members, a presence that marks a shift from the community’s earlier organisational history. The office bearers, including co-author Sameera as president and a young woman as secretary, are themselves young people, which is a significant departure from a community where Elders have traditionally held authority over every aspect of life.
This was not accidental. The community consciously chose youth leadership, drawing on the lessons of past experiences: exclusion, stagnation and the slow drift of younger generations away from community life. Youth representation at the leadership level was identified as a structural necessity, not simply a gesture. Yet an appointment has not meant automatic acceptance; the young office bearers have had to actively fight for their voices to be heard and their decisions to be respected.
Youth representation at the leadership level was identified as a structural necessity, not a gesture
The youth have formed teams to cover different dimensions of the food system. One team focuses specifically on seed conservation and seed health, working to preserve Indigenous varieties. Another team, led by a young Indigenous woman, looks after animal and cattle rearing and experiments with the production of organic fertiliser. There is an education team that works on Indigenous language preservation and offers English-language education. A group of young entrepreneurs and businesspeople from the Indigenous community are also part of the committee and hold ongoing conversations about possible collaborations.
The committee has also built in a deliberate inclusivity around land access. If a young person wishes to join but does not own land, they are invited to cultivate unfarmed plots. This reflects a longer tradition in the community, where land has historically been cultivated collectively rather than held as private property. While cultivation remains collective in spirit, the farmer who holds the permit for a given plot retains the income from what is grown there.
Cultivating food sovereignty on their own terms
The youth members have discussed ways to make agroecology more attractive to other young people. Their proposals are practical: access to user-friendly machinery, better value addition to what farmers grow, and moving away from the exploitative structures that have long disadvantaged small farmers.
Although the practice of agroecology is still in its early stages for the RIDC and Rathugala community youth, the principles that support it resonate deeply with values the community has long held. Reclaiming their food system is not merely an agricultural undertaking; it is an act of dignity and resistance, the retrieval of what was forcibly stripped away from them. Through the revival of Indigenous knowledge and the power of collective decision making, the RIDC youth are building something larger than food security. They are cultivating food sovereignty, on their own terms, rooted in their own land.
The RIDC is now working on its most forward-looking project: a youth farm where food, culture and livelihood come together. The president, secretary and other youth members have already begun clearing land and have cultivated their first crop of pumpkins. Alongside the farm, the committee is planning to build a small restaurant that would employ youth from the community, source its ingredients directly from the farm, and offer a menu rooted in Indigenous recipes.
Community members are actively collecting native seeds – varieties that have quietly disappeared from Rathugala’s fields in recent decades – with the hope of cultivating them and bringing forgotten crops back into circulation. The farm is envisioned not only as a productive space but as a living example, a place where members of the committee and people from surrounding villages can see, in practice, that agroecology is not an abstraction or a utopia. It is something that can be done, on this land, by these people, right now.
In 2027, Rathugala is set to host World Indigenous Day celebrations. Young committee members intend to grow the fruit, potatoes and other vegetables needed for the event entirely from their own land, conserving the seeds in advance, cultivating communally, and following agroecological principles throughout.
An argument made visible
Not everything about this work is straightforward. The committee’s Elders are supportive of agroecology in principle, but there is a gap between encouragement and action when it comes to actually changing farming practices. Older members are reluctant to experiment with agroecology on their own land, particularly during harvest season, when the fear of reduced yields feels too real.
When youth take up office and lead from within, real change becomes possible
The youth understand this. They know the Elders’ caution comes from decades of lived experience in a system that punishes risk. Their response is not to argue but to demonstrate, piloting projects, showing results, living by example. This is precisely why the youth farm matters so much to them. It is not merely a farm; it is an argument made visible, proof that agroecology is not a romantic ideal but a practical reality, built by young Indigenous hands in a village that has already been displaced once from the land it calls home.
But what is perhaps most important is the space the youth have chosen to occupy. In an Indigenous community where Elders have long held authority over every decision, it would have been easy and expected for young people to defer and wait their turn. The RIDC shows what happens when they do not. When youth take up office and lead from within, real change becomes possible.
Authors: Natasha Van Hoff (29) is an independent researcher and activist and currently the coordinator of the People’s Alliance for Right to Land (PARL) in Sri Lanka. Damith Dissanayake (Sameera) (29) is the president of the Rathugala Indigenous Development Committee (RIDC), and a young farmer. Loku Banda (38) is the vice president of the RIDC, a farmer, and the leader of the youth farm initiative. Contact: natashavanhoff@gmail.com
This article is part of Issue 4-2026: Youth leading the way in agroecology.
