The Gal Oya Valley: Ceylon's Little TVA

T HE seemingly fanciful dreams of a mere half-dozen years ago of bringing rehabilitation and abundant life to Ceylon's Gal Oya Valley jungles are today beginning to materialize in amazing and heartening fashion. Here, in a small segment of Ceylon's vast Dry Zone, thousands of acres of long-idled lands are now being methodically cleared and watered, to bring them once again into agricultural production to help feed a sadly food-deficient population. In spite of Ceylon's extensively developed commercial agriculture, the people of the island have long suffered embarrassing dependence on other Asian countries for most of their basic foodstuffs, even for most of their daily rice.' In recent decades, to complicate the problem further, the island's already sizable population of more than eight million has been increasing at one of the highest rates in the world, adding more than 200,000 people each year. The necessarily large foodstuff imports, from other Asian countries, are made possible only through equally large exports, to the world at large, of Ceylon's three principal cash crops-tea, rubber, and coconuts.2 Such heavy dependence on foreign countries for basic foodstuffs, and at the same time on still other foreign countries for marketing its agricultural exports, is hazardous, both financially and strategically. A sudden slump of the international tea or rubber market or a sudden halting of the rice shipments from abroad might well spell calamity for the newly independent nation and its people. Fortunately, the Ceylon government fully realizes the precariousness of the situation and is bending every conceivable effort toward its ultimate alleviation. Plans for increasing production of foodstuffs for home con-