Chandre Dharmawardana, Canada When construction workers excavating the site of the Sathosa Store  in Mannar  unearthed skeletal remains in  late 2013, they had accidentally found one of the largest mass graves in the country. Radio-carbon dating has now put the skeletal remains to the 15th -18th century. However, the TNA and a number of NGOs […]

By Chandre Dharmawardana Some  technicians dressed like surgeons in an operating theater are working in a vast tower sealed from the environment. It is full of hydroponic shelves, lights, pumps and small robots  controlled by  clusters of computers. This is  ultra high-tech  agriculture (UHTA). We are in a modern agro-factory tower that has replaced the […]

By Chandre Dharmawardana Imagine a space rocket whose controls are taken over by  zealots who are driving the rocket  straight into the sun due to ignorance  of its controls. Mission control detects danger and advises the pilot to correct the course. Rubbish, you technos and engineers  know nothing –  yes, we are having increasing glare […]

Chandre Dharmawardana, Canada. It is gratifying that several writers have taken up  the vital topic of pesticide use in agriculture (6th  of February, Island).  Dr. Ranil Sananayake (RS)  has claimed to  rebut”  what I wrote. I stated  that our soils are NOT laden with toxic agrochemicals, and that they support a thriving ecosystem full of  […]

Chandre Dharmawardana, Canada. Mr. Siri Pathirana,  a Farmer from Malsiripura” has responded (1st February,   Island”) to my article  (Island, 24 January).  Mr. Pathirana  recounts his memories about the poisoning of fish in a paddy field after the application of pesticides some 60 years ago (note that the word pesticide” includes herbicides, insecticides, fungicides etc., as […]

Chandre Dharmawardana, Canada Sri Lanka has now woken up to the fact that the armyworm caterpillar, known locally as the Senaa caterpillar, has arrived in Sri Lanka and begun its march of devastation. This is what is known as a Grey Rhino” event – that is, an event whose coming  is  obvious but totally ignored […]

by Chandre Dharmawardana, Canada. I thank the Lankaweb editor for publishing a  note about the recent unanimous re-affirmation of the safety of the herbicide glyphosate by a team of 20 Canadian scientists. See: http://www.lankaweb.com/news/items/2019/01/12/health-canada-concludes-new-review-of-glyphosate-herbicide/ When this news item appeared in the Lankaweb, two commentators responded to it. I felt that those comments should be responded […]

 Chandre Dharmawardana Last summer when a California School Gardener was awarded damages by a Court, various militant anti-GMO groups in Canada demanded a new review of Glyphosate. An independent panel of 20 scientists reviewed the latest material and their unanimous report has been released. Note that this approval covers  NOT ONLY GLYPHOSATE, but ALSO THE […]

Chandre Dharmawardana. The following BBC news item on how Indian Science is being influenced by quacks touting Hinduthvaya-Science  is extremely noteworthy, especially for south-Asian nations. In Sri Lanka we have influential intellectuals  like Dr. Nalin de Silva, one time Dean of’ the Kelaniya University who seems to have been  a  mentor to Venerable Ratana and […]

Chandre Dharmawardana What happened to CWW Kannagara happened to many legislators of limited means of that era who worked selflessly, without thinking of how they are to fend for themselves when they reach old age. They died poor although they were expected to maintain a high social standard. In deed, it is an irony that […]

By Prof. Chandre Dharmawardana, Ottawa, Canada. We live in a world where learned judges of a California court decided to award millions to a gardener who claimed to have contracted cancer on using a common herbicide, glyphosate, in tending a school garden. We live in a world where a California doctor addressed the Sri Lankan […]

Chandre Dharmawardana, Canada. Samalankulam or Smalang weva has been a place name that we had included in our list of place-names in the North and East (scroll to Samalankulam at the website: https://dh-web.org/place.names/index.html ).  This was made available to the public since approximately 2002 to 2006. Samalankulam had been listed in the 1982 Annual Report […]

Chandre Dharmawardana, Ottawa Canada According to a news report, a scientific meeting of the Dept. of Agriculture (DOA)  was held in Peradeniya on the 6th and 7th   of September 2018 on  Agriculture beyond production”. One aspect  of this topic was bringing farm produce to the consumer with the minimum of waste. It is well known […]

Chandre Dharmawardana Many of you may have listened to the interview given on 5th November on the Pathikada-Sirasa program, with Bandula Jayasekera himself hosting the interview. The lawyer held the view that this government should have been allowed to continued to run its course, and gave mainly legalistic arguments, or arguments based on predicting the […]

Chandre Dharma wardana. It has been fashionable to claim that honey bees and wild bees in particular are declining in numbers, and that this is caused by glyphosate, neo-necotinoids and other agrochemicals, especially by eco-activist NGOs and donation-collecting organizations like the AVAAZ team. However, scientists had suspected that the new types of viruses, parasites, loss […]

Chandre Dharmawardana, Canada. The reasons for the production and consumption of more vegetables, cereals and fruits are  not just  those based on religious considerations, but they are  also over-whelmingly scientific and ecological. Livestock farming requires a huge amount of water and land as pasture. The amount of  agrochemicals  and veterinary chemicals needed also are high, […]

Chandre Dharmawardana This kind of propaganda claiming that deformed childern are born due to the use of glyphosate and other agrochemicals is not new. Similar films were shown regularly  at all sorts of green-activist rallies some  years ago as well, and now almost as a matter of routine. These NGOs command vast financial resources, fanning […]

By Chandre Dharmawardana, Canada I am glad that Grusha Andrews (GA) has given me another opportunity to discuss agrochemicals and the scientific approach to the elucidation of causative factors of ill health and disease. The readers may  note Grusha Andrews’  tone of the holy Inquisitor, nay of the Nazi Sturmabteilung in dealing with  myself, Dr. […]

Chandre Dharmawardana A set of California Jurors has decided that the use of the herbicide Roundup was the cause of the cancer contracted by Mr. Johnson, a California-school gardener. This is an alarming warning to modern technical societies. Modern societies are still using ancient instruments of judgement, namely, the old court system which came into […]

Chandre Dharmawardana, Canada. There are always intermittent reports and circulation of petitions about the loss of bee populations, butterfly populations, fire-fly populations etc and evident environmental damage. These reports are never accompanied by entomological surveys of insect populations and other relevant data. Instead, it will claim that the reader in his/her childhood days saw many […]

Chandre Dharmawardana, Canada According to the news item that appeared in the Daily Mirror, 15-July-2018, the government plans to “hand over” the maintenance of village tanks to villagers themselves. The Prime Minster is supposed to have said: “we have decided to focus on villages. If we renovate tanks the villages will benefit from these projects. […]

By Prof. Chandre Dharmawardana. I have seen this and previous publications by Dr. Gunathilleke and some of his friends regarding the claimed toxicity of the glyphosate-based  herbicides, in spite of its safe record extending over 4 decades, and the most recent study on 90,000 farmers exposed to glyphosate formulations for over 23 years, with no […]

By Chandre Dharmawardana Dr. Lal Jayasinghe (LJ) writing in the Island (11-05-2018)  gives three reasons that he says are put out  in opposing the ban. He is of course for the ban. The glyphosate debate in Sri Lanka is an intellectual and scientific scandal. Seemingly, Sri Lankan scientists are remaining silent about it? No, in […]

චන්ද්‍ර ධර්මවර්ධන 2018 අපේ‍්‍රල්19 වැනි දා ‘ඬේලි නිව්ස්’ පුවත්පතේ පළවූ Glyphosate Ban: Has the GMOA studied the Research? නැමැති ලිපියේ සිංහල පරිවර්තනය ‘යහපාලනය ලංකා’ අනුග‍්‍රහයෙනි ග්ලයිෆොසේට් වැනි ‘හානිකර රසායනික’ හොරෙන් මෙරටට ගෙන්වන්නන්ට එරෙහිව ‘දැඩි පියවර’ ගැනීමට හැකි වන පරිද්දෙන් අලූත් නීති හඳුන්වා දිය යුතුව ඇති බව, අපේ‍්‍රල් 11 වැනි දා පැවති ප‍්‍රවෘත්ති සාකච්ඡුාවකදී, රජයේ වෛද්‍ය […]

By Chandre Dharmawardana, Canada [A shorter version of this article appeared in the Daily News:  http://www.dailynews.lk/2018/04/19/features/148615/glyphosate-ban-has-gmoa-studied-research] In a press conference held on 11th April,  the Government Medical Officers’ Association (GMOA) stated that fresh laws should be introduced to take stern action” against people involved in smuggling in such harmful chemicals” like glyphosate. The GMOA considers  […]

By Chandre Dharnawardana, Canada. Paraquate was an excellent  herbicide which was banned by a previous government mainly because farmers who went bankrupt due to  government rice policies used paraquat  to commit  suicide! Gyphosate was the other popular herbicide  banned in 2015, ensuring that the farmer and even the wealthy tea planter should commit suicide. Pethiyagoda, […]

CHANDRE DHARMAWARDANA Canada Courtesy The Island According to an Island newspaper report, “responding to the Global Tamil Forum’s (GTF) plea, the South Asia Department of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) on Feb. 22 assured Surendiran that the UK took the incident ‘very seriously’ and Minister for South Asia personally got in touch with Sri Lankan […]

By Chandre Dharnawardana, Canada Can you predict the outcome of a toss of a coin, given enough data and a sufficiently large computer? Can you predict the outcome of the next election if we are given enough opinions polls and a sufficiently large computer? These are of course the sort of questions that might interest […]

by Chandre Dharmawardana, Canada. ([email protected]) The claim that Sri Lankan soils and its agricultural produce are full of toxins, and that it is a “killing field”  is an attractive slogan for those foreign agents who compete with Sri Lanka’s  agricultural products. It is also a useful cry for those who want to destroy the rural […]

Chandre Dharmawardana. Please see:http://www.lankaweb.com/news/items/2017/12/20/the-khapra-beetle-and-using-that-russian-credit-line/ There are those who wish to kill the tea plantations arguing that it is an unprofitable, ecologically unsound, colonially imposed liability etc.  While  some aspects of those arguments are true, many observers have suggested  a hidden agenda  behind all this.  The tea industry is being channeled  to collapse by (i) banning […]