The Agriculture Minister has instructed Forest Conservation Department Officials to issue free permits to the public to enter forest lands to enable them to pluck jackfruit on forest lands.
The yield of jack trees in the protected lands belonging to the Forest Department has increased this year, according to the officials of the Forest Department. They said this while participating in a discussion at the Forest Department yesterday (1).
The meeting was chaired by Agriculture, Wildlife and Forest Conservation Minister Mahinda Amaraweera and was attended by senior officials of the department.
There are about 3,000 hectares of forest lands islandwide. They said that jackfruits are cultivated on all these lands and the produce of these trees would fall and rot without any use.
The Minister said that in this time of a food crisis, the wastage of nutritious foods such as jackfruit should be prevented and the public should be given the opportunity to harvest jackfruits on forest lands. Many people are afraid of entering protected areas.
Therefore, the Minister instructed the Forest Department to initiate a programme to issue permits to enter the forest reserves free to harvest jackfruit.
According to the available information, the annual jackfruit harvest in Sri Lanka is 280 million jackfruit. It has been revealed that most of them are wasted.
Although jackfruit has the potential to produce a large amount of food, the public does not have a formal knowledge of it. Therefore, a programme should be initiated in collaboration with the Agriculture Ministry in this regard as there is a possibility of dehydrating jack fruit and preserving food as well as exporting them as fruits, he said.
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