A Simple Introduction to Plant Quarantine

A few weeks ago when Lionel Rajapakse phoned me from Australia and asked me to review the above book, I had to oblige despite other work. Lionel and I became good friends over 50 years ago when I was working as a fledgling Agricultural Experimental Officer in the Botany Division of the then Central Agricultural Research Institute (CARI), Gannoruwa, of the Department of Agriculture (DOA). This was during the period, 1970-73 when he was an Agricultural Instructor in the same Division.

- 

I found him to be a devoted, serious and honest officer, with a youthful zest for life. Predictably, he made the best use of the facilities available at that time and completed his B.Sc.(Ag) degree at the University of Peradeniya. He went on to the hierarchy of the DOA to be appointed in 1982 as an Agricultural Officer of the Sri Lanka Agricultural Service (SLAS). He worked initially at the Plant Protection Service, Gannoruwa when he completed his M.Sc. in Entomology at Texas A & M University, USA in 1983, studying on a government scholarship.

Subsequently, from 1994, he worked at the National Plant Quarantine Service (NPQS), Katunayake, till 1997 when he migrated to Australia looking for a professional career in Plant Quarantine in Australia (the Land of Kangaroos). Given his qualifications and experience, he was able to join the Alligator Weed Control Project in Victoria as a Technical Officer not long after his arrival. Subsequently in 1998 he joined the Australian Quarantine and Inspection Service as a Bio Security Officer and worked in various capacities till 2017 when he retired as acting Food Safety Manager for the North East Region in Queensland.

Armed with his qualifications and years of wide professional experience in plant quarantine he took on the challenger of writing possibly the first Sinhala book on this subject. His objective was providing the reader a simple introduction to the subject from a practical point of view. He would have thought that this would be a way of repaying his motherland from which he had gained much from the free Education system and professional experience of the DOA though part of his career was overseas.