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| President Anura Kumara Dissanayake addressing at an election rally during Presidential polls last year. |
N. Sathiya Moorthy
Water, water everywhere, not a drop to drink… This is often said of sea-farers, who are stuck in the middle of the seas and still do not have potable water to quench their thirst. The island nation that Sri Lanka is, the country today does not have enough salt for your dining table, and there won’t be any local salt at least until around April. The government has since decided to import 30,000 tonnes of salt for domestic consumption.
It is not only salt that is in short supply. The most staple of all staples, namely, rice too is in short supply. The government has already imported 70,000 tonnes of multiple varieties of rice in the past fortnight. The figure has since crossed the 100,000-tonne mark. It is not clear if there will be a need for further imports.
It does not stop there, either. Coconut, which may be a non-essential food item elsewhere, is also a staple, here in Sri Lanka. And coconut too is in short supply. For both rice and coconut, the government had to fix the maximum retail price (MRP). The government also sold coconuts directly to the consumer in the past weeks to ensure availability and price stability.
For a government that came to power on an unprecedented popular mandate, that too by kindling hopes and aspirations of ending shortages and steep price increases for all kinds of products in the wake of the economic crisis of 2022, the challenge is huge. It is not just about managing the demand-supply curve. It is even more so about managing the new government’s image curve.
Even without it all, these are grave issues, which when it became worse, provided the trigger for the Aragalaya mass protest two years ago, forcing a democratically-elected President Gotabaya Rajapaksa to quit under unprecedented public build-up. It may not be anywhere close to it for the leadership of President Anura Kumara Dissanayake just now.
Even without it, the local government Elections before the annual Avurudu / Tamil New Year in mid-April, followed by the even more delayed Provincial Council polls before the year-end, there is a lot that the government leadership has got to worry about. Coming in the first year of the government’s term, any serious reversal from its unprecedented popularity rating at present, any reversal in the twin polls could have consequences not only for the ruling JVP-NPP image.
It will, instead, have even more for the performance of the government, whose leadership at all levels has had little to no experience in political administration of any kind. The mention of President Dissanayake’s brief stint as a Minister two decades ago would remain insignificant and a non-starter when serious discourses on political administration come underway.
Conspiracy of Nature
For starters, shortages, especially of common staple food items, are a huge challenge for the government of the day – both the political bosses and the bureaucratic set-up. Looking at it inside out, it’s as much an opportunity to set things right after years and decades.
It is more so in the case of the centre-left government leadership, which, while in the Opposition, had sought greater focus and national commitment on the farm sector. They used to blame the introduction of Economic Reforms in the late seventies as the villain of the piece – but not anymore, it would seem.
Academics and media analysts have proffered any number of reasons and justifications for the unprecedented conspiracy of Nature. That is if you agree that the Aragalaya era crisis was man-made, through decades and governments. Even at the time, no one was talking about the shortage of coconut and salt.
Rice was in shortage, along with dairy products and condiments for cooking, including the all-pervasive turmeric. The latter owed to the Gota government’s brainwave of overnight banning turmeric imports, in the name of promoting local farmers – as if the latter had a magic wand to supply to requirements without even having the time to clear the land and plant the seeds/saplings.
Of course, some of the critics of the Gota government blame the current crisis, especially of rice, for the fertiliser import crisis from that time. As may be recalled, the government had likewise banned the import of chemical fertilisers, to encourage the use of natural fertilisers in their place. Again, even natural fertiliser stocks had not even been loaded – or so it seemed – when the ban was imposed with immediate effect.
Unseasonal rains are otherwise blamed for the loss of salt stocks. There are also complaints that the previous government had released huge stocks to the private sector before the Presidential Election. If there are political scams surrounding both decisions by successive governments, probing them need not be the only option available to the present one.
Rural Background
In its place, the government, whose ideological roots lie in the rural background and backyards, and whose policies and programmes are believed to be inclined towards the traditional sector, can make the current challenge a great opportunity, to re-write the economic priorities of the country and the community. This is even while Team AKD and its politico-electoral face(s) seek to modernise its approach and attitude towards economic policy-making, industrialisation and job creation, which is the need of the hour.
After all, Sri Lanka is an agrarian economy, and there is still a great need for reviving it and a greater scope for improving production and productivity in agriculture and allied sectors like dairy farming. They also generate jobs in their hundreds and thousands, though the acceptance of a farm-related job comes with an attitudinal blockade in the present generation.
It means, that the government, even while laying down policies and implementing programmes for widening and deepening the farm sector and its socio-economic outcomes, needs to re-profile the farm sector and jobs, to make it attractive for the youth. It does not stop there. The policy-makers should also look at schemes that would make agriculture and allied industries a paying enterprise, in terms of personal investments and family incomes.
The problems with the farm sector in the tropical climes flow from the unpredictability of the weather conditions. In the past, years of drought have been followed by seasons of heavy floods. Already there are suggestions to rework the main Maha and Yala crop seasons scientifically, to be in tune with the changed/changing weather patterns with the authorities at all levels advising farmers about alternate crops and marketing strategies.
Of course, all of it also requires the government to end hoarding and black-marketing, say, especially in rice. Even this time round, governmental authorities and media reports talked about large-scale hoarding by the big players in the paddy business. In the past, there were known instances when some of them used, or tried to use rice-hoarding as an Election tool, to try and target the incumbent President or his government or both.
The aim should be to make agriculture sustainable in the short, medium and long terms. Maybe, it all should start with an honest evaluation of the sustainability of agriculture and allied sectors like dairy farming in their present forms and evaluate if they could be revived and reinvigorated through new or additional inputs, in the form of policies, programmes and their active implementation.
It cannot be otherwise, after all. And to read about rice queues reappearing in parts of the country – even though only at the mention of a local supplier selling it at the MRP – and wheat roti and dates replacing rice items in school mid-day meals scheme are not what an agrarian economy is about.
It is also not about what the JVP-NPP government’s policy should be about. Instead, it is about an agrarian nation’s willingness and ability to feed its millions without looking elsewhere for support, alms or daana, given Nature’s bounty that not every other nation is blessed with! (Courtesy- Ceylon Today)
(N Sathiya Moorthy is a Chennai-based Policy Analyst and Political Commentator. Email: sathiyam54@nsathiyamoorthy.com)
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