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| Sunday, 12 September 2004 |
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| News Business Features Editorial
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Stagnant village and the myopic elite Sunday Essay by Ajith Samaranayake The stagnation of the village which we outlined last week can be traced to the neglect of the rural economy by successive post-independence Governments which is paradoxical since those Governments, whether of the UNP or the SLFP, gained their overwhelming majorities from the countryside and the electoral system itself was weighted in favour of the village.
The reason for this neglect then is not the indifference or venality of politicians, but the fact that the political elite which succeeded the colonial regime had no program or agenda for the village, rooted as it was in a liberal cosmopolitan political culture having its base in the cities. For, whether they were UNP, SLFP or Marxist, the upper circles of those political parties were dominated by politicians who had been educated either in big Colombo schools or in western universities and had been exposed to the liberal classical culture of the west and could not see beyond the western development models whether they were the market economy of the capitalist countries or the socialist model. The mixed economy was anyway the prescription followed by the first post-independence Governments. Under UNP Governments, more emphasis was laid on private enterprise and under SLFP Governments on the nationalised sector, but the adherence to the mixed economy cut across political differences until 1977 when the country was totally surrendered to the forces of the market economy and liberalisation of trade. But the thrust of the mixed economy was towards the towns, towards trade and industry. It had nothing constructive to offer the rural economy, agriculture or the villages which continued to be stooped in neglect. British imperialism had laid low the self-sufficient rural economy of the pre-colonial era by substituting plantation agriculture for paddy farming which had been the traditional occupation of the Sinhala peasant for centuries. The colonial economy rested on the tripod of tea, rubber and coconut while rice, the staple diet of the people, could be easily imported from that other British colony, Burma. Large tracts of land in the Kandyan provinces confiscated under the Wastelands Act was opened up for tea plantations and Ceylon became known as Lipton's Tea Garden rather than by its ancient accolade of the Granary of the East. The tanks and the fields of the North-Central Province went into neglect and the peasantry of this area became prey to malaria, then a dreaded disease which took the lives of thousands in a single epidemic. The same pattern continued after nominal Independence with the towns living off the surplus produced by the tea plantations and with no vision or programme to revive the economy following Independence. The strategy for the rural economy followed by the D. S. and Dudley Senanayake Governments was to re-settle landless villagers from the south of Sri Lanka in the newly opened up colonisation schemes in the Dry Zone in the hope that this would lead to a revival of paddy farming. During Prime Minister Dudley Senanayake's regime in 1965-70, intensive cultivation methods and the application of fertiliser and new varieties of seed paddy which went under the rubric of the Green Revolution were adopted with the same end in view. The idea was that the country would become self-sufficient in rice, but it would be largely true to say that these strategies did not bear the expected fruit. In the absence of any comprehensive program to attack the problem of rural landlessness, re-distribute the land and bring about large-scale and sustained cultivation through the adoption of scientific method by an inspired and motivated peasantry, such strategies could only touch the fringes of the problem. Donor agencies Today the standard wisdom peddled by the donor agencies is that paddy farming is no longer profitable and that the farmer would be better advised to cultivate export crops on a large scale. This was the strategy adopted by the Jayewardene Government, which unabashedly championed the open market economy and private sector investment in industries at the expense of rural agriculture. New crops such as gherkin and the cultivation of sugarcane under the auspices of a multinational company were encouraged as means of diversifying the rural economy. But whether one agrees with the IMF-World Bank prescription or not, the fact is that the bulk of the peasantry remains paddy cultivators and ways and means should be found to make paddy cultivation a profitable occupation. This however cannot be done in isolation, but as part of a broader strategy for reviving the rural economy. But it is precisely such a strategy which had been lacking in contemporary times. All Governments, whether of the Right or the Left, have believed in leaving the village farmer to his own resources and concentrated on the towns. However, this strategy of industrialisation too did not bring about the desired results largely due to poor management by the state-owned industrial corporations. The sitting of these industrial plants outside the towns did not lead to a revival of the countryside either or to a resurgence of agro-based industries. The emphasis on foreign investments during the Jayewardene regime did not go beyond the confines of the garment industry while the Premadasa regime only succeeded in siting garment industries in the villages which did not lead to any meaningful all-round development of the village. This failure of strategy stemmed from the ambiguity of outlook which afflicted the post-Independence political elite when it came to the village. The UNP which ruled the country for the first eight years of Independence adopted a patriarchal attitude towards the village typical of any conservative party and expected the village landowners, aristocrats and other such notables who were its pillars to influence the large mass of villagers and deliver their votes to the party's camp The SLFP, which succeeded it, was less interested in the peasantry than in the rising middle-classes of the village which formed its support base from among the village schoolteachers, ayurvedic physicians and petty traders. The Left parties, although they had a village base in the Sabaragamuwa Province and the Matara district, looked to the working class for deliverance and dismissed their rural voters as so many of the great unwashed. In this situation, there was no political party, pressure group or lobby which could speak on behalf of the farmers who formed the bulk of the village. The nature of the debate on the rural economy was best illustrated by an exchange of views which occurred as late as the 1970s between the late G. V. S. de Silva and Hector Abhayawardhana. G. V. S., who was a teacher of economics and as private secretary to Philip Gunawardena when he was Minister of Agriculture in the S. W. R. D. Bandaranaike Government, had collaborated in drawing up the Paddy Lands Bill, had written a booklet titled "Some Heretical Thoughts on Development". Here he had put forward the view that economic development had to begin with the village and the rejuvenation of the agricultural economy under a new rural leadership. Reviewing the book in "The Nation", a newspaper which he edited at the time, Abhayawardhana had reproached the thesis from an orthodox Marxist perspective. The question was one of roads to development and the nature of the leadership. No doubt the rural economy had to be revived, but from where was the capital to come about? And was the village capable of giving leadership to such a revival and was it capable of generating the know-how and the expertise for such a movement without the aid of the urban intelligentsia? Open market economy This debate was given a cruel twist and almost rendered invalid with the advent a few years later of the UNP Government, led by President Jayewardene. This regime laid its entire emphasis on the open market economy and foreign investments for developing the country. Rather than the traditional paddy farming, the thrust of this economic strategy as far as the village was concerned was towards export-oriented production. This meant the opening up of a large tracts of land with foreign investment for the cultivation of export crops in which exercise, the villager would be reduced to the status of a paid worker. But Sri Lanka's capitalist class, which has still to progress beyond its notorious bounds of buying and selling, failed to rise to the expectations of the urban politicians and their foreign advisers and the village continues to be neglected. To sum up then, the urban political elite which stepped into the shoes of their imperial masters after 1948 had no strategy for the development of the rural economy since they did not see beyond the plantation economy bequeathed to them by the British and continued to live off its surplus. It was the disenfranchised plantation proletariat mired in their miserable linerooms which carried the national economy on their shoulders. But now, with the Welfare State which had supported the country since Independence shrinking and the plantation economy no longer able to make the same contribution as before to the national exchequer, other means of revenue have to be explored. Industrialisation has not been a viable option, confined as it is to the garment industry. With globalisation becoming the new gospel of the capitalist class, we are being asked by our new economic gurus to produce for the export market or perish. But for that, capital on a large-scale is needed and that can come only with strings from the big barons of neo-capitalism having their fiefdoms in the west. Not merely the stagnant village, but the entire beleaguered national economy then is captive to this new form of rapacious neo-colonial exploitation. |
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