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| Sunday, 8 January 2006 |
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Features |  |
| News Business Features Editorial
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50-year
mirage vs development in Sri Lanka
Solemn Thoughts by Wendell Solomons In a December column I discussed how several countries in Asia avoided mirage and concentrated their energies to grow rapidly. Most of these countries used a focus on manufacturing and service industry. Countries that adopted an industrial focus (in contrast to agriculture) include China, India, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, Singapore and Taiwan. Following my column, some readers emailed me and asked me to suggest what economic sectors Sri Lanka could best focus on. The choice of what sector to focus on requires a consensus among many people. Such a consensus could develop a momentum useful for involving the executive and legislative arms of government. Today government is overburdened with many untoward affairs that include an outbreak of hostilities in the country, the aftermath of 50 years of economic mirage in Sri Lanka, and the aftermath of year 2004 tsunami. It came therefore as a welcome circumstance that a contribution worthy of discussion towards a consensus appeared on page 38 of the January 1st issue of the `Sunday Observer'. Dr. S. K. D. Frank F. Niranjan and Prof H. P. M. Gunasena mustered valuable research. Their welcome report discussed the production of herbal and medicinal items. The second instalment of their work is scheduled for January 8th. Well-informed readers would want to figure out the pros and cons of manufacturing herbal and medicinal preparations. Let us take up two issues. 1. Is this timely? Planting and growing crops physically to harvest could take months or years... Can Sri Lanka afford such lead-time? Solution: This issue can be addressed by planning for first processing of imported raw material (in part or otherwise) with revenue to be obtained from processing for export. Some local manufacturers are already doing this and Singapore has chosen such a strategy for its focus on biomedicals. 2. Another issue that would concern the well- informed reader is know-how. Who could tell which of 500 products would be easy to sell at profit overseas? What skills and machinery are required to make these products? Could know- how be shared fast enough within the country to make for timely profit? We know traditional Asia had even resisted know-how transfer. Till recently Ayurveda relied on know-how transfer from father to son. In explaining a convention such as the physician passing on knowledge only to a son, we could note that the tradition of keeping know-how to oneself was essential to the West too in village-based society. The small market of those times made it essential, say, for the blacksmith to survive in the village by keeping some key portion of skills to himself. Solution: The way forward here for us is to change the base of calculation. We could calculate, as Singapore did, not for a small internal market but for a world market of 6 billion consumers. Email provides us with a method of accelerating the sharing of
information. Paid- for methods are available but if you want to gain access
to a free method, tell me so at
The ordinary and simplest way forward is to use Cc: (to send copies of your email to people interested.) However, the other method enables you to share information with far more participants. You post your information to a single address where a server automatically passes your email to fifty, hundred or more persons in a list (to which a person interested may opt in.) That makes it possible to focus on items of interest to you with people separated by distance, say, in Colombo, Badulla or Anuradhapura. |
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