‘Maximum well-being with minimum consumption’

By S. Pathiravitana

An AFP news agency report appearing in one of our newspapers recently said that Lankan women working in the Middle East sent 62 per cent of the foreign remittances received in Sri Lanka out of over a billion rupees. At the same time the news that nearly 90,000 women of Sri Lanka in Lebanon alone who were caught up in that country’s recent crisis must have surprised many of us that so many of our sisters, mothers and wives were trapped in that country’s tragic crisis. The AFP report also mentioned that not only the women of Sri Lanka but also the women of Bangladesh were sending 10 per cent more than what the Lankans were sending home in foreign remittances. India, which did not join this race until very recently, has decided, I discovered the other day, to send the women of Kerala to the Middle East. Is this journey worthwhile or to word it differently, is it a profit or a loss?

I don’t know about the women of Bangladesh and Kerala but as far as our women are concerned when you tot up the pluses and minuses of this transaction I think that this is a total loss.

Big percentage

The economists I am sure must be able to calculate the big percentage our women are contributing to fatten the GNP or the per capita income of this country and consequently mislead the politicians into believing that all this is progress and profit; but I am inclined to think that on the home front sadly, all this is decline and loss. No economist, with whatever device he may use, can tell you how much a mother is worth; or how much her absence may cause to the family in monetary terms.

To get back to that AFP report again, there was also a story about a woman in a Latin American country who found the $100 her husband was sending not enough. She decided to go the States herself and soon found that she could send home $400 a month to her two children, a girl and boy and both about to go for higher studies and one ready to enter college.

When they were younger, she used to telephone them, go over their lessons and help them with their studies. She had to work hard for her $400 washing cars, cleaning up the floors in restaurants and in homes. Our mothers who have gone abroad could hardly have had the time to guide their children from across the seas considering their working conditions as domestic slaves. And even if they had time, what assistance could they give? By looking at only the dollars that come into the country we tend to overlook the inestimable damage caused to family life, the decay of morals, the spread of corruption, the breakdown and decline of the family and good behaviour and eventually the increase of crime.

It seems strange that the authorities concerned are neither worried about this dreadful state of affairs nor seem to be concerned about the ongoing social decay. When it comes to the subject of money, all of us seem to develop a strange myopia about its ill effects. Something similar to our neglect of the social decay problem is the unstoppable growth of human waste accumulating in all of America, the most powerful and probably the richest state in the world.
These are but a handful of environmental sins that are committed daily in the States. In his book ‘One World, Ready or Not’ the author William Greider introduces two American economists, Herman J. Daly and John J. Cobb Jr., who do not think that what has been just described is a sign of growth but a trademark of decline. For this, the fraternity of orthodox economists look upon the two as a kind of pariah, says Greider.

Caught the eye

Since the sacred ikon of the GDP has been disfigured by their remarks the fraternity has nothing to do with them. Daly’s work on sustainable agriculture, however, co-authored and published under the title For the Common Good, caught the eye of the World Bank where he worked as a senior economist on that same subject. His chief grievance with the conventional views on economics is that they do not include the natural world when they add and subtract their economic sums. Thus the costs of air and water pollution, the depletion of ozone, global warming, acid rain etc are never regarded as a minus factor in the equations they make up. So, according to Daly and Cobb, his co-author, the American people will be the poorer in the long run for what is happening now and not any richer. In fact, the head on collision they think we are heading for at the rate we are going now is bound to happen within a couple of generations from now. On the other hand the developing world is also facing a dilemma - how should we develop?

This question came up in a very curious form. In the Malaysian part of Borneo live a people called the Penans whose way of life has remain unchanged probably from day one. The Malaysian government began logging operations in the rain forests where the Penans live and a denuded jungle would soon affect their primeval way of life. A Swiss environmental activist by the name of Bruno Manser who has been living with the Penans and taken a liking to their way of life, has tried to rally international opinion against the threat faced by the Penans. This immediately brought the Malaysian Prime Minister, Mahathir Mohammed, into the attack who wrote him the following letter: “As a Swiss living in the lap of luxury with the world’s highest standard of living, it is the height of arrogance for you to advocate that the Penans live on maggots and monkeys in their miserable huts subjected to all kinds of diseases...

Do you really expect the Penans to subsist on monkeys until the year 2500 or 3000 or for ever? Have they no right to a better life? What right have you to condemn them for a primitive life for ever?” This is not a question that can be answered with a monosyllable. At the beginning of this article we were talking about the people ‘living in the lap of luxury’ and how close they are now to virtual non-existence following luxurious living. Is there any point in bringing the Penans to a higher standard of living when they seem to be quite contended with their way of life for years on end? Maggots and monkeys may not be the kind of diet that some human beings may not enjoy. But then our Biblical ancestors were supposed to be living on locusts and honey and some others today find dog flesh a delicacy.

The Americans are being advised to follow the three R’s - reduce, re-use and recycle. As the author of Small is Beautiful has comeback after dipping into the words of the Buddha his advice is “Maximum well being with minimum consumption,” or to put it even more simply be happy with the little you have.