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Mahinda Amaraweera: Killing the farmer

02 Oct 2022

By Rajasinghe   According to historians, there were, in the past, two terrible ravages of the Sri Lankan countryside. The first was consequent to the invasion by an Indian potentate called Magha in the early centuries. The second was when Lord Torrington ordered the devastation of Uva Wellassa after the rebellion of 1818.  The fields of Wellassa (the land of a hundred thousand paddy fields) were sequestered and destroyed as punishment for being the epicentre of the Kandyan revolt. Wellassa was laid waste and inhabitants in their thousands fled their villages, some even to settle down anew in the Eastern Province. The third ravaging came from the Gotabaya Rajapaksa (GR) and Mahindananda Aluthgamage combination. They attempted to change agricultural practices overnight, ignoring the unanimous advice of experts, university teachers, and farmers’ organisations that the timelines set were a recipe for disaster. Instead they preferred to listen to a Johnny-come-lately medical specialist (whose ignorance was shown up in a TV interview) and a monk who was a political busybody.  The farmers countrywide were deprived of chemical fertiliser, weedicides, insecticides, agricultural machinery, and fuel, which led to a disruption of their livelihood and a drastic reduction of the Yala harvest.    Farmers rise up   Farmers are hard to organise because they are distributed throughout the country. But when they do protest, it is difficult to stop – as even the tough-talking Indian PM Narendra Modi discovered to his cost.  Modi had to withdraw his proposed legislation to change the nature of ownership in the agricultural sector, particularly of Haryana State. The highly-productive Punjabi small farmers had made their state a part of the ‘Breadbasket of India’. They converged on Delhi by the thousands and would leave only after the PM capitulated completely and withdrew the draft legislation.  The Indian farmers’ Aragalaya was the inspiration for our farmers’ protests, which were led by the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP). They introduced innovative protest methods like making ‘straw men’ effigies of GR and Mahindananda, beating them with sticks, and burning them.  The farmers successfully destroyed the awe and decorum which was traditionally accorded to presidents and ministers, leading finally to protesters breaking into the Presidential Palace and the undignified exit of GR and his eventual resignation. Unsurprisingly, Mahindanada tried to weasel away from this debacle by blaming GR as a man who did not heed his advice. But given his undistinguished past and lack of credibility, nobody believed him.   Lowest harvest in living memory   The upshot of these GR-Mahindananda antics is that the Yala crop, which is now being harvested, is the lowest in living memory. Experts have estimated it to be only 40% of the previous year’s production. This has led to a total disruption of domestic agriculture, with the farmers unable to get a profitable return on their investment.  Many farmer families pawn their valuables to get working capital for cultivation, which they normally redeem after selling their crop. This year they are unable to do so and are facing a bleak future.  To make matters worse, the loud-mouthed Mahindananda promised compensation for loss of yield. That promise has not been kept and the farmers are furious with him. Many village-level ‘Pohottuwa’ supporters are urging that he should not be brought to their meetings as it is a surefire way of losing votes.   Enter Amaraweera   Now Mahinda Amaraweera of the Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP) has been appointed as the Minister of Agriculture by President Ranil Wickremesinghe (RW). He comes from the interior of the Hambantota District and was inducted into national politics by Mahinda Rajapaksa (MR) because he represented a social group which is vital for the Rajapaksa electoral strategy, which was perfected by Lakshman and George Rajapaksa and has been described as GDR in its cryptic form. When Amaraweera lost an election during Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga’s time, it was Mahinda Rajapaksa who cajoled her into including Amaraweera in the SLFP National List. In 2015, when Sirisena became President, Amaraweera joined him, but kept his lines to the Rajapaksas open.  On the day after Sirisena’s election, Amaraweera took Namal to see the new President. There is a controversy as to what transpired at this meeting, but it certainly spoiled the new President’s credentials and paved the way for suspicion between him and the PM.   Whither the PMB?   Amaraweera has now gone strangely silent about paddy purchases. Earlier he boasted that his Paddy Marketing Board (PMB) would buy large stocks of paddy at Rs. 120 a kilo, which was considered a floor price.  The funds required for the purchase of a significant quantity of paddy is huge and the PMB, which is notorious for corruption, simply has no access to such funds. It is so much in debt to State banks that it has been refused loans by these institutions, which are already challenged by large Government borrowings. Now the PMB has withdrawn from paddy purchasing and the farmer is left at the mercy of private paddy buyers, who are buying at below Rs. 100 a kilo and in some places as low as Rs. 80 a kilo.  The big paddy millers who buy their stocks from middlemen can depress prices because they already have stocks accumulated earlier, have large stocking capacity, and can wait out the vagaries of policy shifts. The upshot is that the paddy farmer is now left high and dry. If a floor price had not been declared, they say they could have earlier sold for a price higher than Rs. 120 a kilo.  The banks have refused to hold the PMB stocks as surety and grant credit to the PMB because the PMB is already heavily indebted to them and there is no way that these loans will be redeemed soon. A query that comes to mind in this context is why the Minister cannot get the PMB stocks milled and released to the market through Sathosa and collect funds for further buying of paddy this season.   A right royal mess   With fertiliser and weedicide costs as well as labour costs going through the roof, our domestic agriculture is in the doldrums. But the Minister does not have any answers.  He is quarrelling with the Chairman of the PMB and the banks. He is also quarrelling with the millers. Like Mahindananda, he too is scapegoating the millers, but has no solution of his own. Meanwhile, he is also opposing cheaper imports from India under the Indian Line of Credit.  His colleague, the Minister of Trade, with whom too Amaraweera is quarrelling, wants Sathosa to import rice to prevent a shortage and high prices in the festival season. These Ministers have made a right royal mess of agriculture just when the country has invested billions in irrigation and the Mahaweli scheme, which would have made us self-sufficient in food grains at a time when the world is facing food shortages. Sri Lanka could have been an example of a small country which is not only self-sufficient but also could sell a surplus abroad. All that has been ruined by the inexperienced President GR and the foolish and garrulous Minister Amaraweera who was expected to solve these problems, but has made things worse. Now both the paddy farmer and the rice consumer are paying the price.  


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