The Nation Editorial

Poor man’s hope for a car

Sunday 29th November 2015

Budgets have always been controversial. They have never been liked by all. The nature of the job is such the finance minister is always an unpopular man. He has to tax someone to give relief to another.

Decades ago in our country ordinary people were more worried about the price of day-to-day essentials. As we progress the situation seems to be much different. Post budget I hardly heard of anybody complaining about such trivia. Now they seem to be more concerned about things that matter, things like car prices. Perhaps, we are no more a poor country.

The price of an electric car has gone up by as much as two and a half million rupees, while other vehicles have gone up in price by sums ranging from two hundred to five hundred thousand rupees. Most people are unhappy that the duty on motor vehicles has been jacked up making them unaffordable to many.

Vehicle price hike seems to have offset the goodwill the government earned by slashing the prices of some essential food items, cooking gas and the like. This is because a motor vehicle in the minds of most Sri Lankans has become as important as the food items.

The reasons are justifiable as Sri Lankans do not have a decent public transport system. With overcrowded buses and trains the majority of the working people use public transport only because they have no choice. It is natural for every young man or woman who begins the working life to dream of owning a car.

It is not incorrect to say that through his budget the finance minister has shattered the hopes of all those middle income earners who have been aspiring to buy their own cars. But then the real issue is different – over sixty thousand new motor vehicles enter the limited road network annually causing traffic jams in the cities. This trend if not curbed in time can end up causing huge impact on productivity of the nation.

There are also other moves to curtail entry of too many vehicles into the city, like compelling drivers to carry more passengers in a vehicle. Some of these proposals are obviously impractical. All these are only short term measures as the main cause of the problem is the absence of a modern mass transport system at least in the western province.

While implementing temporary measures to minimize the entry of new vehicles into the road network the government should expedite building a suitable mega transport system by which people can have a reasonably comfortable journey. This has to be done as a matter of priority with local or foreign capital. When such a system is in place a section of even those who can afford using their own motor vehicles will opt to use public transport thus easing the traffic jam.

In such a situation question of discouraging private car use by jacking up the vehicle prices or imposing special levies on vehicles entering the city will not arise. The hopes of ordinary people aspiring to own motor vehicles will not be shattered. The political fallout of such unpopular measures to curb the traffic jams can be too heavy for the government. A wiser move will be to implement a mega transport plan without much delay.

Sunday Times Editorial

Tea losing its flavour 

Sunday 29th November 2015

‘Ceylon Tea’ — that world famous trademark — had all but lost its brand name and goodwill, to later arrivals; now, the tea industry itself is in the doldrums. Not for the first time, the Plantation Industries Ministry has had to go, hat in hand to the Government, seeking a handout to keep the smallholders and other producers from sinking under the weight of increased Cost-of-Production (COP) and falling prices. The gap had to be bridged by a subsidy from an already cash-strapped Treasury. The Government had no alternative this week but to infuse a billion rupees to keep the tea industry from total collapse.

This will mean that the wheels of the industry will not grind to an immediate halt, as prophesied by many. Contrary to a widely held misconception, it is the smallholders — not the big plantation companies — that produce the bulk of Sri Lanka’s teas. There are more than 400,000 small holders island-wide impacting on the livelihoods of nearly two million people.

Statistically, tea no longer holds the slot as the country’s top foreign exchange earner, having long been displaced by the US$ 7 billion (Rs. 986 billion) sent by Lankan workers overseas. Beaten also by the foreign exchange generated from garment exports, tea comes third with US$ 1.6 billion earned in 2014 (Rs. 225 billion) only ahead of other industrial exports, like rubber products. Yet, the tea industry remains an integral part of the Sri Lankan psyche – and our economy. It is world famous. Till recently it was tea, tourism and terrorism that the country was known for. Now terrorism is behind us, will tea follow suit?

Falling prices are not entirely due to domestic reasons such as high COP (as a result of labour and electricity costs). World politics — the civil war in Ukraine, the devaluation of the Russian currency and the turmoil in West Asia have hit once lucrative markets in Syria and Iraq, as well as sanctions in Iran (despite tea being classified as “food” and therefore exempt, banks remain wary of opening Letters of Credit for commercial purposes with Iran).

Domestic mismanagement, however, is indeed partly to blame. When the new Government promised an ill-advised subsidy by way of a guaranteed price to win votes following the January presidential election, it found to its horror that during its 100-day programme, the entire scheme backfired. Voting patterns at the August parliamentary elections showed tea growing electorates voted against the Yahapalana Government. The whole guaranteed price scheme (of Rs. 80 per kilo) was riddled with corruption. Conditions were imposed by bureaucrats in Colombo counter to what was promised in the interim Budget, restrictions were placed on the beneficiaries and field officers were bribed by those in the business.

And so, Tuesday’s meeting with the Prime Minister was to reverse the scheme, have the Tea Board enter the tea auctions and buy tea to prop up the market. Banks have been asked to support a national cause and exporters to lend their stores for excess stocks in the hope of better times ahead.

To say the tea industry is in the doldrums is therefore possibly an under-statement. Sri Lanka has been slow to up the ante in an industry the colonial British left us. The value-added teas have been slow off the block. The answer lies in the production of specialty teas where even if quantities are small, rewards are high. High-end spenders hardly bargain over price. There’s room at the top, but Sri Lanka is still competing to be a mass market supplier and bulk supplies – not brand. We are building brands for others. There’s no new thinking. Business magnate Upali Wijewardene once wanted to buy into the multinational Liptons to reach its markets worldwide — why can’t Governments think on such lines? Meanwhile, no census has been conducted for years, data are outdated, tea auctions are yet to be computerised and we have commercial courts restricted by antiquated laws dampening exports.

Unlike in a modern commercial enterprise very little profit is put back for advertising, or for research and development. Tea promotions are done on shoe-string budgets. The Tea Research Institute produces PhD candidates, not practical advice to producers. “Precision agriculture” is not a term they are familiar with.

The French have their INAO now called the Institut national de l’origine et de la qualite, a public-private organisation under their Ministry of Agriculture. They are both regulator and friend, originally of the French wine industry and now of their cheese and meat industry as well, relentlessly pursuing their products in foreign markets and defending their appellation d’origine (trademarks) around the world. Today, hundreds of thousands of middle-class Chinese think it fashionable to drink French wine due to their marketing strategies. The Scots have their Scottish Whiskey Association that does likewise with their famous brand of ‘Scotch whiskey’. These are apex bodies with well-paid officers protecting and monitoring the interests of their well-known brand names. Is there one organisation that does the same for ‘Ceylon Tea’, at the very least, as a health drink in an increasingly health-conscious world?

On the contrary, Sri Lanka is acquiring a reputation for exporting rubbishy tea, and even our good teas are blended with inferior teas from other countries and sold as ‘Ceylon Tea’ with no countermeasures from this end to arrest this damaging trend. The popular lion logo on our teas is flagrantly exploited by third party countries and re-exported from their capitals to markets while we stand and stare. There have been tea councils and tea associations in the past and we have a Tea Board and a Tea Small Holder Development Authority all pulling in different directions. It would be wise for Lankan authorities to take a close look at the way the INAO and the Scots protect and market their brands overseas. Other countries, including the US, have taken a cue from them — why not Sri Lanka? The workings of the tea market must be a public-private joint enterprise not left to unscrupulous businessmen, political stooges appointed by Ministers to statutory boards, misfit officers or bungling bureaucrats.

The French INAO lobby its case at places like the WTO (World Trade Organisation) and WIPO (World Intellectual Property Organisation) and help develop rules and agreements that are justiciable in courts of law around the world. When has Sri Lanka done any of this to protect its once-proud teas? These are all public-private exercises that the Plantation Industries Ministry must coordinate and oversee. The allocation in the 2016 Budget to the Ministry is a meagre Rs. 7.8 billion – less than half a percent of the total Sri Lankan Budget; surely, step-motherly treatment to a goose that once laid the golden egg.

On November 5, it has been officially said, the Prime Minister will announce the Government’s Medium Term Economic Policy in Parliament. The plan needed to revive the faltering tea industry is a long-term one, but even so, it will be interesting to see if the tea industry figures in the Government’s equation, or not.

Sunday Observer Editorial

Seeing, is believing

Sunday 29th November 2015

 'Seeing, is believing' is an old English adage that argues that it is easier to believe in the factual nature of something once one has seen it in the physical form whether as an image or as an activity. Relevant to a legal action last week is also another adage: that 'justice must not only be done, but must be seen to be done', which derived from a 1920s British court ruling. 

Both these sayings are relevant to us because of a recent court ruling. Last week, a court convicted a former senior Police officer in what might become a landmark case in this country's modern legal history. A former Deputy Inspector General of Police and several others were convicted for murder of the first degree over a killing of a businessman. 

The court sentence remains to be challenged in appeals. But it is historic in that very few members of either the police or the security forces have been found guilty and given strong sentences in a country with a long history of violent upheavals in which there have been literally thousands of cases of deaths, disappearances, torture, and other violations of laws where the finger of suspicion has been directed towards the very guardians of law and order and, national security. 

Sri Lankans were, at one time, proud of their country's liberal democratic practices. That was long ago. 

In recent decades, Sri Lankans have had to live in a worsening environment of brutality and cynical violence in which the perpetrators have been seen to be 'subversives', 'terrorists' and 'gangsters' on the one side as well as members of the armed forces and police on the other. By the 1990s, a succession of insurgencies and a counter 'dirty war' had already brought the citizenry to what appeared to be a near-crisis situation in terms of human rights and political repression. 

It was the most recent decade, however, that brought Sri Lankan society its worst nightmare in which the ordinary citizen became trapped between insurgents and political murderers on the one hand and the officers of the law on the other who could be more relied on to take the side of the murderers rather than the side of the victims. Indeed, this nightmare became a farce as well when the government of the day itself made 'special inquiries' and even so-called presidential commissions into a kind of crude art of evasion of accountability and cover-up of murder and plunder. 

The political changes of January and August this year were expected to herald a change in the environment of law and order and national security as well. The public had high expectations of the prosecution of plunderers and political assailants. But as the months dragged on, while investigations have been initiated by the hundreds, the actual number of prosecutions are very few and even those seem to have involved more the minnows rather than the sharks. The justice that the people have demanded through their emphatic electoral vote, is yet to be imposed in any convincing form. 

The people have been waiting to see justice being meted out and the convictions in the Shyam murder case are the first. More such justice must be seen to be done if the people are to believe that their political choice in January and August this year have been the right ones.

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Remembrance: military and militant

November in Sri Lanka has become the month of remembrance of various 'heroes' and 'martyrs', in addition to the passing on of our near and dear. In addition to 'All Souls' day, we also remember the 'war dead' of the First and Second World Wars - thanks to our colonial heritage. 

The most recent commemorations that have begun to be observed in November are somewhat unconventional in that those being remembered are mainly young people who fought un-recognised 'wars'. They are the combatants in the insurgencies of both the North and South. 

Barely had our first such 'insurgency' been crushed, bloodily, in the South in 1971, than, in 1975, there began another insurgency in the North. While the southern violent unrest abated for the next two decades, the insurgency in the North did not abate. 

The secessionist insurgency grew over the decades - prompted, no doubt, by the clumsy force resorted to by successive national political leaderships - into a full-fledged internal war that almost tore apart the Sri Lankan State. At one point foreign military forces from our neighbour, India, also joined in the efforts to militarily suppress what is, ultimately, a burning and un-resolved political conflict among social groups within the country. 

Today, while governments - Sri Lankan and Indian - remember those thousands of armed forces personnel who died in our internal wars, it is left to the citizenry, young and old, and also some political movements, to remember those thousands, if not tens of thousands, who were also killed in battle or on the sidelines in these internal wars. These dead are those who died fighting for social causes in which they believed or were led to believe. 

Whether these dead - as with the armed forces, mostly youth - are called 'martyrs' or 'heroes' is only a matter of political perception. What is most crucial, however, is that they are all people of this country or of a friendly neighbouring country. They are people whose living and dying are real and cannot be 'deleted' as they can be done in the virtual reality of war gaming. Hence, the importance of Remembrance.