A nutty business or monkey business?

By?N Sathiya Moorthy

If there is a Rip van Winkle in the country and he wakes up after a long sleep just now, the shock over prevailing coconut shortage and prices would send him back to a comatose stage without fail. It is anybody?s guess how he would be, or the coconut prices and availability will be if and when he wakes up next, maybe, years if not decades later, is the question.

Ask the politically-aware segments in the south Indian states of Tamil Nadu, Kerala and Karnataka in that order, the ruling parties in those state lost the parliamentary polls of 1999, and also the succeeding state/provincial assembly polls of 2001, owing mainly to one reason. Unrestricted import of coconut, rubber and tea from Sri Lanka under the bilateral Free Trade Agreement (FTA) caused the abundance of these products and the consequent crash of domestic prices for these produce, leading to the near-collapse of these agri-based industries in these states and elsewhere in the country, where these were grown.

For long, the India-Sri Lanka FTA has been languishing for want of political courage in Colombo, to take it to the next, broader and deeper levels. The otherwise bold and courageous President Mahinda Rajapaksa succumbed to local trade pressures (some of them personal) and refused to take forward the fully negotiated CEPA, after the MoU for the same had been initialled by officials from both sides, in 2008.

On the side-lines of the Colombo Summit of the now-defunct SAARC, only a fortnight after the MoU, Rajapaksa cried off, pointing to the unique protest outside the President?s ?Temple Trees?, which was otherwise out-of-bound for all kinds of protestors, given the security concerns attaching to the LTTE war. According to reports, Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, as if not to embarrass the host, dismissed the subject by asking Rajapaksa to ?take your time? in the matter. That it has taken another avatar in the equally-delayed CEPA after Mahinda?s exit in 2015, and it found a mention in the December Summit between President Anura Kumara Dissanayake and Prime Minister Narendra Modi, should show how the career of bilateral trade with the nation?s largest economic and trade partner keeps going.

Multiple demands

No, this piece of contemporary economic history is not about trade ties with India. Nor is it aimed at hard-selling, improving and improvising the India-Sri Lanka economic cooperation between the FTA-1998, which might have outlived its utility, very long ago. Instead, it is to recall an era not very long ago when this country was in a position to export coconut, rubber and tea, even to its closest Indian neighbour, which also produced the same products in abundance and still wanted more of them, owing to population-centric demands of multiple kinds.

In about a quarter century or less, Sri Lanka has become a coconut-deficit country from being a coconut-surplus country. Likewise, in tea, the country has lost its prime place in the export trade, owing mainly to bad management (mostly privately-held since), wrong government policies and unattended labour grievances of decades and centuries.

Any talk of rubber would take the nation back to the days of the Rubber-Rice Pact with China of the early fifties, when a swap-deal favourable to Sri Lanka, then Ceylon, helped tie over the crisis to whatever extent possible. Today, no one is talking much about the rubber trade, but rice trade and production in the country is in a shamble.

The nation should thank itself that the current short-supply and price-hike in such common ingredients for any family?s cooking in the country did not coincide with what was seen as policy-failed rice shortage during the Aragalaya protests in 2022, and you will know how precarious the situation is even now. Add coconut and salt to the prevailing shortages in rice, fuel, fertilizer and whatever you can think of and list out, one wonders if those protests would have continued to date.

Influence, affluence

For now, the Cabinet has since decided to import coconuts and coconut-products equivalent to 200-m nuts immediately to tide over the shortage, ?temporarily as a remedy to the current crises’. The imports also include coconut kernels, obviously to produce coconut oil for the festival season and beyond. It is to be noted that the Cabinet decision double-underlines the need to stick to laws and norms. Under previous governments, officials citing the prevailing exigencies had made out-of-turn, non-tendered imports of whatever products in short-supply, all of it ending up in massive scams.

According to other reports, the government is working on an EU-backed ten-year plan to help coconut exports in the country to reach the $ 2- billion mark. No doubt a welcome initiative, but the government should also study the mood and method of the rural population especially, who for long has been caught in the vortex of urbanisation and attendant identity-centric pelf and benefits, and the social media influences about the levels of affluence obtained elsewhere.

As the successful deployers of the social media in winning two nation-wide elections last year, rather, starting with the path-breaking Aragalaya protests in 2022, the present-day rulers should be well aware of it all, to take a closer look and make their assessments and options. Can the government now use the very same social media to re-engineer the people?s thought process in terms of rural-urban divide and also initiate policies and programmes to take urban facilities and identities to rural areas, too?

The Coconut Cultivation Board has suspended 20 projects that planned to cut down coconut trees and develop approximately 400 acres of land. Following this, clearances for garment factories, animal farms and solar power plants on these lands have been halted. A welcome decision, which should be accompanied by such other pro-active projects to promote agriculture and dairy industries in the country, which fell victim to JRJ-driven centre-right market-driven economic policies that have ruled the roost until now.

The question is if the present centre-left leadership can travel on two boats at the same time ? accept IMF?s pro-market conditionalities, and at the same time revive local industries that past economic reforms had killed. After all, the ruling JVP-NPP still carries the image of being pro-poor, pro-rural and anti-urbane, if not anti-urban, and more so anti-market, whatever be their real intention and capabilities while in office, now.

Of course, any pro-people policies of the kind cannot leave out the salt industry, which is in crying need for policy assistance going beyond the government?s current decision to import 30,000 tonnes of the sea-produce that everyone here thought was for them to produce at will. The Hambantota Lanka Salt Company has since increased the price of a 400-gram powder-packet from LKR 100 to LKR 120, and that of one-kg salt cubes from LKR 120 to LKR 180.

Export, but of what?

Yet, what is interesting and laughable after a point is a report that the government was planning a country-wide monkey census, claiming that the animal destroyed millions worth of coconuts each year. If the census found there is an excess of monkeys than the country can do business with, the government has not clarified beforehand as to what it intended doing.

After all, during the closing months of the previous regime of President Ranil Wickremesinghe, the government was forced to stall the export of a hundred thousand monkeys to China for research purposes after protests from ubiquitous environmentalists. The Colombo administration could not sustain its original arguments in defence of the export-decision after it became known that the Chinese importer was a private entity unattached to the government.

Naturally, the present government cannot stall queries if someone adds two and two and arrives at the inevitable result of four, and argues that the proposed monkey census aimed (mostly) at facilitating the revival of exports to China ? whatever the reason. But after the Covid pandemic being traced back to animal-testing in a research laboratory in China, the government there and here will find it difficult to convince the Sri Lankan domestic constituency of the innocence of the ?monkey census? project, especially if they smell a rat, rather a dead monkey in the heap of husk that they had left behind after eating the kernel in the coconuts that they had destroyed!

(The writer is a Chennai-based Policy Analyst and Political Commentator. Email: sathiyam54@nsathiyamoorthy.com)