Sri Lanka's struggle
Issue 107 - 2 Aug 2022 (7-min read)
What does the small island nation of Sri Lanka have in common with the mammoth United States? Ordinary citizens taking selfies inside the offices of high-level government officials.
The more interesting part, however, is what makes them stand apart. Firstly, it is the visible lack of weapons among Sri Lankan protesters who stormed the Presidential Palace, as compared to the US Capitol rioters, who waved their guns with abandon as they strolled through government offices. Another would be the reason why such large numbers of Sri Lankans took to the streets.
Join us in this week’s The Global Tiller as we dig into that very reason. What caused the crisis in Sri Lanka to grow to these proportions and where is it headed? How does it impact the region and what lessons can other countries learn?
Protests in Sri Lankan capital Colombo started in April and spread throughout the country. Citizens were upset with daily power cuts and shortages of basics, such as fuel, food and medicine. Inflation has been running at more than 50%. Things got so bad that, by June, the government banned the sale of petrol and diesel for non-essential vehicles for two weeks and even now the sale remains severely restricted. Schools have closed and most people are forced to work from home to conserve supplies.
The economic crisis in Sri Lanka reached this dire stage in part due to the Covid-19 pandemic and the 2019 bomb attacks, which brought a big blow to the country’s tourism industry and its biggest source of earning foreign currency. Russia’s war on Ukraine and the subsequent fallout in the global food market didn’t help much either.
But perhaps the biggest blame lies with its now-ex-president Gotabaya Rajapaksa for a series of poor economic choices and nepotism that led to a public uprising and his eventual resignation and escape to Singapore.
The protests have remained largely peaceful with a few skirmishes reported between the protesters and the law enforcers. Despite the lack of one person leading the protesters, the general agreement among different group leaders has been to remain peaceful. However, the interim government’s declaration of a state of emergency allowing the police to crack down on protesters threatens to disrupt that.
For other countries in the region but also those in other parts of the world, Sri Lanka should be a cautionary tale. The same crises — the Covid pandemic and the war in Ukraine — are causing a fallout globally particularly on food and oil markets and not many countries have the capacity to withstand these global shocks.
Food prices are spiking not just in the United States and Europe, but also in Ghana, Mozambique, Mexico, Ecuador, Uzbekistan and Afghanistan. The United Nation’s World Food Programme has warned that 50 million people in more than 45 countries are at risk of falling into famine conditions.
And while rising food prices are rarely the reason a government falls, they do act as a spark on existing discontent. In fact, we may need to keep a close eye on Ghana, Nigeria and Pakistan, where rising food prices combined with political unrest and a growing disillusionment with the political elite could spark similar protests. But while the Sri Lankan protesters may have shown how to successfully and peacefully topple a government, other countries may not be so restrained.
Until next time, take care and stay safe!
Hira - Editor - The Global Tiller
Dig Deeper
Schools may shut down and people may be working from home to conserve fuel but it’s hard to keep Sri Lankans away from cricket. The public response to men's and women’s cricket matches in recent weeks has been unusually vivid.
…and now what?
Many economists and other development experts will tell you that Sri Lanka’s situation is unique. That it should be seen as a unique case and can’t be seen as the canary in the coal mine for other countries, developing and developed both.
This is probably true from an economic perspective, I’m no economist myself. But I would dare to say that Sri Lanka’s ordeal is a possible future for many other places on this planet. Not on the basis of economics, but on one of leadership and governance.
Why is it so? As you may know, the Rajapaksa clan has been around in politics for quite some time and ended up taking over power a few years back. Focusing on their own interests and using the national institutions as their own family business, their governance (or lack thereof) quite quickly turned out to be disastrous for the population and a huge mess for public policies.
The same class of people sharing power since decades. Does it sound familiar to you? From Tahiti to the US, from France to Pakistan, we keep seeing the same faces, we keep hearing cases of corruption, nepotism, self-serving politics. I’m not saying “all leaders are corrupt” but it is all too common for us to hear about such cases and more often than not political leaders are linked to them. Sometimes they go on trials, sometimes they are voted out. But somehow they always manage to come back or get someone else to rule on their behalf.
And if there are checks and balances, or ethical frameworks, most of us let them go because corruption and nepotism have become all too common. We lose our ability to keep them and ourselves on our toes because accepting bad behaviour is an easier choice.
One reason why it comes down to this is because voters get disinterested. We are disinterested by the needs of our community, we lose faith in our own social contract so we give the car key to those who haven’t lost faith in the institutions’ abilities…to serve their personal interests. Sri Lanka was no different. Massive abstentions have been observed in previous elections, much like the recent elections in France, or the US, or Tahiti for that matter.
Another cautionary tale from Sri Lanka comes from their agriculture policies. Before the pandemic, the government decided to stop importing pesticides in order to reorient the industry towards more organic farming.
It seemed like a good policy and a courageous decision but the line between policy changes and social impact isn’t a straight one. It requires a lot of additional decisions in order to reorient our communities and our industries towards the intended goal, otherwise we have what happened in Sri Lanka.
Getting rid of pesticides so abruptly resulted in an inefficient agriculture in a country that relies heavily on it. Farmers were never trained, there were no alternatives to protecting crops without pesticides or even an attempt to see if there was a need to shift crops to more native or more resilient ones. Eventually, it led to drastically low agricultural outputs, skyrocketing food prices and the toppling of the government.
So we must not forget the lessons from Sri Lanka. It may be a different economic setting but it’s the usual human and leadership setting. Whether is be January 6 in the US, the recent French election, the Russian or Chinese leadership or what happened during the elections in PNG the last couple of weeks, we can see signs of similarities.
As citizens, as leaders, we must ensure that we don’t give up on our communities and we continue to remain committed to them even if we feel there’s not much hope left. Because we have the responsibility to perpetuate the work done by others for us to be in our current situation, and we owe it to those who will come soon after who will have to face bigger challenges that ill-prepared institutions, left on their own, will not be able to manage.
Philippe - Founder & CEO - Pacific Ventury