Editorial - How the sacred cow was sacrificed to TNC demigods

The Daily Mirror, in its Editorial yesterday, spotlighted the grave economic crisis Sri Lanka is facing. The Central Bank, in a rare instance of transparency, revealed that Sri Lanka’s per capita debt had soared to more than Rs.308,000.

Instead of surviving on loans taken at commercial interest rates, we need to take the more difficult path to sustainable development and more national production, so that we could significantly reduce the import bill and the balance of payments deficit.



In 1970 the well known and widely respected Dr. N.M. Perera, the Finance Minister of the then United Front Coalition government, proposed an economic policy where we could grow our own food and produce most of what we needed in Sri Lanka itself. Dr. Perera said the path would be long and tough, but he could see the dim light of the distant dawn and appealed to the people to give a full commitment to this policy which like Mahatma Gandhi’s principle was to “be Sri Lankan and buy Sri Lankan”. But after about four years, capitalist elements taking advantage of long queues, shortages of food items and problems, over quota systems, ousted the Socialist Ministers. In 1977 the J.R. Jayewardene government bought wholesale the globalised capitalist market economic policies, which have eventually brought us today into a largely unseen pigsty or mud hole.
But it is not too late to go back to the policy of being Sri Lankan and buying Sri Lankan.

Until 1977, the main source of nourishment for Sri Lankan children and others was fresh milk. This we obtained at a small cost from our dairy milk industry. Every day the milk man with his can of milk came to almost every household and we all drank one or two glasses of milk a day at about Rs.10 a glass.  Hundreds of dairy farmers and their families also had jobs on the milky way. But after 1977 we allowed agents of transnational giants to gradually milk us dry and to a large extent destroy our dairy farm industry. Tragically today about 90% of our people including children have to depend on imported powdered milk with questions about its quality and the preservatives used. Additionally the country is wasting millions of dollars in precious foreign exchange to import powdered milk. If this is stopped or curbed, it will be a major step in reducing the balance of payments deficit while Sri Lankans could get better nourishment at a lower cost from fresh milk.

For instance Saudi Arabia, which does not have even a fraction of the grassland that we have in Sri Lanka, has a massive dairy farming industry. Many Sri Lankans also work in it. They tell us that most if not all Saudi Arabians drink only fresh milk – and no powdered milk is imported. This is not a mirage in a desert, and Sri Lanka needs to drink deep from this nourishing reality.