Rohan Pethiyagoda speaks his mind

By Surya Vishwa

We feature today an interview with Dr. Rohan Pethiyagoda, an internationally acclaimed Sri Lankan bio diversity scientist, the first Sri Lankan and the second Asian to receive the Linnean Medal from the Linnean Society of London, awarded annually to a botanist or a zoologist.

His recent book, Green Gold, was launched two months ago by the publishing unit of Dilmah Tea. 

The questions posed to Dr. Rohan Pethiyagoda focus mostly on the plantation economy and the need for policy introspection. 

Excerpts of the interview:

Q. In the book ‘Green Gold’ published by Dilmah you take us through a trajectory of Sri Lanka’s earth based gold so to speak. This is a sequel to your previous work Ours to Protect: Sri Lanka’s Biodiversity Heritage; and Ecology and Biogeography in Sri Lanka. How would you in your own words compare and contrast the three books?

A. The three books are very different. ‘Ours to Protect’ was a coffee-table book, published 25 years ago, when such books were a novelty. ‘The Ecology and Biogeography of Sri Lanka’ is a fairly technical text on this subject, interesting because the subject had never really been dealt with before, and because by collaborating with Hiranya Sudasinghe, we were able to provide some really novel insights into the geographical distributions not just of fishes but of their genetic signatures. ‘Green Gold’, of course, is a history: the stories of the people who discovered and scientifically described Sri Lanka’s biodiversity from the beginnings of European exploration in the 1600s right up to about the 1990s. To qualify for a mention in the book, you had to be dead.

Q.  How do you think modern day Sri Lanka should strategise and innovate upon the plantation economy through national policy at a time when much talk is on the economic crisis?

A. It pains me to have to even mention strategy in the context of the plantation economy. There never really has been a strategy. Who wrote the strategy that created 400,000 tea smallholders? Who wrote the strategy for nationalisation in the 1970s or semi-privatisation in the 1990s? Who developed the strategy to ban all modern fertilisers and agrochemicals? No one. The plantations exist in a policy vacuum. No amount of strategising is likely to make the slightest difference because in Sri Lanka, policies come into being on the whims of politicians, none of who last very long. The emigration of young people from plantations is a sure sign that this industry is not destined for success. Isn’t it crazy to give young people an education and then expect them to pluck tea? Their aspirations, quite understandably, are way higher than that. It’s a waste of time to discuss plantations strategy; let’s move on.

Q. We still follow through with what the British colonial administration is in fact responsible for, the plantation economy and much of our

national revenue is a colonial legacy. Yet we speak highly of our post colonial independence. Your comments?

A .Sri Lanka never really had a vision for the post-Independence era. As important as free education was, CWW Kannangara messed that up by stifling innovation and diversity, and focusing on the humanities rather than the sciences, for which we continue to pay the price today. We produce huge numbers of arts and commerce graduates with skills that do little for national development and then, perversely, we create unproductive Government jobs to keep them employed. By 1953, we had begun the race to the bottom: the hartal, the welfare state, the perennial budget deficits, nationalisation, proliferating state-owned enterprises, and a nationalistic polity. By the time I was born in 1955 the deal was sealed: Sri Lanka was destined to fail. I still can’t wrap my head around how it came to be that people like DS Senanayake, John Kotelawela and SWRD Bandaranaike, who came from the best families, had the best education, and had been groomed for leadership by the British since 1932, could have made such a mess of things so fast. To me, the most compelling era of our history is 1948-53: in those five years the country was forced into a deep dive from which it is yet to recover.

Q.  How does one tackle the problem of deforestation due to the plantation economy? There have been new models as companies like Dilmah has experimented with, such as the forest garden method of growing plantation crops that can stem climate change. Your comments?

A. The plantations are largely in the wet zone and those forests aren’t going to be coming back. Less than 5% of the wet zone now contains natural forests, and even these fragments are being heavily encroached. Our failure to industrialise over the past 75 years has resulted in the rise of an inefficient agricultural system dominated by peasant-owned smallholdings. What’s more, rising population means these are being fragmented even further. The demand for land for peasant-owned agriculture is such that people have no choice but to encroach into forests. Sure, companies like Dilmah are doing their bit to aid reforestation, but not even the biggest companies can attempt reforestation at the level of landscapes. Forest garden approaches might help, but again, what is the earnings model you have for these? How much would workers earn? If all they do is perpetuate a peasantry, what is their value? But as the climate warms, of course, we will have to go in that direction. What we need most is to industrialise, and the last thing industries need are the tens of thousands of graduates in commerce and the humanities, the greater part of our university output.

Q. What are the policy changes you would have made if you could to evolve Sri Lanka›s plantation and earth based economy?

A. I see no economic logic in a leaseholder-based plantation economy. What is the incentive for leaseholders to replant, to develop these assets? Zero. After all, who paints and renovates a rented house? The Government must have the courage to sell these assets and to allow diversification. If tea is not the most productive land use, then change to whatever it is, whether vegetables, tourism or housing. Yet, no Government up to now has had the vision or the courage to allow real change to take place. And for their part, the unions haven’t helped, either.

Q. What are the lessons for Sri Lanka’s plantation economy?

A. I think the biggest challenge is to get Government out of the system. Government management is not only an oxymoron but also the very antithesis of innovation. Everyone knows that the preponderant majority of politicians are people for whom no one has the slightest respect or regard. And yet it is these same people who form the Government and decide policy. But I don’t blame Governments alone. It is the Sri Lankan people who are ultimately responsible. It is they who will not allow loss-making state-owned enterprises to be divested; who insist on huge budgetary deficits; on unsustainable levels of defence expenditure; on state ownership of plantations; on free university education. Isn’t it crazy that only 4% of the population goes to university and gets plum jobs whether here or abroad, and it is the 96% who pay for it? Yet, no politician dares reform these obvious policy failures. Indeed, no political party even mentions them because they are electorally toxic. Sri Lanka has failed because its people have willed it to fail, not recently, but from well before Independence. And to be honest, I can see no developmental or economic model that gets us out of that rut, at least not in my lifetime or the next several generations. It will be business as usual for the foreseeable future regardless of who becomes President or who gets to sit in Cabinet.