Produce or perish?
Prof. O.A.Ileperuma,-April 26, 2020, 11:14 pm
Emeritus Professor, University of Peradeniya
In western countries such as the US, there is an axiom, "publish or perish". This determines whether an academic gets his job confirmed and receives promotions or else lose the job. In Sri Lanka, we are at a critical point in our history whether we can survive after the Corona ordeal. Our economy is taking a hellish beating with the slowing down of the economies of our major trading partners all indications are that we will enter an extremely difficult period. Almost all industrial products ranging from sanitary ware, hardware, fabrics for the garment industry, chemicals for most industries of Sri Lanka are mostly imported from China. This is the same situation faced by the entire world and economists are talking about the adverse effects of depending on one single country for supplying goods, equipment and even the raw materials for sustaining economies of other countries. The intent of writing this letter is to address the dual challenges of achieving self-sufficiency in food and local manufacture of all goods including drugs, currently imported, in the post corona period.
If we are to survive as a nation, there is a serious and an immediate need to think about becoming self-sufficient in our food. At the present time, we import foodstuffs like dhal, soya, onions, potatoes, mung beans, gingelly and even kurakkan. Spices we import include chillies, coriander, mustard, turmeric, cumin etc. mainly from India. Most of these can be readily grown in Sri Lanka. With the recession slowing down the agricultural output in India there will be severe restrictions for the import of these spices as we saw last year with an import ban on onions by India raising local prices of onions. Unless the government commences a programme to grow everything we need, there will be severe shortages of these spices and other foods after about 3-4 months once the current stocks are over. Even as individuals we can grow some of these spices in our home gardens to fulfill our family requirements. Although both the Prime Minister and the Minister of Agriculture have talked about a cultivation campaign, it is doubtful whether the lazy wheels of our administrative machinery will move fast enough to avoid a crisis. We have seen a similar programme for developing home gardens earlier around 2010 under the leadership of Mr. Basil Rajapaksa. Two officers visited my home and promised to bring me seeds and fertilizer and that was the first time and also the last time I saw them! This is what happens to grandiose plans of ministers who order their officials to carry out a programme but fail to follow up on these plans. Officers too know about these traits of our politicians and they simply ignore their directives hoping that the minister will forget it. Lower level officers entrusted to do the actual work too know that these projects fizzle out fast and simply ignore doing anything about them.
Export agriculture is one area where we have a competitive advantage over many other countries and this area has not been fully exploited. Our cinnamon is the world’s best and even our black pepper is far better than what is exported from other countries. Every home can strive to grow the basic spices so that our export markets will become lucrative sources of income. Thailand is currently leading in export agriculture and while they export canned polos, ripe jack fruit, durian and rambutan, we have not filled into such ventures even today.
If, as individuals we can grow some spices in our home gardens, this will come in quite handy during these troubled times. Coriander, green chilies, mustard and turmeric can be grown in flowerpots using compost from household refuse. A single black pepper wine will give enough black pepper for a small family and turmeric can be grown inside a used rice bag and there are several videos in the
web about all what you need to know on home gardening. Similarly, if we grow one or two cinnamon plants in our garden, our daily family requirements can be fulfilled. This is the time to initiate some fresh thoughts on our requirements and how to solve some of these needs because we have a plenty of time because of the curfew. Increasing agriculture output should receive the highest priority of the government and unless this can help to produce our spices, potatoes and onions we will have a hard time in our recovery efforts from the corona onslaught.
Even a bigger challenge is to plan for import substitution in the industrial sector. Those scientists, technically competent people and engineers should put their minds together into producing the gadgets and consumer items we currently import mainly from China. There are encouraging signs already such as the firm from Negombo involved in producing ICU beds and ventilators from the University of Peradeniya. Talented youngsters are producing robots, ventilators, hand free washing faucets and even currency sanitising machines. Such enterprises should be nurtured, and their activities should be encouraged with financial assistance. However, the biggest challenge is to obtain the basic raw materials for such ventures. Sri Lanka does not have any metallurgical operations to produce the required metals nor do we have a chemical industry required to produce various materials such as fertilizer, pharmaceuticals, polythenes and plastics. Polymers such as polythenes and plastics are products obtained in the petrochemical industry. During petroleum refining one of the fractions obtained is naphtha which is the basic raw material used for the polymer industry. Naphtha is produced at our Sapugaskanda petroleum refinery and we either sell this to Singapore or burn them in power plants . This byproduct if utilised properly can be used to manufacture all the polythenes and plastics to meet our requirements. If China fails to provide the raw materials such as plastics in the future, we will soon find a lot of shortages of household items from baby diapers to yoghurt cups.
During the Corona virus episode, we should be grateful to our farmers who toiled hard to ensure that we do not go hungry. Main ingredient we need to ensure an uninterrupted supply of food is fertilizer and to a certain extent, all the pesticides we use. Most of these are invariably made in China or India and we are yet to use our Eppawela apatite to manufacture phosphorus fertilisers in spite of the many efforts of our local scientists to promote its use to produce single super phosphate fertiliser. A comprehensive proposal submitted to the ministry of agriculture in 2018 by a team of experts on how to manufacture phosphate fertiliser is probably now in their wastepaper basket. We pointed out that around Rs. 5 billion we spend on the fertiliser subsidy could be used to commission a phosphate fertiliser manufacturing plant. This is a simple enough process which does not require highly sophisticated machinery. Recently when there was a shortage of triple super phosphate fertilizer in the market, this writer prepared 2 kilos of this fertiliser using Eppawela rock phosphate and sulphuric acid in a clay pot and got an excellent product for use in garden vegetable plots.
The area of drugs is another area where we solely depend on imports from India, Bangladesh and Pakistan. Even we used to import saline, which is nothing but a diluted solution of common salt, of course prepared under strictly hygienic conditions, until 2017. Recently, I saw a vial of nasal drops which is again a 1% solution of sodium chloride (salt) and I was astonished to find that it has been imported from Bangladesh! To think that we do not have either a government or a private enterprise which can dissolve salt in water is unpardonable.
We have two government bodies dealing with drugs, viz. State Pharmaceutical corporation and State Pharmaceutical manufacturing corporation. The need of two government institutions to deal with the same subject is hard to understand but I prefer not to talk about it here. AS far as I know, the pharmaceutical manufacturing corporation does not manufacture drugs but simply get the chemicals from abroad and press them into tablets or put them in plastic capsules. Now is the time to think about manufacturing our own drugs from basic raw material chemicals instead of importing the finished products. At least the state pharmaceutical manufacturing corporation should start making paracetamol, which is a simple chemical compound, acetaminophen. Challenge is to devise a cost-effective chemical process to suit our needs and we have enough qualified organic chemists to undertake this task. Decades ago, I wrote to the Chairman, State Pharmaceutical Corporation to inform him that I can prepare cisplatin, a novel anticancer drug at that time for a fraction of the cost that it takes to import them. In true bureaucratic arrogance, I did not even receive a reply. For my own research, I made this compound several times in the laboratory and my sole intention was to provide this drug to patients at an affordable cost.
If the industrial capacities of countries such as China are unable to provide our raw materials, then the Government should have a long-term plan on how to deal with this problem. During the previous yahapalana government, the President had a National Policy Planning body while the Prime minister too had an Economic Planning Committee comprising of some of his political friends. All these committees were wasteful and useless exercises which only succeeded in wasting taxpayers’ money. They did not have any competent professionals such as engineers, technologists and scientists who are knowledgeable in proposing innovative industries based on our resources and the need for new industries specially to produce the raw materials which we now import. The malaise affecting our country is that most of these committees and commissions suffer from the NATO syndrome (No action, talk only).
I have been writing on the need of a chemical industry for the value addition to our mineral resources for decades and all these have fallen on the deaf ears of politicians. Way back in 1978, I wrote the first article on this topic to a national newspaper on "Need to resuscitate chemical industry for Sri Lanka" highlighting that this is imperative to achieve economic prosperity and that we lag behind even poorer countries in the region in the area of chemical industry. If my pleas were heard and addressed at that time, producing at least phosphate fertilisers would have become a reality by now. During this extended curfew people had enough rice and vegetables to eat because of previous imports of fertiliser but we have to think about what happens afterwards when our raw materials run out.
Our entire garment industry is in a perilous state if the raw materials are not forthcoming from China and also due to lack of orders from our biggest exporters in USA and Europe. Depreciation of the rupee will further add an additional burden and the country will face a bleak future. The whole world will face a catastrophic economic situation worse than the depressions we experienced during world war II and the great depression of the 1930s.
We should learn to live a simpler lifestyle getting the basic necessities out of our own resources. There is strong archaeological evidence that Sri Lanka has produced high quality swords for export to the middle east around 1200 years ago from our own resources and indigenous technology. There was small scale iron and steel extraction up until the 1900s which vanished after the British started bringing their iron and steel. This process of making iron using wind power was replicated in 1996 by a British Archaeologist who obtained high quality iron by using locally found iron ore at Samanalawewa. A furnace built using mud and firewood was employed to successfully extract iron. Local entrepreneurs should take the cue from here and work to improve on the ancient furnace design and undertake to produce at least basic utensils such as mamoties, knives and other agricultural utensils if a situation arises where we cannot import these from other countries.
We faced a somewhat similar situation in the 1970s when USA suddenly stopped PL480 aid in retaliation for the actions of the Government of when she tried to implement a national drug policy. There was no foreign exchange to import almost anything from abroad and all imports of raw materials for the local industries had to be stopped. When the import of perfumes for the soap industry was halted, local industry responded by growing flower plantations and extracting the fragrances from flowers. When importing tall oil necessary for the paint industry was stopped, rubber seed oil extracted from the fallen rubber seeds was used as a substitute. State hardware corporation was producing high quality agricultural utensils, cutlery etc. using our own technology at its Enderamulla factory. Local production in various sectors developed and if these policies continued, we would have achieved considerable developments in the local industries. Food production too increased by cultivating all available lands. Unfortunately, Mrs. Bandaranaike also had to face other problems such as the bread ques and other food shortages which finally saw her defeat in 1976. Her successor, JR Jayawardane, ruined all the local industries by his free trade policy. All profit-making corporations were privatised and cheap products were imported. This dealt the biggest blow to the developments of local industry and corporations such as the profit-making State Hardware Corporation were ruined by the private sector successors and we were made entirely dependent on foreign exports to satisfy all our requirements. We used Sri Lankan graphite to make pencils by the Ceylon Pencil company and now they are all imported from China. At a meeting of scientists, a responsible government officer had the audacity to say, "Why make pencils here, we can get them at a cheaper price from China". Such is the attitude of some our officials and also politicians who put various obstacles for local industrial development.
Our political leaders should be honest and tell the people of the impending crisis and the need to adopt a simpler way of life. They should lead the way by setting themselves as role models for an austere way of life. The susceptibility and the failure of capitalism and the non-relevance of appendages such as consumerism, per capita income, gross national product is clearly evident from the current corona pandemic. The only way out is by increasing productivity, both agricultural and industrial, and failure at this point will spell disaster for the future of our country.
