A Load Of Piffle Parading As “Policy”
By Emil van der Poorten –November 8, 2015
Emil van der Poorten
On my checking out the web edition of a prominent English-language daily on November 5th, I was “greeted”, if that is the appropriate term, by unmitigated rubbish which, if the writer is to be believed, was about to be delivered by probably the most powerful man in the country – Ranil Wickremesinghe, our Prime Minster – in the form of a landmark policy announcement.
This spoke to a great and noble enterprise that invoked the late Robert Knox’s contention that, if you washed the mud off him, a Sri Lankan peasant was fit to occupy the throne. If one seeks the pith of that proposed wondrous policy it is little more than that which, during World War II, when the international sea lanes were utilized by the allies to transport troops and materials essential to the conduct of war, when we had, of necessity, to grow our own food if we were to avoid dying of starvation. This appears to be yet more proof positive that those who do not read history are doomed to live by the consequences of such self-imposed ignorance. The unfortunate part here is that those of us not contributing to this application of monumental ignorance are fated to suffer the consequences of their stupidity.
I cannot recall the number of times that I have spoken to the complete devastation of any efforts by rural people, particularly in the mid-country, to grow anything resembling food. There is literally no crop – root, vegetable or tree – that is safe from complete devastation by wild pigs, porcupines, monkeys, giant and flying squirrels and even muntjac or barking deer.
Apart from those plants traditionally treated as fruit or vegetables, a friend recently informed me that he had abandoned something like 30 Acres of cardamons because the monkeys had developed a taste for cardamom shoots and the sambhur had finished off what the simians had begun!
I am aware that, not so long ago, a meeting of academics and specialists – those engaged in trying to deal with the monkey menace – determined, unanimously, that the only means of dealing with the menace as killing them. It is interesting that those proceedings have never been exposed to the public and the only way I have knowledge of them is because an attendee told me about what had transpired at that meeting in Kandy!
