Land is a very controversial and emotion issue. It can change governments. Water even more so, said Nanda Abeywickrama, former Secretary to the Ministry of Lands and Land Development, and one of the founding directors of the International Water Management Institute (IWMI).
 Nanda Abeywickrama
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In his retirement at his home in Borella, Abeywickrama looks back at the various land and water policies which were brought in to manage the natural resources of this island of 65,610 square kilometres. In his book Natural Resources and Environment Management Policy: Sri Lanka Experience and Future Directions, he traces his own journey from government officer to advocate for sound environmental policies.
A public servant who cut his teeth during the time of the Accelerated Mahaweli Programme (AMP), he served as Secretary to the Land and Land Development Ministry under the late Minister Gamini Dissanayake for 10 years and ‘irrigation’ has left a strong mark in his work. From then on, his book moves on to his later work in policy formulation and advocacy in water and environmental resource management at IWMI. But key in every chapter is the failure of government institutions and governments to get policy right.
If the mantra of the 1970s was state control of all land, from the 1980s, it was all about economic liberalisation and privatisation of land. Neither ideology has thus far benefited the landless poor. The question the book poses to ask is, why not?
“Party politics based tensions for over two decades as undercurrents, with successive governments experimenting with pro-poor remedies while the basic structure of the regime of policy, legal systems and the approaches that ought to reach out to and empower the stakeholders at the ground level, remained unchanged,” writes Abeywickrama.
The beginning
The rut, he shows, started with two key policy decisions of the British; one, the abolition of the tradition of rajakariya (compulsory labour) which had ensured that all small irrigation systems were maintained by the peasant farmers and, two, the promulgation of the Crown Land Encroachment Ordinance (CLEO) in 1840 which took over all land under the Crown – effectively creating generations of landless poor to come.
The British who had wrongly transcribed rajakariya − a set of customs and traditions which disciplined agriculture and water management to ‘slavery’ − abolished it and since then no administration, British or otherwise has been able to institute a successful programme to maintain the small irrigation systems of the country. Programmes like participatory farmer management programmes instituted by governments later soon fell into disrepute as corruption and bureaucracy crept in, making it ineffective to this day, points out Abeywickrama in his book.
Governments since Independence have also used the British system of owning all land as a political tool to buy over voters and to solve the problem of unemployment. “Creating employment this way does not cost anything, they just take over forest land and give it to people with a bit of assistance. The farmer with his small block of land remains poor, and it is good for the politicians to keep the people poor, because they become dependent,” remarked Abeywickrama.
It was hoped that land and a few acres of paddy would make the settler families self-sufficient and perhaps even rich, but 40 years later, 25 percent of the poor live in rural areas of the country.
“The Mahaweli allotment of 2.5 acres to each family was profitable at that time; it is no longer profitable now. They can’t make a living out of that compared to an urban person,” he said.
Further, the land that was given came with strings attached. Under the Land Development Ordinance, peasants received land on a permit and were required to fulfill a programme of cultivation and development before the permit is turned into a grant, but there has been no adequate monitoring system of these lands and a huge backlog of applications continues to pile up at the divisional secretaries, from people asking that their permits, several generations old, be turned into freeholding title deeds.
Abeywickrama observed that land permits schemes like ‘Swarnabhoomi’ come with a lot of restrictions to the farmer. The holder cannot sell it or lease it. In addition, he can only transfer it to the next of kin, making the market price of his or her land low.
“If he wants to move out, he needs to illegally lease it out to another. A lot of politicians do not want that to happen, they think rich people will grab the land. There is some truth in that. On the other hand, you are keeping the farmer bonded to the land.”
Further, he spoke of a middle path where farmers can be given title deeds to their lands and to limit the danger of them being bought over by large companies and multinationals, a provision would be included to only allow the farmer to lease out the land for any use of his choice, if he is not going to utilise it for his own farming purposes. This would give him the right to choose the most profitable way of utilising the land.
Policies are not five-year plans
The late M. Rajendra, former Land Commissioner whose paper has been incorporated in the book, observed in 1985 that by the 1950s, they realised that they had no proper system to monitor or alienate state land to peasants in a way in which it would truly help them. But the report of the second Land Commission appointed to study this generated very little interest among policymakers or the public. “My impression is that it was years before anyone in a policy-making position read it.” Thus, from the beginning, policymakers have not paid much attention to getting the fundamental systems and policy right when it comes to managing resources in the country.
“There is actually no policy because governments cannot agree on a single policy. When there is one, it does not work. Why? Because decisions are made top-down, they lack consistency; when a minister changes, policy changes. You have to look 30 years ahead, not five, and decide this is the policy,” said Abeywickrama.
When it came to the AMP, he observed that they circumvented many of these issues by not formulating any ‘national policies’. “We did the job and the policies came out of it. You do something right, if it works, that becomes policy. In this so-called democracy, you can’t do otherwise.”
“It was the same with the institutions. The Mahaweli Authority was not set upfront; it became a need to implement the Mahaweli programme. Forestry and environment policy arose out of the Mahaweli Programme to accommodate the needs of the project. Because the moment you come up with a policy, there are other ministers trying to come in and they don’t cooperate and at times, professionals draw it up and the ministers don’t understand it.”
Abeywickrama, who traces his career in environmental resource management in the book, shows a shift in thinking, as he moved from the need to practically implement policies as a government servant to a researcher and director at IWMI. Natural resources can be easily destroyed but take longer to recover, he observed, and thus call for a more long-term perspective and the need to “harmonise sectoral policies on an intersectoral basis.”
However, at present this thinking has been quagmired by “sectoral policy formulation largely being project or donor driven, using a sectoral or single agency approach, activities not being synchronised, institutional mechanisms for intersectoral consultations being weak, competition for scarce financial resources discouraging collaboration between sectors, and inadequate arrangement for information sharing.” Further, he also advocates for the need to bring in the private sector and NGOs in the consultative process of natural resources management.
Water, water
Another major issue the book touches on throughout is the need for systemised and fair water management. “We need a basin approach rather than sectoral management of water resources,” said Abeywickrama.
“Valuation, costing, pricing and cost-sharing backed by an incentive regime will promote conservation, investments and cost-effective management. Each basin has to be looked at separately to see how it can be best managed.”
Setting up with these institutions and policies however has proven to be harder than necessary. M. Samad in his paper in the book describes the time the government in 1996 and in 2000 tried to set up water management institutions and bring in a national water policy. “In 1996, it was proposed that a national water policy would be formulated. It came under the President and thus had the highest commitment, but it then also prevented key stakeholder agencies from claiming ownership of the proposed policy. The draft was ready by 2000 and a key feature was to set up three bodies − the National Water Resources Authority, Water Resources Council, and the Water Resources Tribunal. These would jointly deal with the sensitive issue of water entitlements and inter-sectoral management of the whole system and decentralised management on the basis of river basins.”
It was not to be. “The policy however came under severe criticism for being top-down, as having insufficient consultations with all stakeholders, being too secretive, having the failure to draft policy in the local language, being donor-driven and insensitive to cultural aspects of water.”
Eventually, the government abandoned the policy and distanced itself from it. The problem however still persists.
Looking to the future
For 70 years the country had trudged along without an overall plan for managing its natural resources, but with climate change, Sri Lanka has been listed on the critical list along with the danger of being caught unprepared.
Abeywickrama in his most important takeaway calls for the restructuring of the entire government system and institutions which currently manage all natural resources. “Most of these institutions are 150 years old and continue to function in the same way. We need to restructure them. Further, they seem to exist only to provide employment and not to work,” he said.
Finally, the government would eventually need to look at making agriculture more profitable and productive, in addition to creating industries which would remove people from the land, reducing the pressure on it. “Numbers living off the land have to be reduced; otherwise, they would continue to exploit the natural environment.”
A great admirer of the late Minister Gamini Dissanayake, Abeywickrama in his book quotes the Minister on his aim for taming the great Mahaweli as a “struggle centered on the poor man,” to give him the economic freedom to live his life on his terms, but 40 years later, whether that has been achieved, remains a question.
(Nanda Abeywickrama’s book is to be launched tomorrow (13) at 4.15 pm at the Central Bank’s Centre for Banking Studies in Rajagiriya)
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