SRI LANKA: Anti-Poverty Reforms Will Add Poverty – Critics

By Feizal Samath Reprint | | Print |

Feizal Samath

COLOMBO, May 29 2003 (IPS) - H M Bandara Menike, a 52-year-old widow with three children who cultivates two acres 140 km north-west of the Sri Lankan capital says: ” I don’t know anything about poverty reduction reforms.”

H M Bandara Menike, a 52-year old widow with three children who cultivates two acres at Karuwalagaswewa, about 140 kilometres north-west of the Sri Lankan capital, says: ” I don’t know anything about poverty reduction reforms.”

All she knows is that her cost of production over the years has been much higher than the return, and that the debt burden of farmers like her has been rising. ”The money I spent on two bags of fertiliser those days now goes to the cost of one bag,” she says.

At the last harvesting season, she was able to recover only 12,000 rupees (125 U.S. dollars) after spending about 35,000 rupees (365 dollars).

Life has not been easy for people like Menike, but women activists say it is bound to get even tougher under the anti-poverty plan that the Sri Lankan government and World Bank approved for this South Asian island nation in April.

”We will get more and more into debt by accepting more loans from the World Bank. The policies in the PRSP (Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper) will lead to increased poverty in this country; not reduce it,” said Padma Pushpakanthi, coordinator of a federation of women called Savisthri (Women for Alternative Development) that represents 200 organisations.

”These proposals will strengthen the hand of big business and attract foreign investment at the cost of the poor,” Gloria de Silva of the Centre for Family Services said during a discussion with women’s groups and farmers’ organisations.

Women’s organisations are threatening to take to the streets if the World Bank or the government does not listen to their concerns and revise the programme, although the chances of changes happening at this point are slim.

In April, veteran activist Sarath Fernando travelled all the way to Washington but failed to persuade the World Bank to give grassroots groups more time to study the bank-funded poverty reduction programme that he says would widen the gap between the rich and the poor.

The bank later approved a four-year assistance programme for Sri Lanka in loans and grants worth 800 million U.S. dollars, which includes implementation of the PRSP.

The programme is aimed at reducing poverty through growth-related strategies. But critics argue that they have seen this formula fail before in many other countries – policies that push the selling of state assets, the privatisation of health services, labour reforms with hire and fire policies to encourage foreign investors, and selling to farmers water that they used to get for free.

When a group of women led by Pushpakanthi met World Bank Sri Lanka director Peter Harold in May to hand over a petition that lists their concerns, they accused the bank of preparing the document without consultation with civil society groups.

But Harold denied this, saying the poverty reduction policies were drafted by the government over a three-year period of consultation with all interested groups. The bank approved the strategy only after that, he was quoted as saying.

To that, Fernando, head of the Movement for National Land and Agricultural Reform (MONLAR), said: ”We were given a list of 300 organisations that were summoned for a U.N. Development Programme conference to discuss this paper in October 2001. Only 40 were NGOs while the rest were government officials and business organisations.”

”The NGOs raised many concerns but were told that the paper had already been prepared,” Fernando added.

De Silva, who was also present at the World Bank discussion, said Harold conceded that the gap between the rich and the poor was much wider here than in any of the 10 countries, including parts of Africa that he had worked in before.

The campaign against the new anti-poverty programme is high of the agenda of women’s groups because they are vulnerable to its effects, activists say.

”Women face the brunt of the reforms as workers, housewives or mothers. Labour reforms permit hire and fire rules. When schools are shut down, it affects us, when state assets are sold to the private sector, it affects us,” added Christine Fernando, a Catholic nun working for a rural women’s group.

Women, who make up 51 percent of the Sri Lankan population, also make up a large number of workers in the garments industry and in plantations. They make up majority of overseas migrant workers. Together, garments, plantations and remittances from migrants are the main sectors that earn foreign exchange for the country.

Water pricing is a key issue in the anti-poverty plan that critics say show how a policy designed to improve economic efficiency on a macro level can wreck livelihoods at the micro level.

According to the petition against the poverty plan, for instance, the Sri Lankan government plans to spend some 50 billion rupees (520.8 million dollars) of taxpayers’ money on water infrastructure, and hand it over to private companies to manage.

But ”they will only come to make profits, selling our water to us while also using the infrastructure already paid for by the people of Sri Lanka,” the petition said.

The debate over water pricing also shows how while the government and donor agencies may consider water a commodity, women’s groups say they see water as life and not for profit.

”We have heard about putting costs on water, but it has still not come to our fields,” says the farmer, Menike. It is an issue far more concrete than the words ‘poverty reduction programme’ and one that Menike knows would increase her farming costs even more, and would mean harder times ahead.