SAARC - ‘poor’ countries get together, but

How poor are we, really?

S. PATHIRAVITANA

The further you go into the past the lesser your chances of meeting the word poverty. This may come as a surprise to you, but that’s because you and I have been taught to look at the past as a dark, gloomy, dismal and altogether a primitive era compared to the state of enlightenment we are living in now.

When we see a thatched roof, mud walls and cow dung floors, what comes to our minds is ‘poverty’; but as an adequate source of shelter only a foreigner, surprisingly, can see its advantages.

Let us see what the foreigner says: “Such a house, since the rain cannot beat very much against the walls, can stand unharmed for a long time. The floor is also made of beaten clay, and on their feast days they take fresh cow dung, mix it with water into a thin paste, and smear with their hands both floor and walls quite flat with it.

Although while being put on it smells badly, yet after a few days, when it is dry, this changes to a pleasant odour; and the ants, which are a great plague in this land, avoid it,” written by Heydt, a German who served the Dutch in the 17 hundreds, living in the Maritime Provinces for three years.

Another foreigner, a British Civil Servant, A.B.Denham, who had even a closer look at our people and country makes the following reflections on poverty. He was here at the turn of the 19th century and what provoked him to make his reflections on poverty was “the enormous quantities of goods which are poured by the West into the Eastern store “ and “the extraordinarily few wants of the Eastern people.” He says that comforts among the people of the East have to be created.

“The villager never possessed any.” All he had was his mud built house and the clothing and the household goods, which could be stuffed into a small bag to flee unencumbered into the jungle at a pinch.

Comfort

“Such conditions in the East,” Denham goes on, “do not indicate a state of poverty, but a complete lack of comfort, the absence of which was not felt...The chroniclers of the reigns of Eastern monarchs do not concern themselves with the standard of comfort among the subject people for the very good reason that no historian of those days would have understood what was meant by such an expression, or if he had would have scoffed at the idea.”

So, having introduced comfort to a people who had nothing to do with it, we have today, thanks to the imperialists who introduced it, not for the welfare of the people but for their own profits, and in consequence we are impoverished today.

Poverty has been here with us for a while and it may be here for some more time because it is a useful slogan at election times to mislead people by promising to ‘eradicate poverty.’

The United Nations, not to thwart the aspirations of our politicians as such but to join them, is planning to introduce a series of ‘quick win’ proposals under their Millennium Plan to eradicate poverty. They have set the target year for eradication as 2015. The proposals don’t seem to look as being any too startling because all their plans seem to be only a going back to the days when things went on smoothly before the ‘comfort’ program stepped in.

By the way, the Millennium poverty eradication ‘quick win’ plan needs $40-60 billion for a year. Compared to what the US is reported to be spending on its armaments contracts amounting to $230 billion a year, the poverty eradication money is just a pittance. One way the UN has proposed to help poverty eradication is to introduce what we call free education and they call ‘elimination of school fees.’

This is not a new scheme at all, but one that they may even have borrowed from our country where education right along our history has always been free, and I don’t mean the days of the Kannangara Plan, but our ancient pirivena system of studies where the monks acted like talent scouts to spot the brighter students among the young.

And neither was education compulsory then. Being a free people we only created opportunities for all those interested in pursuing either linguistic studies or the arts and crafts and sciences in which Sri Lanka has done pretty well. A case in point is the creation of some of the finest water management engineers the world has seen. And all this without the help of any ‘quick win’ Millennium Plan.

Eradicate poverty

Supporting breast-feeding is another of the plans that are thought of as being able to eradicate poverty. This country never had anything except breast-feeding in all its history. If a mother ran out of milk, which was exceptional, then they looked around for a foster mother to help out. Such co-operative efforts went into disuse with the arrival of the business fraternity from the West.

The business fraternity took a lot of trouble to persuade the medical fraternity to advice mothers to change over to the bottle.

And along with the ‘comfort’ plan introduced to our country by the imperialists it didn’t take very long to persuade mothers to change over to the bottle. “Stuff and nonsense” says the Millennium Plan now, and they are determined to go ahead to persuade mothers to throw out the bottle and get back to the breast.

User fees for basic health care is a term that is being used to say that in developing countries, which is the polite form of telling us that we are poor countries, who are now paying for obtaining medical help to keep ourselves alive, must be discouraged. There was a time in very recent history when medicine was freely given in all state hospitals in this country.

Our then international money-lenders frowned on us for this and screwed our then Finance Minister, Dr N.M.Perera, to charge twenty five cents per patient. Now all this is forgotten - the Millennium Plan will now take the health costs under its wing. We had no problems, however, under our own kings when medical treatment was freely given with the King himself acting the physician.

Millennium Plan

Community health training in rural areas, another one of those ‘quick win’ plans to eradicate poverty, is to be introduced under the Millennium Plan. But this is something that we always had, with each village having its own ayurvedic physician, who advised patients to look after themselves with inguru-kothhamlli treatment as a preliminary before visiting him, and the payment in any case was a gift of a sheaf of betel leaves.

There is also evidence that our women could also look after themselves quite well without any medical assistance.

“The Sinhala women,” says Heydt who is mentioned above,” are not accustomed to have midwives, as do ours, to assist at births or give a helpful hand; but they take to them only the women of their neighbours, who serve as midwives.

They rarely die in childbirth, and such a death appears strange to them, from which one can deduce the ease of their bringing-forth.”

Then there is going to be instruction for women on women’s rights as part of the poverty eradication campaign. How the two are related is somewhat difficult to conceive.

There was a time, however, in the history of our country when the Sinhala law prevailed from north to south and from east to west and this law was particularly generous to our women. Marriage and divorce was a very simple affair. And when it came to divorce, “They divorce for a small cause, and it is no disgrace among them... When they cannot live with content together, they separate themselves, and the man seeks another wife and the wife another husband.”

As for any conditions for separation there are none, for the law entitles her to take with her, “the dowry that she brought, perhaps a few heads of cattle, some clothes, and now and then, if she is of higher rank, some slaves; and goes to her parents or nearest relatives or other friends, until she sees another opportunity better to her liking than the first.”

So, as we can see, the Millennium Plan has nothing new to offer us except to restore now the ‘balance of power’ destroyed by our puritanical Victorians from England.

Tree planting

And one more item from a list of about 14. The Millennium Plan recommends tree planting as a measure to eradicate poverty. We had prophets around 2000 years ago who asked us not only to care for trees but also for wild animals and in fact the entire environment as the Arahat Mahinda did when he surprised King Devanampiya Tissa while he was hunting animals, in the following words: “O great King, the birds of the air and the beasts have as equal a right to live and move about in any part of the land as thou. The land belongs to the people and all living beings; thou art only the guardian of it.”

And this has its echo in a modern prophet who says, “The teaching of the Buddha... enjoins a reverent and non-violent attitude not only to all sentient beings but also, with great emphasis, to trees.

Every follower of the Buddha ought to plant a tree every few years and look after it until it is safely established, and the Buddhist economist can demonstrate without difficulty that the universal observation of this rule would result in a high rate of genuine economic development independent of any foreign aid.”

- E.F. Schumaker