Banning mania can be hazardous to the nation’s economic health
As fags go up in price again, smokers and tobacco farmers face dooms year come 2020 if the government goes ahead with tobacco cultivation ban
The Government has announced it plans to ban tobacco cultivation in the land by 2020 in accordance with the President’s determination to make Lanka a smoke free nation and the nation’s budget not be dependent henceforth on the massive revenue it brings to fill the national coffers. Even as he has declared to free the Exchequer’s dependency on the excise revenue the sale of alcohol contributes to keep the rupee afloat, in the manner of his predecessor’s chinthanaya ‘mathata thitha.’ Or place full stop to both smoking and drinking. Period.
This is not to promote smoking or to advocate drinking but simply to ask whether this ‘goody goody’ scouts’ policies can present a hazard to the economic health of the nation. For even whilst the president can earn his laurels at international forums as being a captain of the antismoking lobby as he is famed for winning as he did the laurels at the World Health Organisation’s summit a few years back when he was serving as the Health Minister of the Rajapaksa government, whether this nation’s people can afford to enjoy the luxury of placing the politically right notion before their bread and butter.
The recent announcement is nothing new. This nation’s bane has been this government’s ready inclination to treat banning as the first recourse before seeking a solution. For bans do not need imagination. Solutions demand thought. Take for instance some:
Last Wednesday, Cabinet spokesman Health Minister Rajitha Senaratne epitomised the total negativity of this Government’s policy and its unconcern over the economic consequences in the process when he declared at the cabinet press briefing that
“The Government would forge ahead with the death penalty directive given by President Maithripala Sirisena even if it leads to the loss of GSP Plus.”
Brave words of a brand new Lanka, no doubt. The sort that the leader of the world’s sole superpower trumpets day in and night out when he threatens China and even his European friends of imposing higher tariffs on their exports to the USA.
America with her armed power and financial might as the world’s largest economy may well afford to do that even with a trillion dollar debt. The question is: Can Lanka afford to adopt the same arrogance and give the lion roar when the only lions in her are found on her larger and her national flag? And can hardly but squeak?
But does this coalition government fathom the economic cost that was caused to the nation as a result at the previous regime’s total disregard to human rights? And how much effort was taken since 2015 by its own ministers, spearheaded by its Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe, to convince the European nations that the Lankan gov- ernment of President Sirisena had turned the corner and the dark days were over, in order to regain the GSP Plus status?
With the grant of the GSP Plus by the EU last year the sun dawned again for hundreds of garment factory owners who had staked their last shirt in a sinkor-swim struggle to keep their factories operating and thousands of their workers in employment. Now just when the sun nears high noon, presidential talk of banning the life of another human being -- as His Holiness Pope Francis stated ten months ago ‘whatever crime, however serious the crime the death penalty is inadmissible’ -- threatens to eclipse and dooms it to prematurely set and blacken the garment landscape. Not only the garment sector but also the prospects of over 100 of industries who benefit from it.
And for what? Just to make the 18 on death row swing? And enforce not selective law enforcement the present government accused the previous regime of practising but to implement selective punishment on the spurious evidence of some prison guards? As Minister Rajitha Senaratne said last Wednesday “A list of 19 such individuals drafted by the intelligence services have been forwarded to the Justice Ministry so that the government can carry out the death sentence.” But is that jurisprudential basis to hang a man or more a kangaroo court of Yahapalana justice?
Then take glyphosate. On October 1, 2015, under the Control of Pesticides Act, the Registrar of Pesticides issued a gazette notification cancelling every licence issued in respect of pesticides containing the glyphosate. It was done, it was said, in the interest of the public and on the advice of the Pesticides Technical and Advisory Committee.
But, in a gazette notification dated July 11, 2018, the Registrar of Pesticides said that on the advice of the Pesticides Technical and Advisory Committee, he was rescinding the 2015 order. Like the ban on asbestos, ban today, gone tomorrow.
Doesn’t the Cabinet of Ministers pause and think before they approve a ban for it to be lifted the following sunrise at the whim and fancy of their lord and master at his sole whim and fancy? And realise that as a result of it, this government faces a credibility problem, the kind of which no other government has ever faced before? Ranil Wicremesinghe, as the Prime Minister of this coalition government, may be helpless, but isn’t he embarrassed at the bans and second thoughts thereafter made in the manner of the vacillating moon?
Not to forget, of course, the government’s original sin of banning the Chinese funded Port City upon immediately coming to power. Only to succumb, a couple of yers later, to the reality and give the official nod for it to go ahead. What did the procrastination achieve? If there has to be madness in government’s banning decisions, shouldn’t there at least be a method to it?
Now the government has thought it fit to ban tobacco cultivation. With the aim, with the ultimate end in mind, no doubt, for its leaders to win another medal or
two at a future World Health Organisation summit of making Lanka a totally smoke- free nation. In the same manner of Bhutan which became the first and only nation to boast a totally cigarette-free country in the world. Finland is next on line and was intending to go smoke- free in 2020 but has shelved its plans to totally ban smoking till 2030.
The Lankan government hasn’t still announced its intention to impose a total ban. Its policy seems to be to cut off the blood supply to make the patient die a natural death. Ignoring the economic consequences that will follow.
As the Sunday Punch commented on 1st July ‘Along with his predecessor at the Ministry of Health, the present Health Minister Rajitha Senaratne has been at the forefront of banning cigarette smoke from fouling Lanka’s pristine air. And, together with President Sirisena, has vowed to do so by 2020 in accordance with the government’s general policy and practice to ban everything it considers reprehensible with scant regard to the impact such peremptory bans have on the social and economic climate. One such farming industry facing such a ban is tobacco cultivation. And done on the grounds to protect the nation’s health. ‘
About 20,000 farmers are directly involved in tobacco cultivation. With 300,000 dependents. According to Minister Bathiudeen around 700,000 are employed in this sector directly and indirectly. The ban will thus threaten the livelihood of nearly a million people.
Tobacco cultivation is mainly done between the four months gap of the Maha and Yala paddy seasons when paddy cannot be grown due to the scarcity of water. Farmers use the lean mean drought months to grow tobacco leaves instead, since tobacco needs only one seventh of the water that paddy demands.
Presently approximately 2,500 hectares are under tobacco cultivation during the seasonal Maha-Yala gap. Matale, Kandy, Anuradhapura, Moneragala, Badulla, Ampara, Kurunegala, Hambantota, Nuwara Eliya and the president’s own hometown Polonnaruwa are the main areas in which tobacco is grown by over 20,000 farmers with 300,000 dependents.
But oddly enough, the government has no plans to ban the import of tobacco to keep the Ceylon tobacco company from rolling its paper wrapping around imported tobacco instead of the homegrown stuff to keep the nation’s two million odd smokers puffing. Though at a greater cost. And a greater drain on the nation’s foreign currency reserves.
The government seems not to understand the illogical position of the tobacco cultivation ban for Lanka’s farmers: To deny 20,000 tobacco farmers the opportunity of improving their incomes by banning them from cultivation tobacco whilst allowing the import of tobacco for farmers abroad to better their lifestyles.
Last year alone the cigarette industry contributed a hefty 117 billion bucks in excise taxes to buffer the nation’s financial demands, especially to provide for
the Rs 178 billion bucks that were allocated to the Health Ministry last year. As it has done for decades and become one of the main financiers to enable the government to balance its books when it comes to good housekeeping and to keep the nation’s physical and economic health ship shape.
But, even as the Government continues to tax cigarettes and the propaganda machine works fulltime to blast the hazards of smoking a regulated legal cigarette, what is even odder is the Health Minister Rajitha Senaratne’s recent statement to promote the beedi as the nation’s best smoke.
At a recent press conference, Doctor Rajitha claimed that to smoke the unregulated beedi was less harmful to health than the regulated cigarette. Perhaps that’s why the Government has shown such favoritism to the humble beedi and left it untaxed when it comes to point of sale.
The beedi is wrapped with the Tendu leaf. Before May 2018 the duty on its import plus cess was Rs 250 per kilo. In May this year the tax was raised to Rs. 750 per kilo. But in July, two months later, probably in view of its health benefits, the tax was reduced to Rs 250 per kilo. Once this tax has been paid, that’s it. No other taxes are levied upon it. And the tobacco in which the Tendu leaf is wrapped is in the main imported from abroad. And guess what? With the exorbitant taxes placed on cigarettes, the beedi has captured 51 percent of the smoking class whilst cigarettes have fallen to 43 percent.
Whilst the regulated cigarette contributes more than a hundred billion bucks to the Government treasury each year, the sale of beedi contributes none, except for the tax on imported tendu leaf in which imported tobacco finds home in.
It’s time to caution the government:
What’s the logic behind banning tobacco cultivation in Lanka and depriving twenty thousand farmers of this country from earning an honest living and still allow the import of tobacco from abroad enabling farmers in those countries to better their stand of living?
What’s the medical evidence that beedi smoking is better than smoking a cigarette and why the beedi is favoured when it comes to taxation? The cost of a beedi is Rs 5. This Wednesday the government increased the tax on a single cigarette by Rs. 3.50.
Why the ban solution is the government’s first resort and not its last recourse?
Why this government fails to understand, at the cost of its own popularity amongst the masses, that the economic consequences of banning should also be taken into account without rushing to ban, ban ban everything in its sight? At this rate what next to ban? Sex, perhaps? As sexual intercourse has been identified and scientifically proven to be a direct cause of a nation’s population boom? And thus not only tax it but ban it altogether, Sirisena style?
Doesn’t the Cabinet of Ministers pause and think before they approve a ban for it to be lifted the following sunrise at the whim and fancy of their lord and master at his sole whim and fancy?