Who is the real loser from a boycott of US products?

A group calling itself the Mawbima Surakum has launched a house-tohouse campaign to urge Sri Lankans to boycott all American products, including American wheat, the Sunday Times reported two weeks ago.

Spearheading the boycott is the 82year-old professor and writer Gunadasa Amarasekera. A dentist by profession, he has now made it his life’s business to drill into the people’s collective nerve centre to say a resounding no to Uncle Sam’s myriad products. Beating the drum with a gusto that defies his age and contradicts his Buddhist values, he proclaims patriotically, “Our aim is to create antiAmerican sentiments. We may not succeed at first, but in a few years we will.”

What then? An utopian land free of American wheat and thus without bread, without the Internet, without Microsoft Windows or Apple i-pods and i-pads and all the other technological benefits from American innovations and scientific advances.

And while the rest of the world en- joys a still higher standard of living and higher per capita income through free trade with the world’s biggest economy, Sri Lankans can continue to live in poverty and, in the name of patriotism, a cocooned cuckoo-land that the world has forgotten, and brimming with anti-american vitriol.

And while the good doctor is at it, he should go the whole hog and spend more of his time spreading the same message to Lankan industries, garment industries in particular, telling them not to export their products to the US.

Or better still, he could urge our local exporters not to export to any country that voted against Sri Lanka at the Geneva Summit, including India. After all, do we not have the world’s biggest exporter of garments, China, our mandarin friend, whose readymade market wilt embrace with open arms the influx of Lankan garments. Dhammika Seneviratne

Dehiwela