Notes to the People: Reconfiguring Material Territory

The Bill to amend the Land Development Act of the Land Development Ordinance (1935) has been presented to Parliament. Besides, some technical niceties, it is aimed at making three significant changes that may lead to reconfiguring the material territory in rural Sri Lanka. The three significant new changes include provisions, explicit and implicit:

Ensuring the right of inheritance to women and children: initially a right of the male child.

Making land mortgages to banks and financial institutions easier by abolishing the existing requirement of prior approval from the Divisional Secretary.

Making the cancellation of land that has been already granted somewhat easier.

DSS’ model

The Land Development Ordinance of 1935 was a political tract introduced to change the rural landscape in Sri Lanka in order to reconfigure it. D S Senanayake (DSS), a prime mover of the Bill as the Minister of Land and Agriculture sought to achieve primarily three related objectives at the same time. First, he was keen to weaken and stultify the growth of the Left movement, especially in the towns and the southern coastal belt. Abject poverty and growing unemployment in those areas would be a fertile breeding ground for Leftist radicalism at the time led by the young Lanka Sama Samaja Party (LSSP). So, DSS had to find ways and means of weakening the LSSP and the radical Left.

Relocating the poor from these breeding grounds to areas where the Left has no big following was seen as a solution to this issue. Secondly, DSS knew that the Left is orienting towards the urban working class so he found the presence of a numerically large petit-bourgeois class was imperative in the context of an elected representative system based on the universal franchise to preserve the rule of the elitist local nascent bourgeoisie. Thus, each family, in the early arrangement, was given five acres of wetland and three acres for a home garden.

It was calculated that a peasant with eight acres of land would not support a Left uprising in the cities and the urban ruling class would get the support of this new class of land-owning petit-bourgeoisie to hold onto political power. (He might have consulted Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, ha ha). One may also add a third one. DSS knew the British raj would sooner or later transfer power to Ceylon’s political elite. Hence, an economic plan based on agricultural development to increase food production was required. Reparation of the old irrigation system and construction of new tanks was planned to improve paddy cultivation.

This model was not seriously questioned until 1977. Even after 1977, there was no attempt at transforming the basic structure of the model since the policymakers had failed to develop a new alternative. What was introduced was marketisation, commodification and financialisation, without seriously disrupting the DSS model. However, the second phase of structural adjustment and the post-2008 crisis new world trends significantly changed the rural landscape.

Peter M. Rosset and Maria Elena Martínez-Torres have, in another context, described these changes in the following words. “In recent decades, neoliberal policies, characterised by deregulation, privatisation, open markets, and free trade, have opened avenues for transnational financial capital and transnational corporations to invest in new and old enterprises worldwide”. New investment areas like dot-com, AI, finance and others faced a new crisis in 2008. “This has created a somewhat desperate search for new investment opportunities, pushing investors to look south increasingly, especially focusing on rural natural resources. This is driving a new boom of export crops, agrofuels, mining, and industrial monoculture plantations”.

The Land Development Ordinance 1935 

When we look at the legal drafts prepared with the intention of reconfiguration of the land space, it is necessary to keep in mind the changes that have taken place within the neoliberal space, particularly after the 2008 financial crisis. Peter M. Rosset and Maria Elena Martínez-Torres have shown the emerging bifurcation of material and non-material spaces on the basis of social classes. They perceptively remark: “At the beginning of the 21st century, the rural areas of the world constitute spaces that are hotly contested by different actors with opposing interests. Organisations and social movements of rural peoples, i.e., peasants, family farmers, indigenous people, rural workers and the landless engaged in land occupations, rural women, and others, increasingly use agroecology based on diversified farming systems, as a tool in the contestation, defense, (re) configuration, and transformation of contested rural spaces into peasant territories in a process that has been termed re-peasantisation. In contrast, financial capital, transnational corporations, and domestic private sectors are re-territorialising spaces that have abundant natural resources through mega-projects such as dams, large-scale strip mining, and monoculture plantations. These corporate interests, aided by neoliberal economic policies and laws, have generated the growing land-grabbing problem in many southern countries”.

The Amendment and the original Bill mark two historical phases of capitalism in Sri Lanka. While DSS wanted to build a strong middle-class land-owning peasantry as a counterforce to the urban working class, the present-day rulers make an attempt to grab the land that the peasants have been using in favour of agri-businesses. In other words, the DSS model was aimed at peasantisation or repeasantisation of agriculture.

It is true that this neoliberal project cannot be put into practice easily for varying reasons. One key issue has been that capital knows the specificities of agriculture where labour time and production time are not equal. Moreover, nature plays a big role in agriculture. As a result, capital always makes an attempt to pass the risk components to the farmers notwithstanding the fact that the land is owned by the company or the farmer him/herself. An added reason is in a country where legislative and executive bodies are elected, ruling elites are forced to think about their electoral support when decisions are taken.

Granting legal rights for land may be an attractive proposal for farmers. Nonetheless, it may be a step towards the concentration of land in a few hands or in multinational or local agribusinesses. Land should not be private property, it is like water, forests and other natural resources should be commonly owned by society. Any legislation deviating from this basic principle should not be allowed to pass.

The writer is a retired teacher of Political Economy at the University of Peradeniya. sumane_l@yahoo.com

By Sumanasiri Liyanage

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