Features

Inside the Shadows of China: My Talk with Jasper Becker

Published

10 months ago

2025/11/23

Jasper Becker

That was one of the most concealed nightmares humanity was forced to endure. “In one village a mother was discovered boiling her two-year-old to eat its flesh. In another case, a father was charged with strangling his two sons to consume them; his defence was that they were already dead,” Jasper recounted in his book Hungry Ghosts. The famine of Mao’s era, though China had long been known as a land prone to scarcity, was of an unprecedented magnitude; this man-made calamity claimed at least 30 million lives.

I spoke to Jasper this week, and our hours-long discussion unearthed his profound insights on China—its history, economy, and the deep, often invisible mechanisms that have shaped its trajectory. “I was not an academic,” he told me, “and most of the academic books written in American universities and British universities got the whole picture of China completely wrong.” It was this outsider’s perspective, unencumbered by institutional loyalty, that allowed him to travel freely across rural China and speak directly with peasants, capturing truths that the state sought to conceal.

Jasper Becker is a British journalist, historian, and author whose career has spanned several decades across Asia, with a particular focus on China. Fluent in Chinese, French, and German, Jasper began his career reporting for the Associated Press in Geneva and Frankfurt, before joining The Guardian, where he covered pivotal events across East Asia, including the pro-democracy movements in South Korea and Taiwan, the first pro-independence riots in Lhasa, and developments in North Korea.

From 1995 to 2002, he served as Beijing Bureau Chief for Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post, later becoming China correspondent for The Independent. Jasper has authored nine books on Asia, most notably Hungry Ghosts, the first comprehensive account of China’s Great Leap Forward famine, and Rogue Regime, a study of Kim Jong Il’s North Korea, along with numerous privately published family histories.

Jasper explained that the systemic failures leading to the Great Famine were not merely historical accidents but predictable consequences of authoritarian centralisation and obfuscation. “Because one of the things about China is that it’s very secretive, it’s very authoritarian, and the statistics are unreliable,” he said. During Mao’s era, reporting lines were constructed on fear: “People were given targets. And if you didn’t meet the targets, you were punished. So people told lies to the people above them in the hierarchy, and they then doubled those lies. So you got these inflated reports, which went to the centre.”

This compounding of falsehoods created the terrifying conditions in which policy, divorced from reality, resulted in catastrophe. As Jasper noted, “Eventually then everybody starved, because you couldn’t eat these lies, and you had to import food from abroad. Nobody dared tell the great leader Mao that actually all this was lies and his policies didn’t work. And people who tried to do it were then severely punished.”

China’s long history of famine contextualises the Great Famine within a recurring pattern of environmental stress, social upheaval, and bureaucratic failure. Jasper elaborated on the historical mechanisms: “China was known as the land of famine… the responsibility of the state in Chinese history had been to collect grain in surplus years, hold that in storage, and release it during famine years. That system worked quite well.”

Yet environmental pressures, population expansion, and infrastructure challenges often disrupted these mechanisms. “The geography of China makes it very difficult to move grain around in large quantities, so what China did was they built a grand canal to bring food from the centre of China—from the Yangtze Valley—up to the north on barges.” The north, perpetually threatened by horse-riding invaders, relied on this logistical system to protect both population and state. However, Jasper stressed that, over centuries, human intervention exacerbated vulnerabilities: “People began to move out of the valleys into the mountains and cut down the trees, and that silted up the rivers, and when the rivers silted up there were more and more floods. So there were a succession of rebellions because there wasn’t enough food; the food wasn’t keeping up with the population growth.”

The twentieth century layered additional calamities atop these historical vulnerabilities. Civil wars between the Communists and the Nationalists, Japanese invasion, and regional conflicts created a persistent cycle of destruction. Jasper explained, “Despite the fact that the Chinese were benefiting from all these Western inventions and better crops and better transport, that was negated by all these people moving armies across the country and fighting each other.”

These repeated disruptions meant that, by the time the Great Famine struck under Mao, China’s population was extraordinarily vulnerable. Yet, while the famine itself was catastrophic, Jasper noted that the Communist Party later claimed to have eradicated extreme poverty—a claim he views through a critical lens: “The claim doesn’t really make any sense to me because people were poor when the Chinese Communist Party took over, because the Chinese Party had waged a civil war in order to impose a communist system, which made people worse off.”

The political economy that underpinned the famine and subsequent reforms is complex and, Jasper argued, distinct from other socialist experiments. In the early years of Deng Xiaoping’s reforms, the challenge was to transition from a militarized, state-controlled economy to a consumer-driven one. “When I went there, everybody was dressed in military uniforms… and the military ran everything… So people moved things out of the military into the civilian consumer market.” Jasper emphasized the incremental, step-by-step liberalisation as central to understanding China’s economic evolution.

“Communist countries had a choice between freeing all the prices and privatizing everything in one go, which is what a country like Poland did. Or they could do what China did, which was to do this one commodity at a time.” The initial price liberalizations led to rampant inflation and social frustration, culminating in the student protests of 1989: “Even though living standards were going up, the people wanted to get rid of the Communist Party, because they believed, well, if we’re going to go into a market economy, why do we need a Communist Party?”

Jasper recounted his own experiences reporting during those turbulent times. “I was in Tiananmen, and in Beijing when they sent the army in to suppress the student protest.” The episode revealed the Party’s prioritization of political control over economic reform, a principle that continued to define China’s subsequent trajectory. Upon returning to China in the mid-1990s, Jasper observed the divergence from the Soviet experience: “In the Soviet Union, the Communist Party had been banned. But the Chinese said, well, we’re staying in power. Our children, the children of the revolutionary leaders, are going to stay in control. We are not going to sell off the state factories… But we are going to get foreign investment in.” This hybrid model, combining controlled liberalization with political continuity, underpinned China’s rapid industrial ascent.

Yet Jasper stressed that the extraordinary industrial expansion carries its own contradictions. “China has done everything to excess… which leads to actually a lot of damage.” Overcapacity in housing, steel, and emerging sectors like electric vehicles exemplifies this pattern. “You get a car and the speed limit should be 50 miles an hour. And you say, ‘Oh no, we’re the Chinese Communist Party. We can do things faster.’ And then you drive the car at 100 miles an hour. And then you crash the car. That’s kind of what they do.” This metaphor captures the structural tensions within China’s economic model: rapid production without the corrective mechanisms provided by a truly functioning market.

The modern manifestation of this over-investment is striking. China’s steel production now exceeds one billion tonnes annually, eclipsing the combined output of the next ten countries. Jasper explained, “China produces more than India, Japan, Korea, America, Europe all put together. And now they’re flooding the world with cheap steel. So steel companies all over the world are going bankrupt, because they can’t match the steel prices.”

Similarly, overbuilt housing and infrastructure, while creating employment and stimulating local economies, represent sunk costs unlikely to yield sustainable returns. “You built all this housing, but way too much housing—nobody wants this housing. And so that means the banks, which kind of own the housing because they lend people mortgages, are essentially bankrupt. And lots of industries are like that.”

The structural opacity of the Chinese system exacerbates these issues. Jasper highlighted that “even to this day, the Chinese currency, the renminbi, is not a convertible currency. We don’t know what it’s worth. And they were very fortunate that a lot of foreign companies came into China… but people in the leadership also don’t know the true data.” The reliance on falsified statistics and controlled information channels creates persistent uncertainty in both domestic and global economic planning. “Most of the data coming out of China is fraudulent… the problem we still have today is that most of the data coming out of China is fraudulent; it’s inflated and doesn’t give you a true picture because the political system is still the same.”

This combination of over-centralization, state-directed investment, and opaque governance presents distinct challenges for contemporary analysts and journalists. Jasper lamented the shrinking space for independent reporting: “There are almost no foreign journalists there now… and the Chinese journalists obviously can’t do anything because everything is censored.” Digital technologies, once presumed to guarantee transparency, have been co-opted into mechanisms of control. “You can’t even use a VPN safely in China… that technology story didn’t pan out at all.”

In our discussions, Jasper repeatedly emphasized that the patterns observed historically continue to shape China’s present. The “stimulus programmes” of 2008 and subsequent over-investment, the lack of a convertible currency, and state-directed malinvestment reflect enduring features of a highly centralized system. “One steel mill is a good idea, but ten steel mills is a bad idea… you basically have to write that off.”

Similarly, the economic and demographic legacies of the Great Famine reverberate in persistent rural–urban inequalities. The Hukou system, controlling mobility and access to services, reproduces centuries-old hierarchies: “If you are from a rural area you have no right to live in the city and therefore enjoy better schools or better health care… the difference between the status of an urban resident and a rural resident didn’t change.”

Jasper also offered trenchant observations on China’s geopolitical posture and trade strategies. Overcapacity and export-led industrial growth create structural pressures on other nations, inducing trade tensions. “European and American countries are now moving to basically putting up barriers to Chinese products… because if you’re dumping all this stuff on the market, other people can’t develop their own factories and industries.” He detailed the complex interplay of tariffs, smuggling, and regional industrial relocation: “China has been using countries in Southeast Asia to move factories out of China and try and get round these tariff barriers, and to smuggle these advanced chips through third countries.”

Throughout our conversations, Jasper returned consistently to the historical continuities linking famine, war, and economic mismanagement. Centralized decision-making, secrecy, and excessive intervention created vulnerabilities in the past and continue to shape the present. “Over-centralization is a mistake, having fixed exchange rates is a mistake, having too many subsidies and too much government-directed investment is a mistake, and you’re better relying on market signals than government central planning… They promised everyone they were going to abolish money, abolish markets and abolish private property and they all starved to death.”

His reflections also extended to China’s military–industrial nexus. “It’s certainly building up its military because that’s a way of using up all this steel and all these people… it becomes really difficult to compete.” The intersection of industrial overcapacity, strategic posturing, and centralized planning illustrates how historical patterns of overreach persist into contemporary policy making. Similarly, tensions regarding Taiwan exemplify the political uncertainties that permeate the upper echelons of the Party. “Ever since I’ve been dealing with China, people have been talking about this… I don’t think it’s physically possible for China to invade Taiwan; they would suffer a huge defeat.”

Jasper offered a sobering assessment of the prospects for journalism and historical research in the digital age. The capacity to collect reliable information has been severely curtailed, creating significant blind spots in global understanding: “We certainly know less about China than we used to do… because what China does affects everybody’s economy now, whereas what China did in those days mostly just affected China.” He warned that the combination of over-investment, opaque governance, and restricted information channels will continue to produce systemic challenges, echoing lessons from history.

Reflecting on the entirety of our hours-long dialogue, it becomes evident that the Great Famine, China’s economic trajectory, and its current global positioning are inseparable from the patterns Jasper elucidates. From man-made famine to overcapacity in steel, to censored information and over-centralized planning, the through-line is a system that amplifies both achievement and risk. “Although you get these incredible achievements,” he noted, “you also actually bankrupt yourself doing this… You make lots of electric vehicles, but you lose money when you make them.”

China’s trajectory, as Jasper portrays it, is one of extraordinary paradox: immense industrial and technological prowess coexists with structural fragility; economic growth is accompanied by unsustainable debts and overproduction; centralization ensures both speed and opacity; and censorship preserves the Party’s narrative while masking underlying dysfunctions. In his words, “The manufacturing is real, but underneath things are not very healthy at all… that reversal will be very painful… a lot of the investment will go bad.”

As Jasper reminded me repeatedly, “This is the characteristic of the Chinese system… they do everything to excess, incredibly organized and good at organizing large numbers of people, and getting them to do something very, very quickly, because nobody can oppose it. But this leads to actually a lot of damage.” The tragedy of the famine was not merely the deaths themselves, but the fact that they were preventable. The tragedy of modern China, as Jasper sees it, may lie not in dramatic collapse but in an extended period of stagnation, tension, and dislocation—a slow grinding down of dynamism under the weight of centralized control. The past is not repeating; it is rhyming in ways that are easy to overlook and dangerous to ignore.

by Nilantha Ilangamuwa ✍️

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Features

Sri Lanka’s rice conundrum: Time to stop managing crises and start fixing the system

Published

22 hours ago

2026/09/4

Thilina Walpola

Prof. Ranjith Senaratne,
Emeritus Professor in Crop Science and former Vice-Chancellor,
University of Ruhuna and General President of the Sri Lanka Association for the Advancement of Science (2023) and
Prof. Prasad Jayaweera,
Dean, Faculty of Computing, University of Sri Jayawardenapura

Rice is not merely another crop in Sri Lanka. It is our staple food, an integral part of our history and culture, and a foundation of the civilisation that flourished around our ancient hydraulic systems. Revered as Buddha Bhogaya, the Buddha’s crop, rice has sustained our people for more than two millennia. Yet, remarkably, a country with such a profound relationship with rice continues to lurch from one rice crisis to another.

At one time, we have a surplus. At another, we face shortages. Prices rise sharply, consumers complain, farmers struggle to obtain remunerative prices, millers and traders become the focus of public attention, imports are hurriedly arranged, and governments announce yet another set of measures to contain the crisis. Then, after the immediate problem subsides, the matter recedes from the national agenda, until the next crisis arrives.

Why does this keep happening despite decades of agricultural research, policy interventions, expert committees and public debate?

Perhaps because we have been asking the wrong question. The fundamental problem is not simply how to produce more rice. Nor is it merely a question of prices, imports, fertiliser, farmers, millers or markets. The rice conundrum is a complex national systems problem.

We cannot solve a system by fixing its parts in isolation

Sri Lanka’s rice sector is an intricate web of interconnected systems involving agriculture, land, water, climate, technology, finance, energy, transport, markets, trade, governance, institutions and consumer behaviour. A decision made in one part of this system can have consequences, sometimes unintended, in another.

A change in fertiliser policy, for example, can affect productivity and production costs, which in turn influence farmer profitability, market prices and the need for imports. Irrigation decisions affect not only production, but also water availability, energy use and environmental sustainability. Guaranteed prices influence farmers’ cropping decisions, while import policies can simultaneously protect consumers and weaken incentives for domestic production. Likewise, market concentration can affect both the price received by farmers and the price paid by consumers. This is precisely why isolated interventions so often produce disappointing results. We keep treating symptoms while leaving the underlying system largely untouched.

For decades, we have generated valuable scientific knowledge on individual aspects of rice production and marketing. But knowledge generated within disciplinary and institutional silos does not automatically translate into solutions to complex real-world problems. What is needed now is a fundamentally different way of thinking.

From a “rice crop” to a “rice system”

The first step is to stop looking at rice simply as something that is grown in a paddy field.

The rice system begins with land, water, seed, inputs, technology and finance. It extends through cultivation, harvesting, drying, milling, storage, transport, wholesale and retail marketing, and finally to the consumer’s table. At every stage, there are different interests, incentives, constraints and actors: farmers, farmer organisations, input suppliers, machinery operators, millers, traders, wholesalers, retailers, financial institutions, government agencies, researchers and consumers.

And hovering over the entire system are climate change, changing consumer preferences, technological transformation and national economic conditions. A weakness anywhere in this chain can compromise the performance of the whole system.

Consider post-harvest losses. If significant quantities of rice are lost because of inadequate drying, storage or processing facilities, increasing production alone cannot solve the problem. Similarly, if farmers produce efficiently but face weak markets and poor bargaining power, productivity gains may not translate into improved livelihoods.

The question, therefore, should not be “How much rice can we produce?” but “How can we make the entire rice system work better?”

That requires us to see the connections.

The missing ingredient: reliable, real-time information

There is another fundamental weakness that deserves urgent attention: we still lack a comprehensive, integrated, interoperable and reliable national information system for rice. Information is scattered among different institutions, often collected using different methodologies and not necessarily available when decisions need to be made.

How much rice will actually be produced? How much is in storage? What is the likely demand? Where are the emerging production shortfalls? What are the stocks held by different actors? How are prices moving along the value chain? What are the likely consequences of climate conditions? Without timely and reliable answers to such questions, policymakers are forced to make critical decisions with incomplete information. This is not merely an administrative inconvenience. It is a national food-security vulnerability.

Sri Lanka should therefore seriously consider establishing a National Rice Intelligence and Decision Support System (NRIDSS), an integrated digital platform that brings together relevant real-time information from agriculture, meteorology, irrigation, markets, trade, statistics and other institutions. Such a system could support production forecasting, market monitoring, import decisions, early warning and evidence-based policy formulation. In an increasingly uncertain climate and volatile global economy, this should no longer be regarded as a luxury. It is becoming an essential component of national food-system governance.

The deeper problems cannot be ignored

A systems approach would also force us to confront some uncomfortable structural realities. Why does productivity remain relatively low despite decades of research? Why are so many holdings too small to achieve economies of scale? Why are modern technologies and precision agriculture not being adopted more rapidly? Why do farmers often have limited bargaining power? Why do substantial losses occur after harvesting? Why can market power become concentrated in a relatively small number of actors? Why are guaranteed prices sometimes announced too late to influence farmers’ production decisions? Why are policy interventions so often reactive rather than proactive? And how will droughts, floods, temperature extremes, changing rainfall patterns and emerging pests affect the stability of rice production in the years ahead? These are not separate questions. They are parts of the same system.

From crisis management to systems governance

Sri Lanka does not need another isolated discussion about rice. What is needed is a national policy dialogue and action forum that brings all relevant actors together, not merely to exchange speeches, but to develop a shared understanding of the system and agree on what needs to be done. Such collaboration must go beyond consultation or the exchange of views. The different parties need to work together from problem definition through to implementation, bringing their diverse knowledge, perspectives, interests and practical experience into a common process.

Farmers bring contextual and experiential knowledge; industry actors understand market realities and operational constraints; scientists contribute evidence and analytical capabilities; policymakers bring institutional and regulatory perspectives; while technology and data specialists can provide new tools for understanding and managing the system. When these different perspectives are brought together systematically, they can reveal interdependencies, challenge assumptions, identify feasible interventions and generate solutions that are evidence-based, practically implementable and socially acceptable.

This is the essence of a transdisciplinary systems approach: not simply working across disciplines, but bringing together multiple stakeholders and multiple forms of knowledge to co-create solutions and share responsibility for outcomes. The process should therefore go beyond presentations and speeches. It should involve systems mapping, causal analysis, stakeholder dialogue, scenario planning and the participatory identification of the critical bottlenecks and leverage points in the rice system. Most importantly, it should distinguish between what is urgent and what is important, and between interventions that merely alleviate symptoms and those capable of changing the underlying behaviour of the system itself.

We need an implementation roadmap, not another report

There is, however, one important caveat. Sri Lanka has no shortage of reports, recommendations and policy documents. What we often lack is sustained implementation. Any national initiative on the rice conundrum must therefore end not with another set of broad recommendations but with a prioritised national action roadmap. It should identify short-, medium- and long-term actions, assign institutional responsibilities, establish timelines and define measurable indicators of progress. The ultimate objective should be to move Sri Lanka from reactive crisis management to proactive systems governance.

A national opportunity

The rice conundrum may, in fact, provide Sri Lanka with an opportunity that extends well beyond rice to deal with other important crops. If we can demonstrate that a complex national problem can be addressed by bringing together science, policy, stakeholder knowledge, real-time information and systems thinking, the approach could become a model for addressing other persistent challenges, from climate resilience and water security to energy, food systems and disaster risk.

The choice before us is therefore quite stark. We can continue responding to each rice crisis as it emerges, adjusting prices, arranging imports, appealing to millers, reassuring consumers and supporting farmers, only to repeat the cycle later. Or we can step back and ask a more fundamental question:

What is it about the way our rice system is structured and governed that continually produces these crises?

That is the question that needs to be answered. Sri Lanka has the scientific expertise, institutional capacity and stakeholder knowledge required to do so. What is needed now is the willingness to bring these fragmented sources of knowledge together and examine the rice sector as one interconnected system.

Our ancient civilisation understood the importance of interconnectedness: land, water, agriculture and society were organised as parts of a larger whole. Perhaps, in confronting the modern rice conundrum, we need to rediscover that systems wisdom, this time supported by modern science, technology, real-time data and transdisciplinary thinking. The time has come to stop merely managing the rice crisis. It is time to fix the system that keeps producing it.

It is against this backdrop that the Sri Lanka Association for the Advancement of Science (SLAAS) proposes to convene shortly a “National Policy Dialogue and Action Forum on the Rice Conundrum in Sri Lanka”, bringing together the key stakeholders across the rice system. The Forum is intended to provide a platform for moving beyond piecemeal and reactive interventions towards a coordinated, evidence-based and transdisciplinary systems approach, one capable of generating lasting and pragmatic solutions to what has become an “island-shaking national issue”.

Features

This curse of partisan politics in Sri Lanka

Published

22 hours ago

2026/09/4

Thilina Walpola

78 Years of Demagoguery, Not Democracy

by Brigadier Ranjan de Silva
rpcdesilva@gmail.com

On the 4th of February every year, we raise the lion flag and speak of democracy. We speak of 78 years of “self-rule.” But honesty demands we ask: what kind of rule have we actually had? It was not democracy. Democracy is government for the common good, constrained by law, informed by reason, and accountable to truth.

What Sri Lanka has had for 78 years is demagoguery — government by manipulation, by party, and by passion.

Defining the Curse:

The dictionary defines demagoguery as “political activity that seeks support by appealing to the desires and prejudices of ordinary people rather than by rational argument.” Its tools are simple: divide the people, promise the impossible, demonize the opponent, and govern for the next election, not the next generation. That is the political culture we inherited in 1948 and perfected since.

78 Years of Evidence:

The record is not ambiguous. Policy by Pendulum – 1948–2024. Instead of a national development plan, we got a partisan wrecking ball. 1956: The “Sinhala Only Act” was passed not after linguistic study, but as an election mobilization tool. 1970-77: The SLFP nationalized private enterprise and imposed import controls. 1977: The UNP reversed course with an open economy overnight. 2005-2014: Mega infrastructure was built on Chinese loans with no feasibility transparency. 2015-2019: Those same projects were called “white elephants” and stalled. 2020-2021: The organic fertilizer ban was announced as a populist “green” policy, reversed 6 months later after it collapsed agriculture and food prices. The Colombo Port City, Hambantota Port, and the Central Expressway all followed the same pattern: started, stopped, rebranded. The country pays twice. The party takes credit once. Economics as Election Candy. Demagoguery is expensive. 1960s: Subsidized rice to win rural votes, leading to the 1971 food crisis.

2005-2014:

Fuel subsidies and public sector hiring sprees that doubled the wage bill. 2019:

Unfunded tax cuts that removed Rs. 500 billion in annual revenue with no offset. By April 2022, external debt hit $51 Billion and we defaulted for the first time. The party that cut taxes was not in power to manage the IMF program. The party that inherited it was blamed for the austerity. This is the cycle. Institutions captured. A democracy needs referees. We turned them into party cadres. The 17th Amendment 2001 created independent commissions. The 18th Amendment 2010 abolished them. The 19th 2015 restored them. The 20th 2020 gutted them again. Police transfers, university vice-chancellors, and state bank chairmen have all been decided by party headquarters, not merit.

When the institution serves the party, the citizen gets leftovers.

Identity over Ideas: From 1956 to 1983 to 2009 to 2022, our elections have been won on fear, not spreadsheets. “They will erase your language.” “They will sell the country.” “Only we can protect Buddhism/the minorities/the nation.”

Rational debate on debt, productivity, or climate adaptation never wins a rally. Prejudice does. That is demagoguery by definition.

Party Interest subverted the National Interest. The core damage of 78 years of partisan politics is this: the nation became secondary to the party. Need power sector reform? Impossible, because our unions will strike. Need to cut 300,000 ghost employees? Impossible, because our voters will defect. Need a 20-year education and export plan? Impossible, because it won’t show results before the next election. So, we borrowed. We patched. We lied. The result: a railway system that still runs on 1950s engines, hospitals without paracetamol in 2022, and a brain drain of 300,000+ skilled workers since the crisis. The parties rotated. The country declined.

The Opposition’s Original Sin and here, all parties share guilt equally. In opposition, the job is not to govern. It is to destroy. The UNP in the 60s called the SLFP “communist.” The SLFP in the 70s called the UNP “imperialist.” The JVP called both “traitors.” The SJB, SLPP, and NPP today use the same script with new logos. Every tax is “anti-people.” Every reform is “a sell-out.” Every crisis is proof the other side is evil and must be removed at any cost. Then they win. And implement 80% of what they opposed. Because demagoguery has no principles, only positions. 78 years of unmerciful, bad-faith criticism has not produced accountability. It has produced cynicism. The public now believes all politicians are the same — because for 78 years, they have behaved the same.

Breaking the Curse:

Changing the party in power will not end this. We must change the incentives that reward demagoguery. Three reforms are non-negotiable: Bind future Parliaments to national policy. Pass 10-year frameworks for energy, education, and public debt with 2/3 majority protection. Infrastructure and fiscal rules should outlast one government, as they do in Chile and New Zealand. Depoliticize the state. Independent commissions for police, elections, public service, and bribery must have constitutional budgets and appointment panels that exclude MPs. No more 18th/20th Amendment style rollbacks. Demand better from voters We must stop rewarding the best slogan and start demanding the best spreadsheet. Town halls over rallies. Costings over promises. A 5-year plan over a 5-minute speech.

In 1948, we did not inherit democracy. We inherited an election. For 78 years we have used that election to choose our favourite demagogue. The prize has been debt, division, and decay. The curse of partisan politics will only end when citizens and leaders agree on one principle: Party second. Country first. Until then, February 4th will remain a ceremony, not a celebration.

Features

Developing markets for fruits, vegetables and flowers in the Gulf

Published

22 hours ago

2026/09/4

Thilina Walpola

Image courtesy Export Development Board)

Export diversification – Missing the wood for the trees – Part II

by Gomi Senadhira

Sri Lanka established its diplomatic presence in the Gulf region only in the early 1980s. First, a small embassy was opened in Abu Dhabi, covering the UAE. Then in 1982, embassies were opened in Jeddah and Kuwait. The embassy in Jeddah covered Saudi Arabia while Kuwait was responsible for Kuwait, Oman, Qatar and Bahrain. Commercial Diplomats were also assigned to these two embassies. A senior private sector executive, with experience in marketing, was posted to Jedda as the commercial counsellor. I was posted to Kuwait as a second secretary (Commercial). Our instructions were very clear. Focus not only on traditional exports. Product diversification was a priority.

Developing Markets for Agricultural Products

At that time, Minister Lalith Athulathmudali had just launched his Export Production Villages (EPV) programme. He believed that the EPVs working closely with the exporters would provide an ideal opportunity for rural households to directly benefit from the government’s new open trade policy. Agricultural products, particularly fruits and vegetables, were a key component of this approach and the ministry thought that the Gulf countries, with large Sri Lankan communities, would have a ready-made market for these items. Thus, from day one we were compelled to explore the market for nontraditional exports; fruits and vegetables (F&Vs) were on the top of our priority list.

From cane baskets to cardboard boxes

Fortunately, the market for the F&Vs products in the region was at a very early stage of development. That provided an opportunity for Sri Lankan exporters, who were also inexperienced, to work with the importers and grow together. For example, in Kuwait, one of our first customers for F&Vs was a small supermarket where the manager was a Sri Lankan. After the first shipment arrived, he invited me to inspect the shipment. I visited the supermarket and was shocked by what I saw. While produce from other countries was packed nicely in cardboard boxes, our packaging mirrored transport to Manning market, cane baskets! As a result, fresh produce had suffered significant damage. A long report, with photographs, to the trade ministry produced an immediate response. After all, this was a pet project of the Minister. Within weeks, shipments were packed in cardboard boxes. Immediately afterwards, an expert on packaging from the Commonwealth Secretariat was sent to Kuwait with an official from the EDB to study the problem.

By then, we had also managed to develop a friendship with the management of the Salmiya supermarket, a large upmarket supermarket patronised by wealthy Kuwaitis and expats. It was a cooperative and the chairman was a Kuwaiti public servant. I could only meet him after 6 PM when his large office functioned as a diwaniya, a cherished cultural space in Kuwaiti society. Guests moved in and out the room. I had to spend time with them sipping many cups of tea. Though that meant at least two hours on each visit, it helped greatly to develop a close relationship. The general manager was an efficient and friendly Palestinian. After many visits we had succeeded in getting an order for F&Vs. The day after the first shipment arrived, I got an urgent call from the GM to come and inspect it. Once again, I was in for a surprise. Inside the cold room, the consignments from other countries were stacked neatly on top of each other, while vegetable boxes from Sri Lanka had collapsed once placed on top of each other, crushing the produce within.

Fortunately, our packaging experts arrived in Kuwait soon after this incident. They spent two days in the Salmiya Supermarket, studying the packaging from other origins. We were also successful in assuring the GM our packaging would improve. After that, packaging improved and exports moved smoothly. With that, Sri Lanka emerged as a small but reliable supplier to the mainstream market, not just the ethnic segment of the market.

Export of Fresh Vegetables by Sea

Towards the end of my tour, a Sri Lankan businessman requested me to find a buyer for cabbages, which he was prepared to export in large quantities by sea. I introduced him to the largest fruit and vegetable importer in Kuwait. Their regular suppliers of similar vegetables were Jordan, Lebanon and Syria. Luckily, the company was keen to diversify the supply sources. A few weeks later, the first container load of cabbages from Sri Lanka arrived in Kuwait. Immediately after the arrival of the container, I visited the company. They were pleased with the quality and the price and were looking forward to importing more fruits and vegetables. Unfortunately, that turned out to be a one-off event. Later on, when I was back in Sri Lanka, the exporter informed me that he couldn’t continue with it due to the problems with the local supply chains.

Floriculture

During the period I was asked by the EDB to explore the market for floricultural products, more particularly for cut flowers. At that time Kuwait was a relatively large importer of cut flowers and live plants. The main suppliers were the Netherlands and Colombia. Importers were also reluctant to move out of the established supply chain, particularly due to “snob value” associated with the product from Europe. However, after some difficulties, one importer agreed to place a pre-paid trial order. After the arrival of that shipment, he was impressed by the quality of the product and the orders expanded rapidly. As a result, by the end of 1985 Kuwait had become a major buyer of Sri Lanka’s floricultural products.

From village to global markets

As a result of the proactive promotional work undertaken by the EDB and the embassies in the region, by 1985, Sri Lanka had managed to acquire a small but significant share of the F&V and floriculture markets in the GCC countries. We had also identified domestic supply chain issues that hindered exports. All that was done, long before Southeast Asian or African countries even entered into that market. In fact, my Southeast Asian colleagues used to contact me often to reserve “durian” for them at the “Sri Lankan supermarket”.

Most importantly, a substantially large share of produce from Sri Lanka in Kuwaiti supermarkets originated in the EPVs. Of course, that didn’t just happen. The ministry (or the minister) using the carrot and stick approach “encouraged” exporters to buy the produce directly from the newly established EPVs. (The writer can be reached at senadhiragomi@gmail.com)