JVP, Dudley factor and rice issue

Tuesday 25th March, 2025

The JVP/NPP government is still upbeat about the passage of its maiden budget with an unprecedented majority of 159 votes. That was no mean achievement, but everybody knew that the ayes would have it. Euphoria invariably gives way to the sobering reality in politics. A serious problem is already looming on the horizon.

The harvesting of Maha season paddy is drawing to a close. It was forecast that the country would be able to produce about 2.9 million MT of paddy during the 2024/2025 Maha season, but the harvest has dropped to about 2.4 million MT, according to Minister of Trade Wasantha Samarasinghe, who told Parliament the other day that the government would not hesitate to import rice, if necessary.

The sharp drop in the Maha paddy harvest is mainly due to floods in rice-growing areas. The government pledged that the Paddy Marketing Board would purchase about 300,000 MT of paddy to build a buffer stock to make market interventions, if necessary, but it could buy only 60 MT of paddy, according to media reports. Paddy farmers’ associations and agricultural experts are warning that rice prices are likely to increase further during the upcoming festive season, and the country will experience a rice shortage towards August 2025. When the government failed to make large-scale millers release adequate rice stocks to the market, last year, it opted for imports, but its leaders thundered in Parliament that they would never import rice again after the 2024/2025 Maha paddy harvest!

Rice, which is also a cultural staple in this part of the world, plays a significant role in Sri Lankan politics, as is public knowledge. The possibility of a rice shortage must therefore be a disconcerting proposition for the JVP/NPP government, with about six weeks to go before the local government elections. All signs are that the much-delayed Provincial Council elections, too, will have to be held either towards the end of this year or in early 2026. The government will have to ensure that rice is freely available at affordable prices.

Having come into being in the mid-1960s, the JVP rose to national prominence circa 1970 by taking on Dudley Senanayake’s government, which it condemned as a US puppet. Claiming that the CIA was planning to keep that administration in power regardless of the outcome of the general election to be held in 1970, the JVP closed ranks with the SLFP-led United Front led by Sirimavo Bandaranaike and urged the public to give that alliance a supermajority to defeat what it called a CIA conspiracy. The UF won a two-thirds majority. One of the main reasons for the fall of that UNP government was a reduction in the rice subsidy. (The following year, the JVP took up arms against the UF government!)

Five and a half decades on, the JVP is in power with a two-thirds majority in Parliament. It is now eating out of Uncle Sam’s hand! Dudley Senanayake is long dead, but the JVP has another Dudley to contend with, and rice has become an election issue again.

Several farmers’ associations which threw their weight behind the JVP/NPP, helping make last year’s regime change possible, are now on the warpath. They are of the view that the government, in spite of its rhetoric, will continue to be at the mercy of the rice millers’ cartel led by Dudley Sirisena, who, they say, is running a kind of parallel government together with other powerful millers capable of making political leaders bend to their will.

Unlike in 1970, when the JVP went all out to defeat Dudley of Mirigama to help install a government led by the SLFP, today, it has had to tame Dudley of Polonnaruwa for its own sake; it has its work cut out, for the rice Mafia has prevailed over successive governments and humbled even those who take pride in having defeated the LTTE.