Poverty, pledges and dangers

* Monday 27th July, 2020

Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapaksa has undertaken to rid the Colombo city of slums and shanties by implementing housing projects for the low-income groups. We have heard this promise before. The late President Ranasinghe Premadasa was the first to pledge to do so. He, in fact, made a serious effort to help the urban poor, but more than one half of the people in Colombo are said to be living in slums and shanties. Successive governments have adopted densification by way of a solution, built some multi-storey apartment complexes and moved some of the poor there, ignoring the fact that slum and shanty dwellers come in ceaseless waves.

Some governments have, in their wisdom, resettled sections of the urban poor in suburbs to develop shanty areas in Colombo, and these new settlements have become hotbeds of violence and drugs. The Badowita and Werahera wattes serve as examples.

The most effective way to solve the problem of slums and shanties is to reduce urban poverty while new housing projects are implemented for the poor and the factors that cause the migration of the rural poor to peri-urban areas and/or cities eliminated. A multi-pronged strategy is called for. Otherwise, efforts to prevent the expansion of the poor quarters of the city and tackle the problems associated with the urban sprawl are bound to fail.

Meanwhile, the problem of slums and shanties in urban and semi-urban areas will take a turn for the worse if plans currently under to pave the way for the acquisition of land by multinational corporations reach fruition. When neo-colonial forces cause dispossession among rural communities in the developing world in the name of economic development on various pretexts to further their geo-strategic goals, the rural poor, especially farmers, who lose their lands and livelihoods are left with no alternative but to migrate to cities. This kind of unplanned urbanisation gives rise to the proliferation of slums and shanties. This is why moves being made to privatise the state-owned land and facilitate the sale of rural land to western multinational corporations through various compacts have to be defeated.

The SLPP, which is seeking a popular mandate to retain state power and amend the Constitution ought to reveal its position on the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC) compact. Its leaders are blowing hot and cold on it.

The US-based Oakland Institute has, in its recent report titled, Driving Dispossession: The Global Push to ‘unlock the Economic Potential of Land’, warned that MCC could potentially shift millions of hectares of land into private control. It has pointed out that the US is ‘a key player in an unfettered offensive to privatise land around the world via US blockchain corporation, government agencies and the World Bank’.

In Sri Lanka, the MCC, a US government entity, is targeting state land—it intends to map and record up to 67 percent of the country to “promote land transactions that could stimulate investment and increase its use as an economic asset,” says the Oakland Institute, which has conducted case studies in Sri Lanka, Brazil, Ukraine, Zambia, Papua New Guinea and Myanmar.

It is against this backdrop that the on-going project to digitise land records, in this country, should be viewed. The agriculture sector has been neglected, and farmers find it difficult to recover even production costs. When the project aimed at the commodification of land reaches completion, these cultivators in dire financial straits can be enticed into selling their lands for a song so that multinational corporations can acquire them through their fronts. There is the danger of such dispossessed people becoming destitute and migrating to urban centres for want of a better alternative.

Let the political leaders who promise deliverance to the urban poor be urged to desist from being party to the ongoing efforts to dispossess the rural people in the name of ‘unlocking the economic potential of land’.