Wishful thinking and thoughtful wishing

By Usvatte-aratchi

Wishing is swishing around so much that I thought that I might switch my thoughts to wishing. (‘From the troubles of the world I turn to ducks …’). The result might be some thoughtful wishing, which when looking back does not look completely as useless as wishful thinking. But wishing itself is literally a waste of breadth. I once worked in an office building which contained more than 1,000 workers. After festive days, most who returned to work wished the door keepers and the liftmen (floor directors) ‘a happy and prosperous new year’. I had seen those men doing that job for a long time. Those wishes simply floated in the air. Anyone wishing that you attain nibbana or wishing in a full-page advertisement that X, who was dead, attain nibbana is both wasting his breath and the newspaper page. A dead man is a cadaver. There is no way that a dead person can attain nibbana, any more than we could wish that person back. And I stopped wishing anyone anything. It made no difference except that I saved my breadth and the victims theirs. It was sometimes embarrassing to withhold wishing.

But wishful thinking is fraught with danger to oneself and the victims of such thoughts. If you want an example now painfully familiar to all of you, take the wishful thinking to free this land and its people of chemicals in agriculture. What could have been be more benign? Rightly, that wish went all the way to the United Nations in 2021. Whoever conceived the idea, it was stillborn; it was wishful thinking. In contrast, I recall a declaration, made a few years back, before the General Assembly by Narendra Modi, Prime Minister of India, that he had built 112 million lavatories in India in the previous 12 months. It was a thoughtful wish, which had borne fruit. The first was an embarrassment and the second a declaration of victory. When you have wishful thoughts preserve them to yourself; they are yours. When you have thoughtful wishes, tell ‘the whole wide world’, as our children used to say when they were small.

Agricultural output and science and technology

In 1870, the population of the world was roughly one billion and in 2001 a little more than six billion and now it is above seven billion. Those rising numbers were fed at increasingly higher levels of nutrition out of agricultural production on this same earth. Mars was yet a land too far to plough. Some relatively small additions were made to total arable land when some lands were cleared and when massive irrigation schemes made parched lands arable again. At the same time the world lost some arable land because deserts spread and as cities grew and roads and houses took over land otherwise available for agriculture.

That miracle took place because of the application of science to productive activities including agriculture. Repeated crops on the same land depleted it of plant nutrients. Consequently, farmers left a third of their field fallow (puran) and the application of fertiliser brought back that third into the arable stock. With time, non- animal energy came to be applied to ploughing, planting, harvesting, threshing and milling. Mechanical ploughs, ploughed deeper and faster. With advances in chemistry, synthetic fertilisers and knowledge in ways in which plants reacted to their application came to be known. The study of plants enabled scientists to design plants for the absorption of fertiliser and for the period of growth and maturity of plants. Consequently, each year three or more crops came to be cultivated in place of one or two, there was economy in the use of water and smaller losses in harvesting and later in storage. Chemical fertiliser encouraged the more furious growth of weeds and fungi and chemical herbicides and fungicides were brought in to control that growth. Changes in storage facilities with the introduction of air-conditioning enabled longer term storage of harvests. Steel hulled ships with internal combustion engines and refrigeration facilities opened large markets across oceans. US soybeans came to be sold in China, Argentine beef in Europe and Kenyan fresh flowers in Chelsea markets.

More recently, ‘the green revolution’ in many countries including our island raised the output of cereals and of tea, rubber and coconuts. The graph below, that I copied from a recent publication shows the picture in England. (See graph)

Agricultural production was almost stagnant for 200 hundred year 1600-1800. By 2000, another 200 years later, milk production had increased 60-fold, meat production 40-fold and crops production more than 20-fold. The picture is even more dramatic in the US, where the West was settled in the second half of the 19th and mechanization was even faster than in England. The ‘green of revolution’ came to most of the rest of the Americas and Asia and parts of Africa in the second half of the 20th century. The increasingly richer diet in so short a time in China is a remarkable achievement. In all this long history over much of the globe, we had not come across the apocalypse that some enthusiasts here predicted.

None of this denies the unfavourable consequences of most of these changes. However, that hunger, malnutrition and famines that haunted animals, including humans, well into the 20th century have been eliminated is a gift, that I do not want to look in the mouth. Famines now are a consequence of either war (as in Sudan, Ethiopia, Yemen or Afghanistan) or the unintended consequences of policy debacles as in China in early 1960s and is not unlikely in Sri Lanka now.

This account refined and better filled in could have been prepared by any 2nd year undergraduate and presented to policy makers for information before they plunged in to prohibit the use of fertiliser and chemicals in agriculture. Anyone willing to swim against this long strong current would have needed intellectual muscle of extraordinary strength. If that strength met the likely force of what may follow, we may not have been us all into the probable forthcoming debacle.

Truth to power

The Leader of the Opposition is going around the country beguiling the public with his own wishful thinking. He offers his listeners benefits (sahana) if and when he will be elected to office. Baloney! An economist in his party tells the truth. No matter who governs, thanks to former governments, we must suffer austerity. The Governor of the Central Bank is plain wrong to say that we are in a cash management problem. That is wishful thinking. We are in an economic crisis. I will give a grossly simple explanation of the crisis.

Piyasiri earned LKR. 200,000 monthly. One evening, at a drink at home, his friend Bongovamsa gave him an idea, too good to refuse. Bongo made arrangements for Piyasiri to borrow LKR. five million to put up two rooms next to his house to accommodate foreign tourists, at very modest prices. Piyasiri could use 10 % of the money for his personal use. Bongo himself built the structure at a substantial profit. Months passed but no tourists came. After a few months Piyasiri found himself in a financial bind. His bank manager advised him that that was not a cash management problem which will pass. Piyasiri had no more savings that he could use to service the debt. There were no buyers for his property in a deserted area. He was short of funds to buy food for the family and to send their children to school. Bongo made another offer too good to refuse; he would buy that property from Piyaisiri for one-third the value of the loan. In other words, the value of bonds issued by Piyasiri to raise LKR five million fell by tw-thirds. Piyasiri found an answer to his cash flow problem. The property was sold to Bongovamsa. Piyasiri’s obligation to pay back the loan rested with him. PIyasiri’s economic problems pressed relentlessly. Bongovamsa dismantled all the hardware in the two rooms and made a neat profit of 47 percent on the transaction. He bought a tablet for Piyasiri’s daughter.

And that is where our country is. There was a foolish choice of projects, financed on harsh terms. With no income from those projects, we cannot service the debt we incurred.

Like Piyasiri in the story, we have no choice but to suffer austerity, no matter who imposes it: our present government or an alternative administration with or without IMF support. All that the IMF can do for us now is to slightly reduce the pain of austerity, make the process more sensible and perhaps be the fall guy. Pretending that we have only a cash flow problem is to mislead gullible politicians and even the intelligent public. There is an economist in the Opposition who understands it, and who week after week, tells the public the truth. Give him voice and listen to him. The Opposition in Parliament can save itself from making a fool of itself, if they tell the public that there will be pain in their solution. Any and all attempts to pay back debt, out of income that has not increased, must require that we pay out of present income which is to say suffer austerity. They had better avoid being burnt in effigy. They might choose more fitting rehearsal funerals.