Saturday 4th January, 2025

The government has announced new restrictions on marketing food and beverages for children under the Food (Labelling & Advertising) Regulations 2022. A long-felt need has been fulfilled, but much more remains to be done, given the increasing incidence of obesity, diabetes, etc., among children. Food and beverage manufacturers stand accused of using excessive levels of sugar, salt, oil and food additives to catch them young.

The Ceylon Chamber of Commerce (CCC), has welcomed the new restrictions at issue. Its positive response can be considered the food and beverage industry’s willing compliance. Having helped the Ministry of Health during the consultation process, the CCC is of the view that under the new rules the industry must ensure that children under 12 are not featured in advertisements for food and beverage products and that such products are not advertised or promoted for children below 12 years without prior approval from the Ministry of Health. It says the updated food labelling requirements will empower consumers with essential information, including nutritional values and detailed ingredient lists to make informed food choices.

It is one thing to introduce regulations to protect the public but it is quite another to ensure their enforcement. This country is not short of rules and regulations aimed at preventing unethical and illegal practices the food and beverage industry has earned notoriety for, but the regulatory authorities act in such a way that one wonders whether they are concerned about consumer safety at all. Consumers of all ages are at risk. A young woman was rushed to hospital recently after ingesting a detergent she was mistakenly served instead of a bottled soft drink at a restaurant in Pettah. A police investigation revealed that the restaurant staff had used soft drink bottles to store the surfactant!

The health authorities should go beyond adopting measures such as mandatory labelling and restrictions on advertising to ensure consumer safety. The food and beverage industry must not be allowed to use labelling as a caveat emptor to market products that are harmful to consumers’ health. Action must be taken to remove such products from the market to protect unsuspecting consumers who often overlook the fine print on food and beverage labels.

It is not prudent to expect all food and beverage manufacturers to be truthful in respect of what is mentioned in the labels on their products. Hence the need for random testing besides stringent laws to deal with those who provide misleading or false information to consumers.

There are many products sans labels for sale and how do the health authorities propose to ensure that they conform to the food and beverage safety regulations? Fast food outlets are apparently without any regulation across the country. There is nobody to check the levels of oil and additives in food items they sell, especially fried rice and koththu roti.

A successful campaign to ensure that food and beverages conform to stipulated standards will go a long way towards preventing noncommunicable diseases this country is plagued by and reducing state health expenditure.

Friday 3rd January, 2025

A Washington Post report that in January 2024, India’s premier intelligence agency, the Research and Analysis Wing (RAW), began discreet discussions with some Maldivian Opposition politicians to explore the possibility of impeaching President Mohamed Muizzu has created quite a stir in diplomatic and political circles. Citing a document titled ‘Democratic Renewal Initiative’, The Washington Post has claimed that the Maldivian Opposition wanted to bribe 40 MPs including some members of Muizzu’s own party, and 10 senior army and police officers. It has said the plotters failed to gather enough votes to impeach Muizzu, and India did not pursue or finance the bid to oust him. The Maldivian Opposition has denied The Washington Post report, and the reaction of the Indian government was not known at the time of writing.

It has also been alleged that the ruling party in the Maldives engineered defections from the Opposition to thwart the impeachment bid.

Whether The Washington Post report is accurate one may not know, but it has shed light on the vulnerability of smaller states caught up in Great Power rivalry and facing a strategic dilemma. It has also reminded us of a similar allegation former President Mahinda Rajapaksa made following his defeat in the 2015 presidential race. In March 2015, he told The Hindu, that the RAW had conspired with the CIA and MI-6 to rally the Opposition under Maithripala Sirisena’s leadership against his presidency.

Anura Kumara Dissanayake, as an Opposition MP, told Parliament in October 2015 that Jaffna had become ‘a den of RAW spies’ on a mission to destabilise the North. He declared that foreign interference in domestic affairs was detrimental to Sri Lanka’s national interest.

The alleged attempt to bribe the Maldivian MPs including the ruling party members and countermoves evoke one’s memories of a foreign-backed move to bring down a Sri Lankan government by bribing MPs about 17 years ago.

In 2007, following an abortive attempt by the then Opposition to defeat Budget 2008 presented by the Mahinda Rajapaksa government at the height of the Eelam War IV, Dullas Alahapperuma, who was a minister at the time, disclosed at a media briefing that some MPs of the ruling UPFA had been bribed to vote against the budget, as part of a conspiracy to topple the government and derail the war; they had been found in five-star hotels with foreign prostitutes, Alahapperuma said, claiming that the government had fought quite a battle to prevent them from doing what they had taken bribes for. The Rajapaksa government managed to win the budget vote. Alahapperuma stopped short of revealing how that task had been accomplished, but there is reason to believe that the Rajapaksas outbribed their opponents.

Interestingly, on the eve of the 2007 budget vote, an influential western diplomat went in a tuk-tuk, under the cover of night, to a UNP MP’s house in Battaramulla, where a discussion was held on how to defeat the budget. This newspaper reported on his abortive nocturnal mission.

On 21 March 2024, the then Speaker Mahinda Yapa Abeywardena revealed in Parliament that he had been pressured by some foreign powers to take over the executive presidency in violation of the Constitution, at the height of Aragalaya, following President Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s resignation, in 2022. Their intention had been to create, in this country, a situation similar to that in Libya or Afghanistan, Abeywardena said, disclosing that they had gone to the extent of intimidating him when he refused to do their bidding. Some religious leaders were also among those who had exerted pressure on him to take over the presidency, he said. That damning revelation should have prompted the SLPP government to order a high-level probe.

The JVP-led NPP government has chosen to ignore Abeywardena’s aforesaid statement in Parliament. The Opposition, which makes a song and dance about even trivial matters, has also remained silent on this serious issue.

Let the self-proclaimed patriots in the government and the Opposition be urged to have Abeywardena’s claim investigated. As the Executive President, Dissanayake is now in a position to order a thorough probe into the alleged foreign interference in Sri Lanka’s internal affairs during Aragalaya.

Wednesday 1st January, 2025

The Supreme Court (SC) has delivered its much-awaited verdict in a fundamental rights case pertaining to the leak of three questions in the first paper of the 2024 Grade Five Scholarship Examination (GFSE); the award of free marks has led to a violation of fundamental rights, the apex court has ruled, ordering that a solution be adopted in keeping with the recommendations of an expert committee appointed to study the issue, which triggered a public outcry. The SC decision is most welcome, and one can only hope that it will be carried out expeditiously. The education authorities must not be allowed to find simple solutions to serious problems which come about due to their lapses.

Question paper leaks adversely impact the integrity of the examinations held by the Department of Examinations (DoE), as is obvious, and therefore everything possible must be done to prevent them and ensure that deterrent punishment is meted out to the perpetrators of examination rackets. We suggest that new laws be introduced to impose severe forms of punishment like long jail terms and heavy g fines for such offences.

Besides, in this day and age, technology plays a central role in our lives, and the DoE must be equipped to meet emerging challenges effectively. The Government Printing Department and the Police came under cyberattacks yesterday. This points to the growing vulnerability of key state institutions. The National Medicines Regulatory Authority suffered a massive data loss due to a cybercrime.

The phenomenal growth of the shadow education sector, which is full of unscrupulous wealthy private tutors who are ready to do anything to achieve the goal of ‘producing best results’ has rendered the DoE even more vulnerable. Hence the pressing need for it to adopt extraordinary measures to ensure the integrity of the competitive examinations it conducts. It should be provided with all required resources to protect itself. However, the examination question leaks at issue should not be allowed to eclipse the bigger picture in respect of the GFSE—the existence of popular and not-so-popular state-run schools and the painful struggle of the underprivileged students to gain admission to privileged schools.

An absurd solution to this problem has been suggested in some quarters—the scrapping of the GFSE! Such a course of action will deprive the underprivileged students of the only opportunity available for them to achieve their dream of entering popular schools. The ultimate solution, in our book, is to develop the underprivileged schools by eliminating the glaring urban bias in state expenditure on education so that poor children will not have to jump through the hoops to receive a good education, which opens opportunities in life.

This may be considered easier said than done, but it is a task that the JVP-led NPP government must strive to accomplish in keeping with its pledge to ensure equal opportunities to the people. After all, the JVP coined the pithy slogan, ‘kolombata kiri, gamata kekiri’ (‘milk for Colombo and melon/cucumber for the village’). That slogan, inter alia, enabled the JVP to mobilise the rural youth in their thousands for its second abortive uprising in the late 1980s.

Now that the JVP has gained state power with a mammoth majority in Parliament, it has to undertake the task of developing the underprivileged schools and provide the much-needed leg-up to the ordinary children.

Moreover, Prime Minister Dr. Harini Amarasuriya, who is also the Minister of Education, has been an ardent advocate for increasing state expenditure on education. She was among the university dons who courageously took part in a long protest march organised by the FUTA (Federation of University Teachers’ Associations) in 2012, demanding that the state allocate 6% of GDP for education.

It is now up to the NPP bigwigs to translate their rhetoric into action and sort out the kiri-kekiri issue once and for all for the sake of underprivileged children. Let no excuses be trotted out.