After their first view from afar of Adam’s Peak, the next marker that identified this country for passengers whether on P&O liners or cargo boats, was what would now be called a hoarding facing the Indian Ocean across the Colombo harbour: ‘Ceylon for Good Tea’. We learnt of that while yet in primary school: ‘Ceylon for goo-ty!’ chuckled Brother Frederick, Director at De Mazenod College, as he brought his thick rattan firmly down on some part of our body. What, oh! what, happened to those good old days?

The crop diversification project, as the FAO/World Bank saw it, working as they were in cahoots with the commercial interests relevant in this sphere, reflected also the phenomenon of ‘empire’ shifting tea production to more manageable countries yet under their overt control. In that they misjudged the effectiveness of the control, despite the odd ‘would-be’ hiccup, they yet exercised here, in good ole Ceylon. No more generous people anywhere.

As we seem to have come full circle and the old slogans of make-believe, nice lines for screwing the country, are being touted yet again on hoardings, national newspapers, TV, radio, let’s take ‘Sri Lanka first’. ‘London’ had left behind their surrogates, laughably calling themselves the United National Party. London controlled Trinco and Katunayake, was ready to do its R2P (‘right to protect’ its interests) at the drop of a Top Hat; all it would take was a telephone call or a cable. Even a whisper in the ear of somebody who was somebody in the Chamber of Commerce or, indeed in the Estate/Employers’ Federation, would have sufficed.

At first things went well, the system continued to function, it was business as usual. The (mostly British) planters continued as before; they even had a Brit as Government Agent in Newreliya and he knew his job - how to mind his business -through that long vacation he had chosen for himself. There were natives as S.D.s, P.D.s, assistants in Agency Houses, - and even as VAs. They knew what to do. Thank god, we had trained them.

That was quite unlike, say, in Indonesia, where, when the Dutch were rousted out by Sukarno, the highest ranking native on a plantation was a Conductor. Even I knew more, or so they felt, about that business than the Director-General of Plantations, who was, in his regular kit, a General in the army. He took me to Sumatra in the belief that I could give him some ‘tips’ on how the plantations should be run. The plantations ranged from some 5 to 16,000 hectares and had massive factories to match. (The largest here were Demodara and Pallakelle, around 1-3000 hectares). By the time the leaf was smacked onto the vats with ekel-brooms, it was like poonac without its uses. I mentioned such matters to him, said we’d be happy to help and suggested that he brings over a team to meet my Minister.

Recalling Borobodur, Bandung, Sukarno, Bhasa Indonesia, the Ramayanaya and so on, I viewed such a gesture as a route to building goodwill. The Dutch moved in fast: for them it meant a re-entry into a market they had controlled from leaf-tip to the bank. The DG however had other fish to fry; a number of properties that had been confiscated were to be returned to the previous owners, and transactions had to be finalised. Soon after he dropped me off at Medan airport, a plane-load of old plantation managers arrived from Amsterdam. They were among the survivors of something akin to ‘the Indian Mutiny’ (as the English represented it): in the run up to independence, plantations, including planters and plants, had been attacked.

Trauma

London had long lost its place as the centre of the tea trade, replaced by Rotterdam from where undifferentiated ‘black tea’ was despatched around the world, mostly to America. Much of that came from Indonesia and the Argentines as well as from Africa, and was good enough for iced and instant tea and for tea-bags. The Dutch had recovered hands-on control over the tea from Indonesia.

Though India was the biggest producer, her domestic demand was such that Ceylon remaineda the leading exporter of tea. It was even suggested that we import tea from India for our domestic needs – and in return India would be good enough to export tea from here to Europe, the proceeds, naturally, to be lodged in the State Bank of India. The idea was put about, more or less informally, by functionaries of the WB and the FAO. It is no secret that there were officials around Colvin who urged such a proceeding.

Over many years the FAO in particular had been developing ‘data’ relating to production, demand and prices for tea. Their reports were embellished with graphs that portrayed a demand curve moving downwards, a production curve moving in the other direction, and a price curve sweeping down in embarrassment. Voila! The remedy was obvious, a mere matter of scaling down tea production in Sri Lanka so that global production would match demand and prices stabilize. Q.E.D. Would prices move up? Are you kidding? The facts were that tea production globally had remained steady or declined, and demand had gone up, but, surprise! Prices had come down as predicted. Our officials had been trekking to Europe for annual reviews of ‘the problem’ and what to do about it. Nothing came of those consultations except a bit of R & R. The market remained in the hands of brokers and shippers, with banks doing their bit as well to shut out ‘rogue’ competitors.

That was the foundation for the push towards ‘crop diversification’. It was fortified by the ‘disinvestment’ or neglect most evident on estates run by/for ‘sterling companies’.

Matters were getting out of hand, old chap, the Aegean Stables had to be cleaned out, sort of once and for all. The planter-raj gave its ‘Yes, Sir!’ salute, was ready to come out all guns firing (as it had in 1915 when those yakkos gunned down unarmed Sinhalese villagers). The coup d’etat attempted in 1962 had a high level/degree of participants from Agency Houses; that most of them, and other such ‘activists’, ‘belonged’, also in the proprietary sense, to the Roman Catholic Church was, shall we say, a striking coincidence.

The project moved overseas, called on ‘the international community’ of the time, the UN agencies, to move in, make their presence felt. One such was the thrust for ‘crop diversification’. A Project was mounted in the late 1960s, Foreign Experts and all. It was handled by Gamini Iriyagolla till he moved out of the Ministry to the ARTI, and I took over his functions.

In the context of my remarks at an FAO conference in Canberra about the need for ‘primary producers’ to acquire control over shipping and banking for their products (a matter that had plagued Australia as well), this matter came up. I remarked that it did not make sense for anybody to ‘diversify’ from a commodity that was said to be ‘in crisis’ into another whose prospects may well be worse. I ‘declared’ – in conference-speak - that the FAO should be mindful of that.

The FAO panjandrum for Asia & the Far East on the podium gave an oily smirk and said: ‘There is an expert in Commodity Pricing right now in Colombo. The distinguished delegate from Ceylon would not know of that." (He had assumed that I had been lately brought in by the new ‘revolutionary’ government). I waved my flag to no effect: I was not recognised by the Chairman, Doug Anthony, who was the Aussie Deputy P.M. and, as Minister for Primary Industry, would, in his mind, have been endorsing my remarks. He concluded the session by saying that he had to attend a Cabinet meeting and called on me to chair the next session. It was a moot point at the time whether I could insert my response to what had been said ‘by the FAO’. On the advice of a senior colleague, Chandra de Fonseka, then with the FAO, (‘They want to silence you, but up there you control the buttons’), I chose to do so.

I said that I was aware of the presence of the Expert on Commodities, (I had met him and he wasn’t all that hot), and that the FAO had despatched him only because we had refused to accept any other Experts of theirs till the commodity man was sent. That silenced the Man from Bangkok.

In the meantime, Victor Santhiapillai came down from Geneva to assist with price projections for tea and for other products we might take up. Abey de Vaas Gunawardena, who had worked in that field at the Commonwealth Secretariat, did much ground work on the related aspect of ‘diversification’: secondary and tertiary forms of processing.

The project was given the go-ahead for an initial range of investigations. How did it work on the ground? Not well. And that for a variety of reasons: insufficient knowledge about traditional crops that were new to them in the government agencies that were required to provide guidance in diversifying land use on a commercial scale, the unwillingness of planters to look beyond tea, subterranean projects for the continued employment of estate labour at the expense of villagers who were familiar with the new crops proposed, - a tangle of objectives that did not mesh.

The ‘tea-districts’ that ‘cried out’ for diversification were in the mid-country, - areas where British planters had learnt the first principles of agriculture ‘on the job’. The land was ruined, so badly eroded that virtually nothing would grow in them except grasses and scrub that were of no use to man or beast.

Mulberry

A plant that could be established on such land was mulberry, the feed of silk-worm. Sericulture had proved to be a viable industry in the country in the 1930s, mostly in the dry zone where the low-producing multi-voltine species had flourished. Through experts from Bangalore and Kashmir, we accessed the technology required for raising worms that yielded as much silk as a bi-voltine and could be ‘cropped’ several times a year. Where was the project to be located? By all that had gone before in argumentation about ‘diversification’, it should have been in the Gampola district. For one of the reasons mentioned above, Doric wanted it in Pallakelle. He moved further along such lines, pursuing personal agendas; though they would be of more than peripheral import here, such is not the object of this survey.

On the company estates, the problem lay with the unwillingness of plantation managers to try out other crops. After the opening ceremony for the Hunas Falls hotel, Dusty Miller (Chairman of Colombo Commercials) drove me and Kenneth Ratwatte (Managing Director of CCC) to a lemon grass still. He came out with the rhetorical question: ‘Do you know how long it took me to get these people to do this? Twelve years!"