Land and poverty 

The Presidential Task Force on Economic Revival and Poverty Eradication recently announced plans to use unutilised and underutilised State-owned lands for cultivation of crops and livestock management to boost the incomes of one million families. 

The Task Force is headed by Basil Rajapaksa. While poverty alleviation is always a laudable aim, there are also legal and other concerns regarding utilisation of land, especially when it is done in an opaque manner and close to elections. 

Land is a subject that is devolved to the provinces and its use has to be beneficial on multiple fronts, including community and environment, to justify parcelling out. Beyond the serious political ramifications of such a step, there is also concern of where people can turn to if they disagree with the top-down measures promoted by the Task Force. 

The one million families, apparently already selected, should be linked to the Samurdhi program, though there was no specific mention of this in the short statement and raises the question of why they will be given access to the land when there are many other landless people vying for land in Sri Lanka. Currently there are two million Samurdhi families.  

Also this raises the second thorny issue of ownership. Will the families own the land, and if so under what regulations since there are strict regulations governing paddy and arable lands? If the State-lands are underutilised for environmental reasons, then what will be the impact? And also will there is demographic changes as seen after the conflict where families will be entrenched and sent to completely different provinces where they were given land, which caused community tensions? In addition, if these families are given outright ownership of land and they chose to sell it, then is that essentially not privatisation of State lands?

This is not to say that privatisation of State land is in and by itself bad, but that it needs to be done in a transparent manner that makes sense to the individual, the community and the economy. 

The sheer ad hoc and non-transparent nature of land allocation raises questions on how effective these poverty alleviation measures will be. Despite the attention showed by successive Governments to reduce poverty in Sri Lanka, there are serious spatial challenges that have been left unaddressed. Sri Lanka’s poverty alleviation measures have also been fragmented for decades and there is little coordination between the different militaries, departments and now Task Forces that are at the helm of these decisions. 

At a time when COVID-19 impact is expected to raise unemployment to as much as 8% of the population there is a dire need to have more organised, consistent and transparent measures in place for the poor that are better targeted and flexible. The one million poor families identified by the Task Force should ideally be already part of the Samurdhi program and there should be a clear path so that these families genuinely rise above the poverty line and become socially upwardly mobile. 

Unfortunately it is questionable whether the Task Force target of raising family incomes to Rs. 25,000 per month will achieve this. If each family has four members, then their daily income will still only little over Rs. 200, which is well below the international poverty line of $2 per day. If the Government is serious about poverty eradication, it should stop playing political football with the poor.