Editorial

The brief but meaningful high-profile visits by the French President and the Japanese Foreign Minister over the last weekend brought home the importance of Sri Lanka as a geographically significant location. And it has been well said that this very location can be both a blessing and a misfortune. It all depends on how well it is handled.

With Sri Lanka’s domestic wellbeing well and truly intertwined with the outside world, there is a crying need to redouble its focus and therefore upgrade its expertise in meeting these modern-day challenges.

Greater skills are clearly required in the fine art of international trade negotiations, and the need for a proper institutional framework. For instance, has the country really benefited to the maximum from the EU’s GSP Plus facility? When Viet Nam and the Philippines got the same facility, they moved on towards Free Trade Agreement (FTA) negotiations with the EU. They succeeded by first sending their mid-level officials for training to the EU and followed up with their civil servants and diplomats, backed by astute political leadership. Sri Lanka remained content with the facility and then fought to get it back when it was lost.

During recent negotiations with the IMF, the Government was forced to hire foreign law and finance firms to handle the country’s brief. All the doctorates at the Central Bank were found wanting to take up the case. Lankan economists abroad had to be inducted as advisors. Was it a lack of capacity building at home, a lack of recognition of those at home, or the brain drain? Many researchers at home are often given private assignments by foreign agencies only to get suckered into the lure of the almighty dollar — and euro salaries abroad.

Apart from the vital debt restructuring process and several FTAs on the table, there are a host of international instruments up for negotiation in which Sri Lanka needs to play its role. Very soon, it will chair the IORA (Indian Ocean Rim Association) Council of Ministers. How will it help participating nations? Already, it is in BIMSTEC, the Bay of Bengal initiative of seven countries for technical and economic cooperation, and now the President has asked for inclusion in the Japan-led Bay of Bengal partnership with India and Bangladesh. SAARC seems to have passed its shelf life, and we are tapping on the ASEAN door. There’s the Japan-led FOIP (Free and Open Indo-Pacific Plan), the request to join the RCEP (Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership), and the invitation last week to be an Observer at the French-led Indian Ocean Commission.

All this, with China’s Belt and Road Initiative, means a huge workload and financial resources that need to get pumped into the foreign policy system. Is the institutional reporting mechanism between Colombo and the key channels in world capitals in readiness? After all, the debt restructuring process that is paramount, must run parallel with foreign project financing to save time.

In the process, will the country get shortchanged by weak negotiating skills? The Commerce Department is a neglected lot. A solitary international trade negotiator without the necessary backup in human resources functions out of the President’s Office for now, but he needs assurances his work is devoid of political involvement.

It requires the support of all political parties to give foreign governments and investors the necessary confidence in engaging in meaningful discussions with the country in the long term. The derailing of the Japanese Light Rail project was a textbook case of disaster. A foreign think tank providing strategic analysis for Asia this week announced a study of theirs that showed Sri Lanka’s low performance in implementing trade facilitation measures and its dependency on external assistance.

The think tank established by visionary Foreign Minister Lakshman Kadirgamar (his 18th death anniversary falls next week), now bearing his name, to feed the Government with insights into international relations, global economics and strategic studies, has not lived up to the standards expected from it, so far. How much of its research has been distilled and made productive for the higher echelons of policymakers remains a question. University dons, often in cocoons, have not been fully utilised in local think tanks either.

The President must surely be experiencing these twin needs of an experts’ collegiate and funds. While giving robust leadership to Sri Lanka’s foreign policy attachment to its domestic economic goals – he goes to Singapore later this month, the UN next month, and China in October – he will desperately require the backup of a new breed of technocrats, with senior hands, even those retired, to support him in bringing the country up to speed with the modern world. He will need to find the funds as well. As one public servant engaged in this area lamented; “it’s difficult to make gold out of rock.”

Sri Lanka was the first off the block in South Asia and some countries in East Asia in 1977 with an open economy; today it is playing catch-up to a host of other late bloomers.

Animal cruelty in Animal Welfare Bill

Local activists, having reached the end of their tether lobbying at home for a proper new law to the outdated Cruelty to Animals Act, have begun reaching out to activists abroad.

This new strategy should not be easily ignored by the Government. The recent case of ‘Muthu Raja’, the majestic tusker that had to be sent back to Thailand when local activists brought worldwide attention to the plight of the animal, caused irreparable damage to the country’s image.

A country, already under the hammer for allegations of human rights violations, can do without an added blemish in the way it treats animals. The activists say the proposed law is a pro-butcher, anti-animal law. Ms. Gandhi who was sent a copy of the draft law appeals to the President pointing out that there is no point in a law that protects only cats and dogs when most of the violence against animals takes place on farm animals and at slaughterhouses.

Successive Governments have struggled to enact this new law. This Government will have to brace itself for another backlash from an influential global animal rights lobby for introducing a law in the name of animal welfare, which in reality is the very antithesis of it. It is time it was sent back to the drawing board. Alas, to further delays.