LINDSEY COLLEN,
LALIT
Dear Sir,
In LALIT, we have, for decades, been warning of the dangers – existential ones, as it now turns out – of an economy that does not ensure food sovereignty. At the very beginning of the first lockdown as the Coronavirus swept through the world, you will remember that we, together with trade unions called on you to find fiscal or other ways to force capital into the production of food – in particular agricultural and fishing produce, together with the whole infrastructure necessary to preserve and transform the produce, so as to ensure food security. If properly thought out, this simultaneously assures job creation and foreign exchange. LALIT has called for years for the private sector to be made to seize the opportunity to divest out of “white elephants” like cane-and-sugar and real-estate wind-fall gains for big land-owners, as well as out of the fragile sector that tourism is – dependent on many external factors and even on the whims of a few Embassies’ websites – and also join a world movement to end the sector that masks illegal and immoral money, i.e. “off-shore”, by whatever name it is called.
Instead of forcing capital out of these sectors, the Government – via the MIC — has subsidized them to the hilt to remain in them.
And now with the double effect of the war in Ukraine and the sanctions on Russia, before the pandemic is over, the entire world’s food infra-structure is under threat as the UN Secretary General has made clear. Mauritius must be amongst the least food secure nations in the world. We have lost years.
The Government it must be said has made many speeches on the need for food security. And the Government has now, at Wooton, begun to set up a “hub” for food preservation and processing.
But why is the Mauritian State so afraid of forcing the sugar estates to allocate a proportion of their land – which is the peoples’ only land – to food production? What is so sacred about cane that it is a taboo for Government to do anything except subsidize it? Even as it becomes less and less viable? And if not cane hogging all the good arable land, then why is it only IRS-type gated communities that the land-owners spawn, a kind of development that is like cancer-cells in a body politic – both useless and harmful? And then, as it were, permanently, severed from the rest of Mauritius, and sold off to the highest bidder? As if this will not risk becoming a new kind of colonization?
So, the budget must address this problem by:
1. Calling for one-third of all big sugar estates’ land to be allocated urgently for food crops. This could be done by converting for “inter-line cropping of food products” the totality of their land, over the next, say 5 years. A massive campaign for public support for this will be necessary.
2. Call for “Wooton-like” investments by each of the four or five big land-owning conglomerates, Terra, ENL, Omnicane, CIEL and Medine; to go with this, it will be necessary for the Government to ensure research and development for local seed production, for bio and GMO-free produce, for milk-production, for transportation and storage, and for marketing locally and in the region, in particular, and for niche markets further afield.
3. Putting an immediate halt to all conversion of arable land to the international real estate market, and begin to reverse this process.
4. The Government immediately order two fishing vessels that can be the first in the creation of a fleet that both fishes all our EEZ waters in a sustainable way, and at the same time, polices them. This will mean phasing out the permits to other vessels from abroad.
In the near future, we may, in any case, as well as suffering the economic fall-out from the pandemic and the war-and-sanctions, also suffer even worse fall-out: nuclear war and its fall-out, or, climate change so serious as to go past all manner of tipping points, including species collapse. Mauritius being a State of many Islands and a great deal of sea can, if it starts now with the 2022-23 Budget, cushion some of the impending disaster.
*To the Minister of Finance through Financial Secretary
