A History of Underdevelopment and Political Economy of Inflation in Sri Lanka by Dhanusha Gihan Pathirana & Chandana Aluthge

Author:Dhanusha Gihan Pathirana & Chandana Aluthge
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9789811556647
Publisher: Springer Singapore

3.6 Domination of Sharecropping over Capitalist Development of Agriculture

‘In the nonsettler colonies while the commercialisation of the village economy [through expansion of plantations] led to a concentration of land ownership, and there has been a growing social differentiation of the peasantry brought about by debt, usury and mortgage, the dispossessed peasants became, in the absence of development of capitalist agriculture, entrenched as sharecroppers on the land which they previously owned. The risk element in the investment of fixed capital in the types of grain cultivation which predominated in the peasant sector, being far too great for merchant and usurer capital to undertake, inhibited the transformation of merchant and usurer capital into industrial capital’ (De Silva 2013, p. 234).

The drop in output hand in hand with the decay of the irrigation system during the British rule in Sri Lanka underscores the fact that collapse of the labour exchange system and the emergence of sharecropping altered the system of labour utilisation in paddy cultivation in a way that is incapable of fully utilizing the capacity of the irrigation system.6 The exchange system of labour as noted earlier also applied to the deployment of buffaloes to assist cultivation which was impossible to execute without animal power since labour power was not a substitute for the former. Even if it was this means to say that a decline in the cattle population would escalate the labour shortage problem in paddy cultivation.

Hence, the collapse of exchange labour and labour rotation system equally impaired the economies of using animal power and created a shortage in the supply of cattle for farm work similar to the shortage of labour which developed in the peak periods of cultivation while simultaneously creating a surplus during slack periods. These developments took place in the absence of the system of reciprocal rotation of labour and animal power which minimised unevenness of demand for resources in paddy cultivation. It enables an intensive use of labour such as transplanting, hand weeding, etc., and of animal power which resulted in higher yields and reduced unit costs. The collapse of the labour exchange system prevented intensive methods of labour use and hence transplanting and hand weeding became impractical. That is to say collapse of the system increased the length of production time over labour time and hence caused underemployment of labour to emerge increasing cost of cultivation and preventing equal distribution of output among commune members. The collapse of the labour exchange system therefore reduced per worker output in paddy cultivation while productivity per man days declining by a lesser degree and necessitated the use of wage labour which in turn increases the cash cost of cultivation. The labour cost in a system of exchange labour or in the use of family labour is not reflected in the market price for paddy but is accounted for in the share of marketed surplus of paddy, i.e., noncash inputs are paid by the non-marketed share of the aggregate produce. Hence, collapse of the Purana village system invariably increased the monetary costs of production, resulting in higher market price of paddy.

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