Dear Editor,
Recent discussion of the Ethnic Security Dilemma (ESD) in the press seems to suggest three important things. First, Indians own and control about 90 to 95 percent of the wealth in the country but no definition or estimate of wealth is offered. Second, that a more ethnically-balanced distribution of wealth will undermine the ESD significantly, if not solve it for good. Third, the need to effect a more ethnically-balanced distribution of wealth, which seems to call for clarification of concepts, affirmative action and a programme of redistribution.
In the drivel offered as substantive arguments, three things seem to have been forgotten. First, ethnic bitterness and spite between Africans and Indians is not a post-independence phenomenon but reaches back to the commencement of Indian Indenture. Africans resented the presence of Indians in Guyana because they felt Indian Immigration was subsidized by the Colonial Government (true), and Indians lowered the wage rate offered to Africans (debatable). The height of the wage rate ruckus coincided with a flood of Africans from the West Indies, mainly Barbados, and West Africa. Of the 36,785 immigrants who came to Guyana between 1835-1846, the West Indies supplied 35.1 %; Africa, 17.4 %; and India, 12.2 %. Further, plantations preferred Africans to do skilled work in the factory where competitive pressure on the wage rate was nil. The misdirected anger grew in intensity when Indians paid for land by forgoing their return passage. The proposition that competition for common resources is at the root of ethnic bitterness skirts the initial free livelihood choices made by Africans and Indians: public sector employment vs. agriculture.
Even towards the close of the 19th century, Indians were not the principal owners and controllers of arable land. How did a penniless people manage to accumulate capital, acquire land and, more generally, invest? They did not splurge on consumption but saved from their meagre earnings and deprived themselves of even basic necessities. Little wonder they were emaciated – skin and bones only –, a people “whose bones were found strewn about the colony,” per Adamson. The “privation,” as my father would say, truncated their lives with the result that Africans outlived Indians; this is probably still the case today. Indians were practical economists who made rational decisions consistent with their vision of a better future for themselves and their descendants. They worked; saved via several means; invested in gold, land, sheep, goats, cows; looked after their investment and reinvested again. It was a process that created a virtuous cycle of upward material upliftment.
Most of the hundreds of acres of rice land they cultivate today were forests and uneven land. Indians, including my grandfather, his brothers and my father, wielded axes and cutlass to cut down forest, and shovel to level the land and dig drains (“inta-lack” as they were called) to ensure the land was not flooded during the rainy season and to bring water into the fields during “dry weather.” Bulldozers were used from around the 1960s, but farmers had to pay. My father paid $33 back then to level each acre of land. In 1960, farmers cultivated 195,275 acres of paddy. If it is conservatively assumed that 50 tons of soil per acre were removed by shovel in hand, then Indians removed about 10 million tons of soil just to cultivate rice, which is our staple today; a commodity that benefitted Guyanese more than the colonials. This estimate excludes the tons of soil removed from digging trenches and canals in non-sugar growing areas, digging new drainage and irrigation canals on the sugar estates and maintaining previous ones. Incidentally, Walter Rodney in his 1984 opus tells us that African slaves “moved 100 million tons of heavy water-logged clay with shovel in hand …” I do not think Indians moved that quantity of soil and this fact about slavery must be recognized.
According to the 1978 Rural Farm Household Survey (RFHS) done by Nathan and Associates, 73 percent of rural farms were 5 acres or less in size and 90 percent of all farms were less than 15 acres in size. The ownership structure has not changed drastically since then; indeed, it is probably more fragmented today as our grandparents and parents divided the land among their children (not legally in most cases but by common consent). On the other hand, the pattern of paddy cultivation has changed dramatically. Most rice farmers with less than five-to-ten acres hand over their fields to more enterprising farmers so that such farmers cultivate more land than they own. The typical arrangement is that the “absentee farmer” gets half of net profits, which at today’s prices is probably around $20,000 per acre. Any tinkering with the pattern of land distribution will mostly likely end up with the same cultivational arrangement.
Second, no deep analysis exists of how the peculiar form of wealth distribution came about. For sure, one ethnic group was not handed wealth on a silver platter. It was not out of love or altruism that land was traded with Indians in lieu of a return passage to India but out of the need to augment the domestic labour supply and to promote the self-interests of planters and the Colonial Government. Africans did acquire land, including whole villages and estates, commendably paid for by themselves. If they disposed of such possessions because of geographic location (far from urban centres where most Africans live) or indebtedness, Indians had no role in this. Besides pecuniary incentive to own, cultivate and dispose of land, any discussion of the specific land distribution pattern must include a discussion of behavioural factors, occupational choice, vision and discipline. The political economy of current land pattern is conditioned by geographical, social, cultural, economic and political factors.
Third, the socio-economic impact of affirmative action and redistribution would be devastating to the economy and society and the bitter economic lesson of the first PNC regime will have to be relearned. There is hardly a country in the world where agriculture was not the platform upon which wealth and prosperity was built. West Indian economist of African descent, Sir Arthur Lewis, who won the Noble Prize in economics, reminded us of this fundamental fact more than half a century ago. Indians have been the backbone of Guyana’s agricultural sector for about 150 years now. They understood that land is the original source of all wealth. It is land that provided the initial capital for investment and Indians managed the process of accumulation well. No valid reason exists to castigate Indians for their ingenuity, creativity, enterprising spirit and human progress in Guyana.
Finally, the question needs to be asked: will a more equitable distribution of wealth – at least land – solve the country’s ethnic dilemma? Is the ESD merely about economics? Is politics and propaganda the most appropriate battlefield to wage the verbal war? The discussion so far has been in terms of dogmas and beliefs instead of facts and science. I fail to understand how educated people can resort to perception, beliefs and unsubstantiated assertions in matters of national importance. In my view, the discussion thus far can only be characterized as “madness.”
As the ESD discourse rages on, some pointers need to be kept in mind. First, Africans will not return to agriculture from which they departed; agriculture will remain the domain of Indians, albeit with diminished relative importance. Second, any redistribution of arable land could conceivable be followed by a conscious effort to dispose of the land in a few years. The new owners would make some money, most of which will probably go to a consumption splurge, but the temporary status quo will revert to its original order in another fifty years or less. Third, it is forgotten that in all colonial territories where Indians and Africans are the dominant ethnic groups Indians have emerged as the wealthier ethnic group. The question as to why this outcome needs to be investigated rigorously; the full story is much more nuanced than is projected in public discourse. It is a mix of vision, discipline, back-breaking labour, deprivations, shortened lives, and much more.
Yours faithfully,
Ramesh Gampat
