Government is set to re-expropriate assets of Sri Lanka’s privatised commercial plantations being under-utilised with the aim of handing it to the people for crop cultivation making it for productive use, the presidential media division announced.
The Government has decided to cancel land licenses issued to plantation companies, President Ranil Wickremesinghe said.
“All the land licenses given to the plantation companies will be cancelled and steps will be taken to provide the land needed by the people and we hope to complete these activities before February 04,” the president’s media division quoted Mr. Wickremesinghe as saying.
The President said that urgent solutions should be given to the land issues faced by the public in Nuwara Eliya.
He expressed these views while attending the Nuwara Eliya District Development Committee meeting held at the Nuwara Eliya District Secretariat yesterday morning (22).
The President requested the District Secretariat, Ministry of Plantation and Land Registration Department to jointly prepare a report on Government owned land in the district within a month.
Sri Lanka’s privatised plantations which are on 50-year lease have only 70,000 hectares of land.
Plantations are an emblematic case in Sri Lanka’s post-independence economic decline where they were expropriated from foreign and domestic owners under ‘land reform’.
Many foreign owners were given land in African nations like Kenya where they set up tea plantations.
Sri Lanka state is now bankrupt and the President Ranil Wickremesinghe is trying to attract foreign investment into privatisations.
Renewed expropriation fears arose after reports that a proposal had been given to the cabinet to take-over so-called ‘under-utilized’ land of privatised plantations.
Sri Lanka in 2011 expropriated a number of private properties including publicly listed Pelwatte Sugar and Hotel Developers, claiming the land was ‘under-utilised’.
Land of several Board of Investment firms were also taken back despite a constitutional guarantee that they will not be expropriated.
Given the past experience with nationalised plantations and other companies, then President J R Jayewardene put in the guarantee to assure foreign investors, but the country has not been able to draw large scale foreign investors unlike East Asia.
Sri Lanka expropriated peoples lands into the Janatha Estate Development Board and the Sri Lanka State Plantations Corporation from which the privatised plantations were hived off after taking monthly handouts from the Treasury to pay workers.
There are still two plantations companies in state hands making losses, raising questions as to how well utilised units like Elkaduwa Plantations is, according to critics.
In Sri Lanka, like most countries before freehold developed in Britain, land use was governed by various types of tenure and Rajakariya.
However the British Waste Land Ordinance took over large tracts of land which were not being used by the people at a time when free hold was under-developed making the state a big owner of land.
After independence established private property was expropriated under ‘land reform’ making the state the largest owner of land and reversing freehold.
