The Harsh Facts of Hydraulics: Technology and Society in Sri Lanka’s Colonization Schemes

Abstract

The Harsh Facts of Hydraulics: Technology and Society in Sri Lanka’s Colonization Schemes BRYAN PFAFFENBERGER From the close of the First World War to the present, the govern­ ment of Sri Lanka (formerly Ceylon) has attempted a series of ambitious irrigation and resettlement projects, called “colonization schemes” in the literature.1 These projects seek to settle landless Sri Lankan “peasants” in Sri Lanka’s sparsely populated Dry Zone, where ancient Buddhist civilizations once flourished in valleys watered by rivers flowing from the central mountain massif.2 (See fig. 1.) The colonization schemes have several goals, including achieving selfsufficiency in rice production and preserving the traditional peas­ antry by insulating it from the evils of a society deformed by colonialism. Although such schemes have substantially increased Sri Lanka’s rice output, they have almost uniformly failed to achieve their social goals.3 Indeed, they seem inclined to reproduce (rather than Dr. Pfaffenbercer, an anthropologist, is associate professor in the Division of Humanities, School of Engineering and Applied Science, University of Virginia, and the chairman of the Sri Lanka Studies Group (an affiliate organization of the Association for Asian Studies). He thanks the School of Engineering and Applied Science, University of Virginia, for summer support that aided the drafting of this essay, and also thanks the Technology and Culture reviewers, whose constructive criticism helped clarify the issues this article raises. 'For a general survey, see B. H. Farmer, Pioneer Peasant Cultivation in Ceylon (Oxford, 1957), and his more recent “The Origins of Agricultural Colonisation in the Dry Zone of Sri Lanka,” in John Farrington, Frederick Abeyratne, and Gerald J. Gill, Farm Power and Employment in Asia: Performance and Prospects (Colombo, 1984), pp. 224-38. See Nihal Amerasinghe, “An Overview of Settlement Schemes in Sri Lanka,” Asian Survey 32 (1982): 620—36, for a review of recent settlement experiments and their outcomes. 2Land Commission: Interim Report, Sessional Paper No. 2 of 1928, p. 19. “Peasants” are defined (p. 10) as persons who “cultivate land by [their own] labour with or without the aid of paid labour” on newly irrigated lands “outside their native villages.” ’On the shortcomings of colonization schemes, see the stinging criticisms in the Report of the Gal Oya Evaluation Committee, Sessional Paper No. 1 of 1970, and the perceptive analysis of water management problems by Robert Chambers, Water Management and Paddy Production in the Dry Zone of Sri Lanka (Colombo, 1975).© 1990 by the Society for the History of Technology. All rights reserved. 0040-165X/90/3103-0007$01.00 361 362 Bryan Pfaffenberger ameliorate) the worst aspects of Sri Lankan peasant society, such as indebtedness, land fragmentation, sharecropping on a massive scale, socioeconomic differentiation, and low agricultural productivity. Joining a chorus of voices raised in protest against the ill effects of Western technology in Third World societies, some observers suggest that these problems might be attributed to the unavoidable social effects of gravity-flow irrigation technology itself, which seems to entail an inevitable differentiation process given by the brute realities of water’s nature—particularly the fact that the peasants at the top end receive water more regularly and in greater amounts than the peasants at the tail end. The differentiating potential of the technolFig . 1.—Sri Lanka’s climatic zones Technology and Society in Sri Lanka’s Colonization Schemes 363 ogy is accentuated by the use of high-yielding rice varieties, fertilizers, herbicides, and pesticides, which only the richer peasants can afford. Because such varieties require expensive inputs such as herbicides and fertilizer, they benefit the rich farmers far more than they benefit the poor ones, thus exacerbating rural stratification.4 For Third World critics of Western technology, the differentiating effects of gravityflow irrigation schemes and Green Revolution technology amount to a Trojan horse: a Third World country imports Western technology to improve social welfare on an equitable basis, only to find that the technology insidiously reproduces the class structure and class rela­ tions of capitalism.5 The result is a class of rural capitalists created by the state. This class commercializes agriculture, expands its landhold­ ings at the expense of poorer colonists, and fosters the growth of a pauperized or landless rural peasantry. Pointing to this...