"Great Expectations" 12-13-2020
Myanmar, since a decade ago, has been under the two constitutionally elected civilian governments and has been a very young democracy. The first 5-year term government was formed up by the majority winning USDP party and the leader of the party 'U Thein Sein' (nicknamed Mr. Gentleman), a former general and a reformer who became our president. In that term, remarkable political and economic liberalizations of our country were carried out and achieved. We were no longer 'the dark heart of Asia' and said goodbye to the other hardcore club members like North Korea , Cambodia, and Kazakhstan . Our GDP increased annually by more than 7 percent in those 5 straight years. Then, in the 2015 general election, the NLD party, led by the Lady, Daw Aung San Su Kyi, won in a landslide victory. The victory was an off-setting of the victory of the party in the 1990 general election arranged by the then junta. The junta declined to let the party form a government and ruled on. The party boycotted the 2010 general election.
Also under the current NLD gov (for the majority of the ruling body are NLD people) including the president, we have been enjoying economic reforms and developments. But in my eyes, compared to the other Asian tigers around, I do not think I have yet seen the ‘setting up of our family businesses’ on a national scale. By that I mean, when it comes to national economics, we are still 'faceless'.
Let me explain:
China started up with supplying clothes and toys. Now they are producing everything from mobile phones and telecommunication related stuff on top of that. Japan is vehicles. India is IT. And Thais are all about Agriculture and Tourisim. The late comer, Vietnam, came up with coffee and rubber. And we are still faceless. Let me give you an example:
Getting back in my hometown Mandalay, one or two times a year, from my current place, sometimes I would meet up with my friends (politicians and famous economists) mostly at tea shops. I got the chance to listen to those respected economists and politicians discussing about choosing prioritized sectors for our national economy. (We need our sectors and we need our identity. Don't we?)
They placed 'Agriculture', 'Energy', Tourism', and 'Construction' on the top of their list of everything. Here, actually, I don't know much about the rest three others, but Agriculture is the specialized field of an Irrigation Engineer. We, the farmers and people of the agricultural department, are nothing but 'one family'. So concerning with the sector, I have a lot to tell. Our country is rich in terms of land and water resources. We have traditionally been a farming society since ancient times. Yes, we have good indicators in term of food security, for the self-sufficiency ratio of our country is 140% (data credited to JICA). Here the self-sufficiency ratio of a country is the amount of homegrown crops per the number of the countrymen that can be fed by that amount. In simple terms, if your country produces crops within a year for sufficiently feeding all the people in your country in that year, then you have a self-sufficiency ratio of 100%. Give plus or minus for the other cases. In our case, it is 140% and we still have 21 million acres of virgin land apart from nearly the same number of cultivated lands. And yet, please don't get overly impressed because of those figures. When you discover that our annual national income from agriculture, or the annual general income of a farmer per hectare of his farm income, you might perhaps be surprised to learn that they will be funny compared to those figures of Thailand, Vietnam, or Malaysia let alone those of Australia or Israel.
Let me present it to you another way with this information. The assets of
Malaysia's Robert Kouk (a sugar tycoon) in 2019 was 26 billion US dollars.
Our GDP that year was 76 billion US dollars. (ref: Wikipedia). These days,
farming on a hectare of his land ( any crop) within a given season, a Thai
farmer can get at least 12000 US dollar from selling out their yields. A
Myanmar farmer in general can expect no more than 2000 US dollar for
the same efforts. What makes the difference? Ah... yes, everything.
Everything from...land consolidation, land reclamation, farming practices,
irrigation infrastructures and irrigation practices, mechanization, finance,
marketing and anything you mention. That was why Joseph Stigliz , a noble
prize winner economist, upon his visit to our country in 2010, gave the
suggestion to the then prime minister, that Myanmar needed to make heavy
investments in the sector using money which the country got from selling off its natural gas to China and Thailand. Farming families make up 70% of our country. Apart from natural gas, minerals, and agricultural products we produce nothing mentionable.
In the general election held in the last November the NLD party again won the landslide victory. I hope the new upcoming government will this time be focusing more on promoting the important business sectors, while still rigorously formulating development and infrastructure projects and setting up and launching reliable family( national) businesses, because we are still at the bottom in the list of Asian economies.
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