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• Salt, salt in every sea but not a pinch on isle to see

Hey, folks. It’s okay. No need any longer to tell friends travelling abroad to smuggle for you through customs a packet or two of common salt on their return. An Indian ship, carrying this time not fuel, medicine or food, but tonnes and tonnes of salt, will soon sail into port.

But first, a word of thanks and gratitude to India’s munificence in throwing the lifeline to Lanka as she did three years ago with oil, drilled deep from desert wells found in Arabia.

That, indeed, was a magnificent deed. If not for India’s lifeline of oil and food, many more would have died, waiting in queues that stretched from coast to coast. Some lives were saved since some seemed so suicidally bent on seeking salvation by submerging in seas surrounding the Serendib isle.

The expected arrival of the Indian salt ship will be heartily hailed, in the same manner as an arrival of a British ship bearing provisions to islanders would have been hailed by the natives in colonial days of old.

On Monday, Trade Minister Wasantha Samarasinghe proudly announced that the Indian salt ship would be arriving the following day at the Colombo port to dock and start unloading salt.

He said, “Steps were taken to import salt to protect the salt industry at the request of Sri Lankan salt manufacturers.”

To protect the salt industry?

Unlike home-grown paddy, which is born from a farmer’s toil, salt is no cottage industry. The government holds the monopoly on salt. No one collects, no one manufactures salt but the government alone is the lord and master of salt.

A person can make salt from the surrounding seas of this island for his own personal use and purpose but is expressly forbidden by law to manufacture salt in commercial quantities, unless by licence from the Salt Commissioner. As for protecting those marketing salt, it is consumers who need protection.

He delved into figures that were indeed alarming to behold. The statistics revealed to what frightful depths salt production had sunk within this past one year.

The minister stated, “Although it was expected to produce 100,000 metric tonnes of salt through the Hambantota Salt Works, we were only able to produce about 60,000 metric tonnes of salt, and therefore, we have had to import salt into the country in this way. We expect to import up to 40,000 or 50,000 metric tonnes of salt into the country accordingly.

He told the media, “Our country requires 180,000 metric tonnes of salt per year, and accordingly, due to the weather and environmental problems that have arisen in the country in the past, only 20,000 metric tonnes of salt have been produced in the country, and therefore the country has not been able to produce the 160,000 metric tonnes required.’

Blame it on the weather. That’s fine. But does excessive water destroy salt? Salt is not grown in flood-prone fields but originates from ocean depths where it for eons laid.

HALCYON DAYS OF OLD: Making salt in Lanka’s sunshine

But if this kind of special salt, found only in Sri Lanka’s seas, is sensitive to rain, tell me, my friend, was this country inflicted by a severe fifteen-year-long drought that laid to waste all else but salt? For a decade and a half of drought, did we import every food but salt? If so, no wonder Lanka went bankrupt.

On Tuesday, the expected salt ship failed to appear at port, though the minister had confidently assured it would the day before. But one cannot blame him for that, since during the long voyage from India to Lanka, much can happen on storm-tossed seas.

What gale-force winds may rip the sails, what hurricanes may blow, to alter course and force ships to stray on unknown, uncharted routes, without map or compass to guide, to flounder on the rocks, and leave the crew marooned or drown, landlubbers will not know.

But two days later, when it still remained unsighted, even as a speck on the far horizon, it was left to the Salt Corporation bosses to blame bad weather again for causing the ship’s delay. But the excuse, however factual it may have been, echoed the ring of hollowness in the wake of Minister Samarasinghe’s confident assurance, given to the media on Monday.

The truth was that the people were still left bereft of salt. The episode made one recount what mariners on ships at sea may have once mused upon: ‘There’s salt, salt everywhere but not a pinch aboard to taste.’

Of course, this will not be the first time this year that India has come to Lanka’s rescue with salt. From her reservoirs of salt, she has agreed to send the required supply to put the flavour back into Lanka’s staple diet.

Only four months ago, an Indian ship docked at Colombo harbour, laden with salt. It was to meet a salt crisis that suddenly emerged in the island. “It was the first time, after fifteen years, that salt had to be imported from India,” a Sunday Times’ report stated. The shortage was blamed on the rains.

The paraphrased words of the English poet John Donne—in the latest version that’s all the rage—‘No man, or Sri Lanka, can be an island entire of itself but has to be a pranth of the Indian subcontinent, a port of the main’—alarmingly ring true when we ask India to pass her salt for us to sprinkle on our food.

Four months later, in May, when this island nation asks India again to send us salt, doesn’t it smack of becoming a habit?

The reason given four months ago was that, after fifteen years of unimpeded sunshine. salterns had been rained upon, making salt production come to a halt. Wonder what earned the wrath of the gods to make them send in the rains?

Pity. Industries Minister Sunil Hadunnetti’s high hopes, expressed when he opened the Alimankada Salt factory, as if it were his own baby, one he had given life and brought into this world—although its genealogy proved otherwise—it seems, it still remains stillborn.

But in that shining hour beneath the mid-day sun, he said, proudly showing a new packet of salt straight from the machine belt, “Now we can not only make this country self-sufficient in salt but can export salt to the world and earn billions of dollars for the country.”

On May 19, when rains had washed away his salty dreams, he claimed that the rains had also washed away the salt in the pans of Elephant Pass, Hambantota and Puttalam. Handunnetti told the media that, depending on the type of the monsoons, the three saltpans do not receive rain at the same time but take turns to bear the brunt. But this time all three pans had been simultaneously rained on. It had led to a salt shortage.

What a stroke of bad luck for Lanka’s three salt pans and also for its citizens, who had fallen from a different pan into the raging fire.

“It was on natural factors,” Handunnetti stated, “that the government based its decision to import salt from India. Neither the workers nor the government could change this result.” He said, “Although salt was purchased from India’s Gujarat region to meet Sri Lanka’s needs, the import process has been delayed due to the closure of the Gujarat port due to the India-Pakistan war. Also, there was panic buying to make the crisis worse.”

Imagine how unlucky Lanka thrice must be,

n firstly, for rains to fall simultaneously on all three pans;

n secondly, for the salt crisis to suddenly emerge when guns boom on Kashmir’s mountain slopes, with war breaking out on May 7 between two neighbours India and Pakistan, after 44 years of peace;

n and thirdly—but not to say the last, for none knows what more evil brews for this island where, with gods all fled, evil unchallenged rides the night—the salt shortage has been made worse, as Handunnetti explained, by people buying salt wholesale in panic that it might get even worse.

But on this Friday’s darkest night, the clouds lined with a streak of light to emblazon the news that India’s salt ship, surviving stormy hurricanes and howling winds on mid-seas, had arrived safely at port.

The messenger who brought the news of the arrival of the salt to these isle shores at last was none other than Minister Wasantha Samarasinghe. Appearing on national TV news on Friday night, he couldn’t contain his euphoric delight, exclaiming with unbounded pride his singular feat of receiving a salt ship from India.

Far removed from the sober style that Neil Armstrong displayed while showing samples of the rocks he had brought from the moon, Wasantha Samarasinghe, in contrast, was beside himself with glee, grinning from cheek to cheek, when he exclaimed, “We have brought down more than sufficient salt, so much salt, you will not want to look even at a pinch of salt again. We have issued invoices to import 158,000 tonnes of salt out of the 180,000 tonnes we require each year.”

Are we to close salterns and place a standing import order with India for salt? Minister Wasantha, who was appointed to the cabinet on the ‘scientific approach’, absolutely misses the point, doesn’t he?

It is not by resorting to the most simple expediency of importing salt from India—though it may make one the most admired hero of the fleeting hour—but by ensuring that salt is produced from the sea that surrounds these island shores, in such sufficient quantities to meet not only the local demand but to export as well to lands deprived of salt, that will make one become valued as the salt of the earth.