Talk and Collaborate, Don’t Peck and Bicker

editorial:

Where Sikkim’s small size should have made it extremely close-knit, it is unfortunate that frequent communication lapses continue to pull sections away, making them complain and accuse in isolation and often out of context. Too many arguments rage unbridled in Sikkim because the participants refuse to engage or listen and prefer instead to steer discussions on a tangent, the real issue at hand invariably lost to digressions and chances of a resolution defeated because too many issues have been flagged and too much been said. The incongruity of a ban on import of poultry products continuing two years on since the causative factor – fear of bird flu – has subsided, presents a stereotype example. Consumer grumblings have been obvious ever since the ban was imposed, triggering a supply shortfall induced inflation. But the consumers lack an organised forum to carry their woes and the occasional surfacing in newspaper reports can be conveniently ignored. Local produce has rarely been significantly surplus in Sikkim and markets here have primarily been serviced by traders working between suppliers in Siliguri and retailers in the State. This is a complicated arrangement where the economy of scales and benefit of contacts are frequently deployed to keep new players out and rocking of the arrangement near impossible. Sikkim has experienced this not only in the bouquet of goods that arrive here for sale but also in the marketing of cash crops that it grows. The contesting voices in the poultry sector exchange of allegations as reported in today’s edition of this newspaper need to be considered against this backdrop. Where poultry traders are rightly upset over what is obviously an unjustified ban on poultry imports directly affecting their livelihoods, the complaint of local poultry farmers that traders are not lifting stocks from them cannot be casually dismissed either. And even as fulminations of the two sides are only surfacing now, Sikkim’s kitchens continue to suffer and an obviously thriving poultry industry hawks its wares metres outside the Sikkim border at Rangpo. And even as the two sides speak up, they sidestep the moot questions and fudge over their respective responsibilities. If Sikkim had leveraged its potential for close-knit collaborations, the Poultry Mission would have included established poultry traders here not only as the driving force of the mission but also as resource persons to develop the poultry sector here on more practical lines. But government officials preferred yet again to talk down instead of walking with the stakeholders and Sikkim is left with an incongruous ban which, it is obvious, is serving no one too well.