The Challenge

The Meade and Titmuss Reports II

From Our Archives – A Glimpse into 1961

By Peter Ibbotson

In the first part of this remarkable article, originally published in March 1961, Peter Ibbotson examined the publication of the landmark Meade and Titmuss Reports, two studies commissioned to assess Mauritius’ economic and social future at a critical moment in its history. He highlighted the reports’ warning that the country had long suffered not from a lack of expert advice, but from a persistent failure to implement necessary reforms. He also explored their candid assessment of communal divisions, weak national cohesion, and the urgent need for greater inter-racial cooperation as foundations for economic progress.

In this concluding installment, Peter Ibbotson turns to what both reports regarded as the island’s most pressing challenge: rapid population growth and the imperative of voluntary family planning. He examines the fierce political and religious controversy surrounding the issue, while reflecting on the difficult choices facing Mauritius and the political courage required to confront them. More than six decades later, many of the questions raised in these reports continue to resonate in contemporary debates about the country’s long-term economic and social sustainability.

The Government, I have said, faces a stern challenge to its courage and integrity. I am confident that it will react to the challenge with courage and integrity and seek to put into effect the far-sighted proposals made by Professor Titmuss, Professor Meade, and their various colleagues. After all, despite Professor Meade’s many criticisms of the communalism which detrimentally pervades Mauritius today, the implication is nevertheless that to abandon communalism will be to work for the benefit of Mauritius; and the Government, enjoying as it does support from people of all races and creeds, is the only multiracial body in the island capable of operating the comprehensive plans needed under the two reports.The alternative governments (PM, or IFB or PM-IFB in coalition) are too dreadful even to contemplate.

In any case, only the present Government has espoused policies resembling those recommended by the Meade Report; the other parties who might form an alternative government have repudiated in advance suggestions for diversification of the economy such as have now been put forward; or else they are committed to the idea that massive emigration will solve all the problems — which Professor Meade’s team has shown to be demonstrably false. And, of course, they are communalists.

If I am prejudiced in favour of the Meade and Titmuss reports, it is for two reasons. First, and more important, because they chart the course for the future prosperity of the island and the future well-being of its inhabitants; and the wellbeing of a human community is something in favour of which I am, as a Christian, naturally predisposed.

Second, the many recommendations of both reports vindicate what I have been saying in these columns for many years at one time and another. The whole principle of family planning is supported at great length and with authority. For years I have argued in favour of family planning in the Mauritius Times. Then take many others of the Meade recommendations. Large-scale emigration is only a minor mitigation of the population problem, but small-scale emigration on the Barbadian pattern should be studied (incidentally Seychelles has already not only studied, but adopted, such a proposal). This is a matter which I suggested in these columns long before the Meade Mission was set up. Don’t expand sugar production ad lib., pleads the report; and a suggestion other than a quota system is put forward for limiting overall sugar production. This plea is one which I have made repeatedly in this paper; the editors too have pleaded for some upward limit beyond which sugar production should not be allowed to rise.

Land misuse is deplored; since its inception the Mauritius Times has asked that valuable land be taken from stag-breeders and given over to food crops. Particularly welcome (from a personal point of view as well as from the standpoint of the future Mauritian economy) is the proposal that an Agricultural Marketing Board be set up to market vegetables on behalf of growers who would thus be guaranteed a market at a guaranteed price. Allied with this is the recommendation that cold storage availability be extended, for fish as well as vegetables; and the “not too optimistic” thought of a future fish cannery. Then the Meade Report urges more sawmills, a bacon factory, development of milk production, development of the fishing industry (with the assistance of Japanese expertise, perhaps), introduction of the broiler poultry and rabbit industry, and an Industrial Development Board — all things which have been urged in my columns in the months and years past.

Also vindicated is my insistence that English be the medium of instruction with Creole used in the initial stages of the primary school.

In the past, various columnists in Le Mauricien and Le Cerneen have suggested that as a Londoner I ought not to comment on Mauritian affairs; that I should not make suggestions about the future development of Mauritius. Now that they see how my past views have been vindicated by on-the-spot experts, I hope that in future they will cease such criticisms.

The proposal for an Industrial Development Board is one of the most important recommendations of the whole Meade Report. In my view, the Government cannot afford to lose any time in giving effect to this recommendation; they should at once get hold of copies of the Barbados Development act, 1955, and study the workings of the industrial development boards in Barbados and Malta (there are other similar boards in, for example Uganda and Jamaica, but Barbados and Malta afford close parallels to Mauritius economically and/or demographically).

And, of course, in anticipation that the Meade Report would make such a recommendation, I have written at length about such boards in other colonies in the Mauritius Times over the last five months.

Wage-Pegging

Two suggestions of the Meade Report in particular are certain to come under fire, and from different sections of the community. The suggestion that wages be pegged for some years ahead will not, at first sight, commend itself to the trade unions, especially those unions associated with the Destructive element. The proposal that labour on the estates be decasualised will not meet with the approval of the estates, who have already (in the Chamber of Agriculture’s annual report) opposed decasualisation which Mr Luce put forward in his report two years ago. (Another example of the tendency to which both Meade and Titmuss Reports referred: the lack of will to act on advice when it has been tendered).

The proposals designed to restrict the powers and activities of the job contractors will not be welcomed everywhere; though I for one would be glad to see the job contractor system, full of abuses real and potential, abolished. I welcome the Meade proposals to curb the job contractors as an interim measure; I welcome too the proposals (which anyway I welcomed when Mr Luce made them) that labour on the estates be decasualised.

I can understand those union leaders who will, on purely economic grounds, oppose the proposals to peg wages; I can even begin to sympathise with them. I cannot, on the other hand, begin to sympathise with those opportunists among the trade unions who will seize on the wage-pegging proposals for political reasons to oppose the Meade Report and embarrass the Govt. Such opportunists belong to the Destroyers’ faction and must be exposed.

8th Year – No 340
Friday 10th March, 1961

Mauritius Times ePaper Friday 24 July 2026