There’s more to the story. Sri Lanka went organic because they didn’t have the money to buy regular fertilizer. And then when they bought organic fertilizer, it arrived in an unusable state due to shipping delays.
> Why did they engage in such a radical experiment?
Well, that's where it cut off for me without a subscription.
Still, I'm sure it's going to say that the problem was the overhype of "green"/"organic" agriculture, and that this is a cautionary tale of why we need to stay with modern chemical-intense agriculture.
> And yet, the collapse of Sri Lanka’s economy had little to do with organic farming per se, and much more to do with the disastrous handling of its economy.
> Nonetheless, the banning of inorganic fertilisers, the reasons it was done and the way it was done is a cautionary tale of how not to embark on a green transition. It should be a mandatory exercise to review these failures as the developing world looks for a stable path as the climate crisis intensifies.
> The first thing to note about Sri Lanka’s decision to ban the import of inorganic fertilisers is that it was based on desperation rather than planning. It is true that President Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s government had promised when it came into power in 2019 that it would shift agriculture to organic farming – but it had announced that it would do so over a period of 10 years, not overnight.
> No large-scale plan was drawn up, no public discussions with farmers was undertaken, and the people in government pushing the policies included those who came up with locally made syrups to combat the COVID-19 pandemic.
> In the end, the decision was taken for the simple reason that Sri Lanka was running out of money. The pandemic had hurt the tourist industry, and when the government was elected in 2019, it further cut down taxes, leaving it with money flowing out – much of it for vast infrastructure projects – and little to raise.
> Between the end of 2020 to March 2021, the country’s foreign exchange reserves plummeted from $7.6 billion to less than $2 billion. It was because of this huge loss of foreign currency, and the cost of importing inorganic fertilisers that Sri Lanka largely does not manufacture, that the country imposed a ban on it – forcing two-thirds of its population that depends on agriculture to suddenly scramble to deal with the fallout.
Seems a bit of a lesson, not in avoiding organic farming per se, but rather in avoiding a situation where your economy is entirely dependent on imports in a key sector.
Also, tourism revenue may be nice, but it is not dependable; I recall Bali having trouble when an act of terrorism caused tourism to crater for a few years.
Abrupt transition to a different agricultural system (organic or otherwise) does surely seem risky, but the talking points here remind me of the folks who said that Texas power blackouts last year were because we had too much wind and solar. It's a slice of truth, served up with a whole lot of lack of context to slant towards the desired conclusion.
"State officials including Republican governor Greg Abbott[13] initially blamed[14] the outages on frozen wind turbines and solar panels. However, data showed that failure to winterize power sources, primarily those of natural gas, had caused the grid failure"
There simply wasn’t enough foreign currency reserves for import.
Prices have rocketed and the president instead of admitting that decided to say they were going organic.
Sri Lanka presidents children spent all their foreign reserves on a white elephant airport and golf courses and due to Covid the principle sources of foreign reserves (tourism and money sent home from domestic and construction workers in the middle east).
It was a perfect storm of black swan and incompetence/corruption.
I have several dear friends desperate for help over there. I managed to send some rice and cooking oil but it just got stolen along the supply chain somewhere.
> It was a perfect storm of black swan and incompetence/corruption.
Nit pick (assuming you are referring to Covid as a black swan):
Covid wasn’t a black swan event. We knew a pandemic was quite likely to happen (if rand) and before 9/11 was generally seen as one of the biggest security threats to developed nations.
I quite like the term “black elephant” meaning:
“an event which is extremely likely and widely predicted by experts, but people attempt to pass it off as a Black Swan when it finally happens.”
The comment clearly doesn't make any sense, fertilizer or not. It's a tautological explanation of the sort "they're poor because they don't have enough money", just rephrased a bit to look less ridiculous.
I honestly regretted even having read another foreign policy thread on HN after seeing something like that upvoted to the top once again. Must remember to stay out of anything non-tech related.
This is strange take. Yes, there were several reasons why the country got into financial difficulties, however the decision to switch from nitrogen fertilizer to organic one was clearly predictable to cause even more problems.
More than a century ago people feared Malthusian catastrophe, that food crops won't be able to feed growing global population. What saved us was the invention of Haber-Bosch process, chemical synthesis of nitrogen fertilizer from air nitrogen.
If globally there was enough organic fertilizer available, we would have never need for synthesized nitrogen fertilizer. That's not the case however. Fertilizer costs money but if you wanted to switch 100% to organic fertilizer, due to global shortage it would cost even more. The problem with toxic deliveries of Chinese organic fertilizer were fully predictable – if they offered to sell it for prices that were too good to be true, then most surely they were.
The economics with inorganic fertilizer is simple: you buy it for X dollars and then you get crops that you can sell for Y dollars where Y > X. Save X dollars by not buying the fertilizer and lose Y dollars.
By switching to organic fertilizer you would have to spend Z dollars where Z > X. How can it be a reasonable advice? It is the same as saying: if you right now cannot afford high gas prices, buy an electric car. Obviously, a person who cannot even afford to pay for gas clearly cannot afford to buy more costly electric car.
And who, in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, pointed out it was "a temporary success in man’s war against hunger and deprivation ... But the frightening power of human reproduction must also be curbed; otherwise the success of the green revolution will be ephemeral only."
This is long-term view is shared with Ehrlich, whose "Population Bomb" appears (based on the cut-off for non-subscribers) to be ridiculed by the author of this essay.
This is really crazy stuff:
>> Western European governments were persuaded to stop supplying fertilizer to Africa. According to David Seckler, former Director General of the International Water Management Institute, "the environmental community in the 1980s went crazy pressuring the donor countries and the big foundations not to support ideas like inorganic fertilizers for Africa."[36]
And later the Western elites did it again: Quite successfully persuaded the 3rd world countries to not make use of the improved crop varieties that were bred with the assistance of gene technology.
When you put it like that, it sounds as if there was some other decision that same government could realistically taken at that time that would have improved Sri Lanka's state significantly.
I think not. It was already close to disaster and not heading away. That government didn't have the ability (intellectual and/or financial resources) to turn around. The precise details of the decisions made shortly before the final disaster don't matter very much, and IMO definitely aren't the most significant reason.
IMO that sudden organic lurch didn't help. But that single lurch didn't turn a sort of tropical Switzerland into a disaster zone.
The government could have tried to borrow money internationally to buy fertilizer. If properly presented the issue (such as great risk of starvation), the IMF or World Bank would have helped. Then they could export some crops and give the country more time to deal with debts and crises. And when covid is over, influx of tourists would have helped again.
While there were many factors, it is quite possible that this one wrong decision was the straw that broke camel's back. But because currently green ideas are quite fashionable, the king was able to convince the government to accept this ill-fated deal about the switch to organic farming.
I am reading Vaclav Smil's 'How the world really works', and cay say in the west 3 generations are removed from the farmland and has this rainbows and unicorn view of food production and thanks to American cultural broadcasting are projecting these (insane) ideas to third world elite.
Industrial farming is critical to feed a world with 8 billion people. NPKs play a very important role to see people around the world are fed.
Understandable, but if you read the book I think it’s comforting to that avenue of thought. Basically, you can be assured that American Foreign policy will be the same no matter what democratically elected government is in place, and the book explains why in 260 pages. I’m not the author and I don’t have a PhD or even think I’m smart enough to sum that up, with end notes, in a paragraph. But I thought it was smart and adds new light to what the original commenter said about learning how the world actually works.
While there is a real problem there, I will point out that it's not that new for elites from wealthy countries to give faulty advice to farmers in poorer countries. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creole_pig U.S. and other advisers convinced Haiti to get rid of their local pig breed, and Haiti's farmers quickly discovered that the "superior" breeds they were given instead were not compatible with local conditions. That was 40 years ago.
So, while the passage of time surely has reduced the familiarity of western elites with the reality of small-scale or low-income agriculture, the wealthy countries have been giving bad advice to poorer country farmers for a long time.
Yet somehow there are still tons of tankies on Twitter - people with actual hammer-and-sickle in their screen names - trying to pin this on "neoliberals" despite the fact that banning chemical fertilizers is the least neoliberal thing I can think of.
Check the top few comments. I’ve seen this a few places, and it does seem reasonable. People at the top of government deciding to hide what was actually going on behind “green” programs because they didn’t have the capital to access the fertilizer markets. Same thing repeated for the oil markets.
I wish there were better patterns for new laws and regulations to be phased in gradually rather than all at once. You see it happen occasionally, but it's the exception rather than the norm.
So much waste and strife comes from big discontinuous jumps that could easily be made smooth and continuous.
"But the underlying reason for the fall of Sri Lanka is that its leaders fell under the spell of Western green elites peddling organic agriculture"
This article feels to me like the author has an axe to grind ("green elites") so I did a quick check:
Shellenberger's positions and writings on climate change and environmentalism have been called "bad science" and "inaccurate" by environmental scientists and academics, while receiving praise from writers and journalists in the popular press, including conservative news outlets and organizations.
When Sri Lanka's foreign currency shortages became a serious problem in early 2021, the government tried to limit them by banning imports of chemical fertilizer. It told farmers to use locally sourced organic fertilizers instead. This led to widespread crop failure. Sri Lanka had to supplement its food stocks from abroad, which made its foreign currency shortage even worse.
Yes he's a well-known opportunistic axe-grinder. After being a long-time climate change denier and getting completely wrecked in the 2018 California primary election as a Democrat he switched tactics to get a little more free publicity from Fox News etc by being a San Francisco hater, got utterly wrecked a second time in the 2022 California primary election, and has dropped the SF angle and gone back to being a profession skeptic of all things "green".
Interesting. I vaguely remember the ban on chemical fertiliser but wasn't aware of currency shortage as a cause. I did a bit of research as well, and some Sri Lankan are apparently laying blame at the feet of Vandana Shiva, a government advisor and environmental activist with a strong anti-GMO stance:
> On April 27, 2021, the Sri Lankan government decided to ban importing chemical fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides and to replace them with organic inputs and methods. This decision was supported by many, including the Global Alliance for Organic Districts, who petitioned for the President’s collaboration in order to include Sri Lanka to an international network of local organic districts. Sri Lanka’s shift towards organic farming was also heavily discussed by both local and foreign researchers and activists. On the 7th and 9th of June, Dr. Vandana Shiva, President of Navdanya International, took part in two online workshops on the Sri Lankan government’s project to go towards organic agriculture and ban agrochemicals.
>Shiva serves on Government of India Committees on Organic Farming. She participated in the Stock Exchange of Visions project in 2007.[22]
>In 2021, she advised the government of Sri Lanka to ban inorganic fertilizers and pesticides[23][24] stating "This decision will definitely help farmers become more prosperous. Use of organic fertilizer will help provide agri products rich with nutrients while retaining the fertility of the land."[25] The policy caused a crisis with a significant reduction of farming output in several sectors, hitting the tea industry in particular[26][27][28] and reducing rice yields were by one third.[25] The ban was overturned seven months later.[24]
Not exactly "Western green elites" but it may be that a strand of pseudoscientific environmentalism played a part.
The author has no training in economics, government, or science, and he has been criticized by the actual scientific community for promoting his own misunderstanding of science (which isn't quite climate-change denialism, but is definitely not based in reality either).
My point is that he has a strong bias about this and also doesn't seem qualified to offer an analysis on this situation in a country he hasn't followed or studied until this crisis.
I wish there were a word or phrase (or better, Internet Law) for when someone rebuts their own conspiratorial claim:
> To be sure, there were other factors behind Sri Lanka’s fall. COVID-19 lockdowns and a 2019 bombing hurt tourism, a $3 billion to 5 billion-per-year industry. Sri Lanka’s leaders insisted on paying China back for various “Belt and Road” infrastructure projects when other nations refused to do so. And higher oil prices meant transportation prices rose 128% since May.
In other words: Sri Lanka barely weathered a global pandemic, drained its foreign reserves to pay off debts, and had no gas left in the tank (so to speak) to handle the price shock of the first major European war in nearly a century. But no, it's environmentalism that's actually to blame.
I would expect the hacker news crowd would be above this deliberately over-simplified take on the situation. Media like this is designed to re-enforce certain incorrect but convenient views of the world.
All that may be true but it's doubtful anyone ever "fell" for anything. The majority of the Sri Lankan people never supported any of this. First the country came under the control of the corrupt Rajapaksas, then it got destroyed with questionable deals dictated by foreign powers.
The Communist Party owns a harbor there now with a 99-year lease. You can't make this up, they're one to one copying the British colonial strategy down to the exact length of the contract used in Hong Kong. There was also the case where authorities rejected a batch of contaminated fertilizer but then under pressure the government had to pay for it nonetheless. Clearly the Sri Lankan elites are not in control anymore when it comes to dealing with foreign creditors. The Rajapaksas have amassed great personal wealth, at the teeny tiny downside of selling out the entire country.
This is just the beginning and will be fate of more countries that can't break the spell and return to focusing on the unique fundamentals of their national interests.
Why is this flagged? It is a fact that Sri Lankan government used the talking points of Green/Organic movement of the west to justify its insane agricultural policy. This needs to be discussed and Greens should be exposed for their possibly well-intentioned but criminally damaging policy promotion.
I do not know how HN moderates around the serial abusers for flagging, but this is serious violation of spirit of this forum.
45 comments
[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 116 ms ] threadEdit: Here’s a BBC story from November about the organic fertilizer shipment. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-59202309
Well, that's where it cut off for me without a subscription.
Still, I'm sure it's going to say that the problem was the overhype of "green"/"organic" agriculture, and that this is a cautionary tale of why we need to stay with modern chemical-intense agriculture.
Because I've seen quite a few of those.
I'll instead quote from https://science.thewire.in/environment/sri-lanka-crisis-orga... (I couldn't find the original essay I read which describes the underlying isssue, but was able to find this one with essentially the same thesis):
> And yet, the collapse of Sri Lanka’s economy had little to do with organic farming per se, and much more to do with the disastrous handling of its economy.
> Nonetheless, the banning of inorganic fertilisers, the reasons it was done and the way it was done is a cautionary tale of how not to embark on a green transition. It should be a mandatory exercise to review these failures as the developing world looks for a stable path as the climate crisis intensifies.
> The first thing to note about Sri Lanka’s decision to ban the import of inorganic fertilisers is that it was based on desperation rather than planning. It is true that President Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s government had promised when it came into power in 2019 that it would shift agriculture to organic farming – but it had announced that it would do so over a period of 10 years, not overnight.
> No large-scale plan was drawn up, no public discussions with farmers was undertaken, and the people in government pushing the policies included those who came up with locally made syrups to combat the COVID-19 pandemic.
> In the end, the decision was taken for the simple reason that Sri Lanka was running out of money. The pandemic had hurt the tourist industry, and when the government was elected in 2019, it further cut down taxes, leaving it with money flowing out – much of it for vast infrastructure projects – and little to raise.
> Between the end of 2020 to March 2021, the country’s foreign exchange reserves plummeted from $7.6 billion to less than $2 billion. It was because of this huge loss of foreign currency, and the cost of importing inorganic fertilisers that Sri Lanka largely does not manufacture, that the country imposed a ban on it – forcing two-thirds of its population that depends on agriculture to suddenly scramble to deal with the fallout.
Also, tourism revenue may be nice, but it is not dependable; I recall Bali having trouble when an act of terrorism caused tourism to crater for a few years.
Abrupt transition to a different agricultural system (organic or otherwise) does surely seem risky, but the talking points here remind me of the folks who said that Texas power blackouts last year were because we had too much wind and solar. It's a slice of truth, served up with a whole lot of lack of context to slant towards the desired conclusion.
Is it really a slice of truth, or a convenient lie? Quoting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Texas_power_crisis :
"State officials including Republican governor Greg Abbott[13] initially blamed[14] the outages on frozen wind turbines and solar panels. However, data showed that failure to winterize power sources, primarily those of natural gas, had caused the grid failure"
citing, among others, "Republicans use Texas power outages to spread false claims about green energy" at https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/republicans-texas-power-outa...
There simply wasn’t enough foreign currency reserves for import.
Prices have rocketed and the president instead of admitting that decided to say they were going organic.
Sri Lanka presidents children spent all their foreign reserves on a white elephant airport and golf courses and due to Covid the principle sources of foreign reserves (tourism and money sent home from domestic and construction workers in the middle east).
It was a perfect storm of black swan and incompetence/corruption.
I have several dear friends desperate for help over there. I managed to send some rice and cooking oil but it just got stolen along the supply chain somewhere.
Nit pick (assuming you are referring to Covid as a black swan):
Covid wasn’t a black swan event. We knew a pandemic was quite likely to happen (if rand) and before 9/11 was generally seen as one of the biggest security threats to developed nations.
I quite like the term “black elephant” meaning:
“an event which is extremely likely and widely predicted by experts, but people attempt to pass it off as a Black Swan when it finally happens.”
https://postnormaltim.es/black-elephant
If foreign currency was the issue they why did the subsequently import organic fertilizer?
I honestly regretted even having read another foreign policy thread on HN after seeing something like that upvoted to the top once again. Must remember to stay out of anything non-tech related.
More than a century ago people feared Malthusian catastrophe, that food crops won't be able to feed growing global population. What saved us was the invention of Haber-Bosch process, chemical synthesis of nitrogen fertilizer from air nitrogen.
If globally there was enough organic fertilizer available, we would have never need for synthesized nitrogen fertilizer. That's not the case however. Fertilizer costs money but if you wanted to switch 100% to organic fertilizer, due to global shortage it would cost even more. The problem with toxic deliveries of Chinese organic fertilizer were fully predictable – if they offered to sell it for prices that were too good to be true, then most surely they were.
The economics with inorganic fertilizer is simple: you buy it for X dollars and then you get crops that you can sell for Y dollars where Y > X. Save X dollars by not buying the fertilizer and lose Y dollars.
By switching to organic fertilizer you would have to spend Z dollars where Z > X. How can it be a reasonable advice? It is the same as saying: if you right now cannot afford high gas prices, buy an electric car. Obviously, a person who cannot even afford to pay for gas clearly cannot afford to buy more costly electric car.
Of equal importance is Norman Borlaug, who bred new wheat and corn varieties that were able to make use of the fertilizers and grow large harvests.
https://allianceforscience.cornell.edu/blog/2020/04/norman-b...
This is long-term view is shared with Ehrlich, whose "Population Bomb" appears (based on the cut-off for non-subscribers) to be ridiculed by the author of this essay.
This is really crazy stuff: >> Western European governments were persuaded to stop supplying fertilizer to Africa. According to David Seckler, former Director General of the International Water Management Institute, "the environmental community in the 1980s went crazy pressuring the donor countries and the big foundations not to support ideas like inorganic fertilizers for Africa."[36]
I think not. It was already close to disaster and not heading away. That government didn't have the ability (intellectual and/or financial resources) to turn around. The precise details of the decisions made shortly before the final disaster don't matter very much, and IMO definitely aren't the most significant reason.
IMO that sudden organic lurch didn't help. But that single lurch didn't turn a sort of tropical Switzerland into a disaster zone.
While there were many factors, it is quite possible that this one wrong decision was the straw that broke camel's back. But because currently green ideas are quite fashionable, the king was able to convince the government to accept this ill-fated deal about the switch to organic farming.
Industrial farming is critical to feed a world with 8 billion people. NPKs play a very important role to see people around the world are fed.
So, while the passage of time surely has reduced the familiarity of western elites with the reality of small-scale or low-income agriculture, the wealthy countries have been giving bad advice to poorer country farmers for a long time.
Sad to say, it has become that way, yes. And so we are seeing only the beginning of this trouble. If there's a way out, it has to begin.
So much waste and strife comes from big discontinuous jumps that could easily be made smooth and continuous.
This article feels to me like the author has an axe to grind ("green elites") so I did a quick check:
Shellenberger's positions and writings on climate change and environmentalism have been called "bad science" and "inaccurate" by environmental scientists and academics, while receiving praise from writers and journalists in the popular press, including conservative news outlets and organizations.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Shellenberger
The BBC has a different take:
When Sri Lanka's foreign currency shortages became a serious problem in early 2021, the government tried to limit them by banning imports of chemical fertilizer. It told farmers to use locally sourced organic fertilizers instead. This led to widespread crop failure. Sri Lanka had to supplement its food stocks from abroad, which made its foreign currency shortage even worse.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-61028138
https://navdanyainternational.org/sri-lankas-shift-towards-o...
> On April 27, 2021, the Sri Lankan government decided to ban importing chemical fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides and to replace them with organic inputs and methods. This decision was supported by many, including the Global Alliance for Organic Districts, who petitioned for the President’s collaboration in order to include Sri Lanka to an international network of local organic districts. Sri Lanka’s shift towards organic farming was also heavily discussed by both local and foreign researchers and activists. On the 7th and 9th of June, Dr. Vandana Shiva, President of Navdanya International, took part in two online workshops on the Sri Lankan government’s project to go towards organic agriculture and ban agrochemicals.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vandana_Shiva
>Shiva serves on Government of India Committees on Organic Farming. She participated in the Stock Exchange of Visions project in 2007.[22]
>In 2021, she advised the government of Sri Lanka to ban inorganic fertilizers and pesticides[23][24] stating "This decision will definitely help farmers become more prosperous. Use of organic fertilizer will help provide agri products rich with nutrients while retaining the fertility of the land."[25] The policy caused a crisis with a significant reduction of farming output in several sectors, hitting the tea industry in particular[26][27][28] and reducing rice yields were by one third.[25] The ban was overturned seven months later.[24]
Not exactly "Western green elites" but it may be that a strand of pseudoscientific environmentalism played a part.
My point is that he has a strong bias about this and also doesn't seem qualified to offer an analysis on this situation in a country he hasn't followed or studied until this crisis.
> To be sure, there were other factors behind Sri Lanka’s fall. COVID-19 lockdowns and a 2019 bombing hurt tourism, a $3 billion to 5 billion-per-year industry. Sri Lanka’s leaders insisted on paying China back for various “Belt and Road” infrastructure projects when other nations refused to do so. And higher oil prices meant transportation prices rose 128% since May.
In other words: Sri Lanka barely weathered a global pandemic, drained its foreign reserves to pay off debts, and had no gas left in the tank (so to speak) to handle the price shock of the first major European war in nearly a century. But no, it's environmentalism that's actually to blame.
The Communist Party owns a harbor there now with a 99-year lease. You can't make this up, they're one to one copying the British colonial strategy down to the exact length of the contract used in Hong Kong. There was also the case where authorities rejected a batch of contaminated fertilizer but then under pressure the government had to pay for it nonetheless. Clearly the Sri Lankan elites are not in control anymore when it comes to dealing with foreign creditors. The Rajapaksas have amassed great personal wealth, at the teeny tiny downside of selling out the entire country.
I do not know how HN moderates around the serial abusers for flagging, but this is serious violation of spirit of this forum.
>but this is serious violation of spirit of this forum.
HN going the way of reddit. No discussion allowed!
It's that the end of the article or is this behind a paywall? I'm not saying anything else after that on the page