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Comment by iovrthoughtthis | Hacker News Reader

Why would "kerosene oil and cooking gas" prices rise are a result of organic only agriculture?

Sri Lankans can probably answer this but Sri Lanka is in a vicious cycle - Covid-19 devastated tourism, which reduced the foreign currency reserves, which weakened the Sri Lankan Rupee, which made imports costly for an island that depends on imports for many basic necessities. This combined with harebrained policies of the President have put Sri Lanka, one of the richest countries (by per capita GDP) in the Indian subcontinent onto a path of economic devastation.

I would assume they import fuel so this makes sense too.

The vicious cycle is true (source: Sri Lankan, but not actively living there).

The current president isn't the only one to blame, though. For the past 15 or so years, the government relied more and more on China to basically keep its wheels moving at the comfort of endless projects funded by China. Sri Lanka used to manufacture a lot of things such as tyre, sugar, paper, etc. The over reliance on imported goods didn't play out well, and things such as tyre, sugar, and paper are now at a shortage because the government simply didn't bother to improve the local manufacturing of said goods.

Without intending to start a debate: we see something similar occurring in Venezuela due to a choice to focus on oil production a few years (decade?) back instead balancing food and oil production.

There may well be something to institutional economics and the notion of a holon.

That's the resource curse at play. I do want to believe that Sri Lanka was just a tiny bit more diversified than Venezuela.

Does organic agriculture use more of them? Organic agriculture uses more of a lot of things.

You're probably right there. That could be what is alluded to when they mention that the organic technologies "generates more air pollutants and environmental emissions". Basically they burn more stuff.

more precisely, fixed cost of fuel and transport has not changed but yield is lower. Hence price's rise .

I think widespread panic hording of essentials triggered by the other shortages/price increases.

True, the panic hoarding almost certainly wasn't restricted to foods only. See toilet paper hoarding early in the pandemic.

You can't hord if you don't have money. The local Rupee was depreciated a lot, and the food prices have gone up 20-30% to a point that it is simply too expensive to hord things.

There are some loosely imposed rules that one cannot buy more than 5kg of rice per turn, etc. But I don't see people actively hording things. The long lines are likely because a shop is only allowed to bring in 2-3 customers at once.

If your money is worth less tomorrow you will spend it today. If CPI inflation is really high, that means people will try to empty the shelves before prices have adjusted.

This is why moderate inflation around 2% is good because it stops hoarding of money and why inflation above 10% is destructive because people start hoarding goods.

A currency crash raises local prices...

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