Green Dogma Behind Fall of Sri Lanka
michaelshellenberger.substack.com
michaelshellenberger.substack.com
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.
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.
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.
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 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]
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.
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.”
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.
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://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.
Edit: Here’s a BBC story from November about the organic fertilizer shipment. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-59202309
> 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.
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.
So much waste and strife comes from big discontinuous jumps that could easily be made smooth and continuous.
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.
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!
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...
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
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.