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Comment by asabjorn | Hacker News Reader

There also doesn't seem to be wide awareness that the degrowth people are currently intentionally sabotaging farming output. Sri Lankas food crisis is due to a forced stop in artificial fertilizer use and growth of only organic crops, and there are likewise farmer protests in the Netherlands (5th largest food producer), Belgium, Germany etc due to the governments pushing this.

Closer to home the "inflation reduction act" spends $20 billion to put farmland out of farm use, and also implement incentives to force farmers to significantly reduce production.

This will cause food shortages like it already has in Sri Lanka. Expect huge spikes in food prices like we've seen for gas.

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Sri Lanka's various crises are not a result of degrowth policies, but because the country simply has no money to pay for imports. Including of fertilisers. The arrow of causality is fiscal collapse -> agricultural collapse.

It's possible to look at historical crop yields worldwide, including in advanced / wealthy nations, and see where economic recession or high energy (especially natural gas, the primary feedstock in nitrogen fertiliser) results in lower applications of fertiliser as well as of reduced cultivation, and consequent reduced crop yields.

Again, that's a simple market mechanisms and response to costs, not an ideologically-driven policy of degrowth, deindustrialised ag, or natural / sustainable / organic ag.

Though it is a portent of what might face us would such choices be forced upon the world more generally. This is the notion of a technology trap (also "innovation trap" or "progress trap"). See James Burke's Connections, particularly episode 1, Ronald Wright's Massey Lecture series and books, Joseph Tainter, and many others.

Sri Lanka banned the use and importation of chemical fertilizers before though.

A year ago, not in some distant past.

https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/fertiliser-ban-d...

https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2022/7/15/23218969/sri-la...

As the economic crisis was already in process --- it's been developing since 2019:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019%E2%80%93present_Sri_Lanka...

After the fertilizer ban was implemented, then "Production of tea — Sri Lanka’s main cash crop — fell by 18% in a year. Production of rice — the main food crop — fell by even more" [1]

So you're saying this did not contribute to the food shortage (a drop in domestic production of rice)?

Or you're saying this drop in production would've happened irrespective of the fertilizer ban?

1 https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/why-sri-lanka-is-having-an...

That's not the point I'm addressing.

asabjorn's claim was that ag productivity was directly sabotaged.

That is a highly unlikely reading of a situation I see as:

1. Government which supported fertilizer imports through direct government spending and via reserve foreign currency holdings was unable to support either end of this policy: it had no capacity for funding imports and had rapidly diminishing foreign currency reserves.

2. Amongst other measures taken, fertiliser and pesticide imports were reduced. Because of financial necessity, not as some "degrowth is good" initiative.

3. Resulting ground truth was that ag productivity collapsed, as you note.

Again, the driver was not "let's de-grow the economy", but "we can't afford what we had". In the context of other comments I've made on this thread, what Sri Lanka are experiencing might better be interpreted as an unplanned collapse rather than a longer-term, planned, and engineered de-growth. Sri Lanka's fertiliser ban itself was a consequence, not a driver, of unplanned collapse.

The usual poster-child of the alternative viewpoint might be Cuba. That country also saw a dramatic reduction in foreign support when its patron state the Soviet Union itself collapsed. There was a dramatic and difficult period of adjustment, but the result has been a stable and sufficient existence, if not one at notional OECD / major industrialised nation levels of wealth and income.

Do you have any sources supporting your claims?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32421641

> 2. Amongst other measures taken, fertiliser and pesticide imports were reduced. Because of financial necessity, not as some "degrowth is good" initiative.

In your reuters link seem to contradict your claim: "The dramatic fall in yields follows a decision last April by President Gotabaya Rajapaksa to ban all chemical fertilisers in Sri Lanka". It was officially rolled back after protests, but "only a trickle of chemical fertilisers made it to farms" so it sounds like supply lines acted as if they were still in place.

> 1. Government which supported fertilizer imports through direct government spending and via reserve foreign currency holdings was unable to support either end of this policy: it had no capacity for funding imports and had rapidly diminishing foreign currency reserves.

That doesn't seem like a great excuse for banning fertilizer, or an explanation for why after rollback of ban only a "only a trickle" of fertilizer was available. The claims in my source and reuters seems to be that the supply was not there, not that fertilizer prices were high. Do you have any source saying fertilizer was available at much higher cost?

> https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2022/7/15/23218969/sri-la...

Regardless of competency in Sri Lankas governments execution they have been working with WEF on their sustainable farming goals for a while. This agenda seek to ban fertilizer, make us all eat bugs instead of meat and move to organic farming.

Getting a high ESG score due to meeting sustainability goals grants benefits when getting loans, Sri Lankas is 98, so I share your intuition that a huge contributing factor is that they really need those loans due to long term mismanagement.

As I've pointed out elsewhere other WEF sustainable farming aligned governments such as the Dutch have implemented very similar policies and as abruptly, triggering the same kind of large scale protests and dire outcomes: https://www.dutchnews.nl/news/2022/07/ministry-figures-sugge...

I am at this point taking WEF seriously, as real-world negative outcomes does not seem to stop implementation of their catastrophic tyrannical policies.

As the Vox article you link notes:

According to one estimate, the president’s agrochemical ban was poised to save Sri Lanka the $400 million it was spending yearly on synthetic fertilizer, money it could use toward increasing imports of other goods. But Rajapaksa also argued that chemical fertilizers and pesticides were leading to “adverse health and environmental impacts” and that such industrial farming methods went against the country’s heritage of “sustainable food systems.”

And:

“Sri Lanka started subsidizing fertilizers in the 1960s and we saw that rice yields tripled,” says Saloni Shah, a food and agriculture analyst at the Breakthrough Institute, a US-based environmental nonprofit that advocates for technological solutions.

https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2022/7/15/23218969/sri-la...

The goal was cost savings. It proved misled.

But again, the snowballing economic and fiscal crisis prompted the ban, rather than the other way around.

One-third of Sri Lanka’s farm lands were dormant in 2021 due to the fertilizer ban. Over 90% of Sri Lanka’s farmers had used chemical fertilizers before they were banned. After they were banned, an astonishing 85% experienced crop losses.

The numbers are shocking. After the fertilizer ban, rice production fell 20% and prices skyrocketed 50 percent in just six months. Sri Lanka had to import $450 million worth of rice despite having been self-sufficient in the grain just months earlier. The price of carrots and tomatoes rose five-fold.

While there are just 2 million farmers in Sri Lanka, 15 million of the country’s 22 million people are directly or indirectly dependent on farming.

This article should give you the context and data points showing you do not have all the information

https://michaelshellenberger.substack.com/p/green-dogma-behi...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32431039

Sometimes people just have to see the result of a policy to get it.

Indeed. The problem is that all of us who already know "degrowth" is bad are going to have to suffer through the result along with them.

De-growth policies have absolutely no chance in our day and age. I wouldn't worry about it too much.

You’ve already lived through artificial gas shortages since February 2021 after fracking and gas pipelines were shut down, so that’s demonstrably incorrect. Less easy to spot you’ve seen policy of not building new refineries and oil fields.

Likewise you can see degrowth in food supply pushed by governments in Sri Lanka, Netherlands, Belgium and Germany etc. in the US the “inflation reduction bill” spends 20 billion to put farmland out of use and put regulation in place to make the remainder farmers farming harder like in Sri Lanka.

The february 2021 had causes that are well researched. It's not indicative of anything.

> Less easy to spot you’ve seen policy of not building new refineries and oil fields.

The US has barely built refineries over the last 3 decades. This is not a new phenomenon.

> Likewise you can see degrowth in food supply pushed by governments in Sri Lanka, Netherlands, Belgium and Germany etc. in the US the “inflation reduction bill” spends 20 billion to put farmland out of use and put regulation in place to make the remainder farmers farming harder like in Sri Lanka.

Can you point this out in the bill so I can read it?

Let me look for a good source for the inflation reduction bill.

In the meantime here you can see the catastrophic effect of Sri Lankan style ESG policies in the Netherlands, as projected by their finance ministry. Netherlands is the 5th largest food exporter in the world.

https://www.dutchnews.nl/news/2022/07/ministry-figures-sugge...

The only de-growth policy that matters anyway is having less children, and people do that naturally as they become more affluent.

That narrative (affiliating the collapse of Sri Lanka with ESG, Degrowth) has been getting pushed primarily by people on the other side of the planet with their own political biases (libertarians, preppers, bitcoin maximalists, etc.).

Yes it was a terrible policy to issue an immediate ban on fertilizers, and don't think organizations/ngos associated with the policy should be absolved, but there also has to be a look into where we are in terms of 'planetary boundaries' (Google it) and what it means.

I agree that there are other issues such as huge loans from China ( belt&road is a economic catastrophe where deployed), tourism drop due to covid and a 2019 bombing etc

That said the ESG actions is clearly correlated in the data with 1/3 of farmland laying dormant in 2021, crop losses and yield issues. Many of us won’t forget Sri Lanka was touted by WEF as a ESG poster child before it went south.

This article links to supporting data

https://michaelshellenberger.substack.com/p/green-dogma-behi...

Fair point, I'm not trying to defend ESG (there's all sorts of issues with it), but authors from abroad (like Michael Shellenberger who you link to) are seemingly caricaturizing the Sri Lanka situation (a mix of economic loan entanglement and bad policy) to argue for their narrative.

Shellenberger who you link to is "A self-described ecomodernist, Shellenberger believes that economic growth can continue without negative environmental impacts through technological research and development, usually through a combination of nuclear power and urbanization. A controversial figure, Shellenberger disagrees with most environmentalists over the impacts of environmental threats and policies for addressing them.[2][3] Shellenberger's positions and writings on climate change and environmentalism have received criticism from environmental scientists and academics, calling them "bad science" and "inaccurate"." (via https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Shellenberger )

There are data points in reality supporting the outcome of ESG policies such as 1) 1/3 of Sri Lankan farmland lay dormant after fertilizer ban & forced organic farming 2) 85% of farmers have crop issues 3) yield issues causing food shortages.

Since he describes a catastrophic reality caused directly by very real government policies, this can't just be discounted as a fabricated narrative.

De-growth people will cause mass worldwide starvation in the next 6 months, and the policies are implemented in tyrannical ways so these are tyrants and will soon be murderous tyrants.

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