Gee, if only Sri Lanka had played the numbers
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yes, we have no bananas, but they’d be organic if we did
Or at least, I think that’s what this scholar seems to be saying — Sri Lanka’s collapse is due to “the rule of numbers” whatever they are; Hinduism, the Jesuits, and Obama the Anti-Christ also seem to play a role, but I don’t have the time to fully-absorb this man’s writings, so I leave it to the curious reader to do that work.
On the other hand, there may be other forces at work, like the country’s dictat forcing the island country’s entire farming industry to go fully-organic last year; disaster followed immediately.
A couple of weekends ago I spent some time with a fellow who teaches high school science and runs a tiny organic “farm” of one-acre. He insisted on touting the benefits of switching our country’s entire agricultural system to an organic one, and while I do try to avoid arguing with ignorant people, I finally pointed out that Sri Lanka had met disaster trying exactly that. He flatly denied that was possible (mind you, this science teacher had never heard of Sri Lanka, and only dimly remembered a country called Ceylon). I stopped arguing, and just promised I’d send along the article you see below, published last March in Foreign Policy Review — did he read it? For some reason, he’s never acknowledged that he has. I may send him the article on Hindu numerology and Jesuits, since he clearly prefers superstition and modern myths to reality.
In Sri Lanka, Organic Farming Went Catastrophically Wrong
A nationwide experiment is abandoned after producing only misery.
MARCH 5, 2022, 7:00 AM
Faced with a deepening economic and humanitarian crisis, Sri Lanka called off an ill-conceived national experiment in organic agriculture this winter. Sri Lankan President Gotabaya Rajapaksa promised in his 2019 election campaign to transition the country’s farmers to organic agriculture over a period of 10 years. Last April, Rajapaksa’s government made good on that promise, imposing a nationwide ban on the importation and use of synthetic fertilizers and pesticides and ordering the country’s 2 million farmers to go organic.
The result was brutal and swift. Against claims that organic methods can produce comparable yields to conventional farming, domestic rice production fell 20 percent in just the first six months. Sri Lanka, long self-sufficient in rice production, has been forced to import $450 million worth of rice even as domestic prices for this staple of the national diet surged by around 50 percent. The ban also devastated the nation’s tea crop, its primary export and source of foreign exchange.
By November 2021, with tea production falling, the government partially lifted its fertilizer ban on key export crops, including tea, rubber, and coconut. Faced with angry protests, soaring inflation, and the collapse of Sri Lanka’s currency, the government finally suspended the policy for several key crops—including tea, rubber, and coconut—last month, although it continues for some others. The government is also offering $200 million to farmers as direct compensation and an additional $149 million in price subsidies to rice farmers who incurred losses. That hardly made up for the damage and suffering the ban produced. Farmers have widely criticized the payments for being massively insufficient and excluding many farmers, most notably tea producers, who offer one of the main sources of employment in rural Sri Lanka. The drop in tea production alone is estimated to result in economic losses of $425 million.
Human costs have been even greater. Prior to the pandemic’s outbreak, the country had proudly achieved upper-middle-income status. Today, half a million people have sunk back into poverty. Soaring inflation and a rapidly depreciating currency have forced Sri Lankans to cut down on food and fuel purchases as prices surge. The country’s economists have called on the government to default on its debt repayments to buy essential supplies for its people.
…. Sri Lanka’s journey through the organic looking glass and toward calamity began in 2016, with the formation, at Rajapaksa’s behest, of a new civil society movement called Viyathmaga. On its website, Viyathmaga describes its mission as harnessing the “nascent potential of the professionals, academics and entrepreneurs to effectively influence the moral and material development of Sri Lanka.” Viyathmaga allowed Rajapaksa to rise to prominence as an election candidate and facilitated the creation of his election platform. As he prepared his presidential run, the movement produced the “Vistas of Prosperity and Splendour,” a sprawling agenda for the nation that covered everything from national security to anticorruption to education policy, alongside the promise to transition the nation to fully organic agriculture within a decade.
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Having handed its agricultural policy over to organic true believers, many of them involved in businesses that would stand to benefit from the fertilizer ban, the false economy of banning imported fertilizer hurt the Sri Lankan people dearly. The loss of revenue from tea and other export crops dwarfed the reduction in currency outflows from banning imported fertilizer. The bottom line turned even more negative through the increased import of rice and other food stocks. And the budgetary savings from cutting subsidies were ultimately outweighed by the cost of compensating farmers and providing public subsidies for imported food.
Farming is, at bottom, a fairly straightforward thermodynamic enterprise. Nutrient and energy output in the form of calories is determined by nutrient and energy input. For most of recorded human history, the primary way humans increased agricultural production was by adding land to the system, which expanded the amount of solar radiation and soil nutrients available for food production. Human populations were relatively small, under 1 billion people in total, and there was no shortage of arable land to expand onto. For this reason, the vast majority of anthropogenic changes in global land use and deforestation has been the result of agricultural extensification—the process of converting forests and prairie to cropland and pasture. Against popular notions that preindustrial agriculture existed in greater harmony with nature, three-quarters of total global deforestation occurred before the industrial revolution.
Even so, feeding ourselves required directing virtually all human labor to food production. As recently as 200 years ago, more than 90 percent of the global population labored in agriculture. The only way to bring additional energy and nutrients into the system to increase production was to let land lie fallow, rotate crops, use cover crops, or add manure from livestock that either shared the land with the crops or grazed nearby. In almost every case, these practices required additional land and put caps on yields.
….
…. The benefits of synthetic fertilizers though go far beyond simply feeding people. It’s no exaggeration to say that without synthetic fertilizers and other agricultural innovations, there is no urbanization, no industrialization, no global working or middle class, and no secondary education for most people. This is because fertilizer and other agricultural chemicals have substituted human labor, liberating enormous populations from needing to dedicate most of their lifetime labor to growing food.
organic food is a lifestyle choice tied up with notions about personal health and environmental benefits as well as romanticized ideas about agriculture and the natural world. Almost none of these consumers of organic foods grow the food themselves. Organic agriculture for these groups is a niche market—albeit, a lucrative one for many producers—accounting for less than 1 percent of global agricultural production.
…..
While the proximate cause of Sri Lanka’s humanitarian crisis was a bungled attempt to manage its economic fallout from the global pandemic, at the bottom of the political problem was a math problem and at the bottom of the math problem was an ideological problem—or, more accurately, a global ideological movement that is innumerate and unscientific by design, promoting fuzzy and poorly specified claims about the possibilities of alternative food production methods and systems to obfuscate the relatively simple biophysical relationships that govern what goes in; what comes out; and the economic, social, and political outcomes that any agricultural system can produce, whether on a regional, national, or global scale.
