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Sri Lanka’s overnight flip to organic farming has led to an economic disaster

262 points by mhb 5y ago

ur-whale 5y ago
Ideology-based management at its finest
- kunagi7 5y ago
  It's not a good idea to ban chemical fertilizers when your whole food production depends on them. Ecologism may sound like a beautiful thing but it can't be implemented overnight and at scale. It's just ignoring decades of human progress without a proper alternative. 6 months later and the results are already here. Sadly, a lot of people will die from poverty and starvation thanks to this measure. I hope Sri Lankans stand up against this (even if they have to smuggle proper fertilizers into their country).
- speed_spread 5y ago
  Usage of fertilizers and pesticides also underlies an ideology: Massively importing chemicals to boost agricultural production at the cost of soil depletion, bio accumulation and health risks. At some point, regaining control of land usage becomes a matter of sovereignty.
erfgh 5y ago
Government intervention to the market, never fails to destroy.
- i_haz_rabies 5y ago
  Yes, this is like that time that the government banned asbestos and destroyed the residential development market.
- andybak 5y ago
  Yes. That pure regulation free nirvana is the shining example we should emulate. It doesn't exist, you say? Oh but you said...
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
kortilla 5y ago
No shit. The biggest problem with organic is that it’s unsustainable for our population. It’s only useful for rich people to brag about amongst themselves. It’s not even sustainable for the US to switch to organic for its own citizens, even setting aside the food it exports. Wtf was the Sri Lankan govt thinking..
- ceejayoz 5y ago
  > The biggest problem with organic is that it’s unsustainable for our population. It's likely this is also true for the "dump millions of tons of pesticides, fungicides, herbicides, and fertilizers on the Great Plains" approach in the long run.
- kareemm 5y ago
  > The biggest problem with organic is that it’s unsustainable for our population. Do you have a source on this? I've read things that are mostly good when undertaken in a thoughtful way at a reasonable pace.
- pessimizer 5y ago
  If it reduced yield by 20%, that doesn't mean it's unsustainable, it means it's somewhat more expensive. The difference between "rich people" and poor people isn't 20%.
  - kortilla 5y ago
    If we only produce 105% of the food required to feed humanity, a 20% drop is a huge fucking deal. Food isn’t something people can just go without when there is a shortage.
- baybal2 5y ago
  > Wtf was the Sri Lankan govt thinking.. It is thinking whatever any other co with Marxist streak does. They want to look cool, and "revolutionary". A lot of stage moves.
1cvmask 5y ago
The gist of the article is at the bottom regarding the externalities to a push to complete organic farming overnight: Threat to food security? According to experts, three scientifically rigorous meta-analyses of organic-conventional crop yield comparisons indicate that across all crops, the mean yield reduction in organic agriculture in Sri Lanka is around 19-25 per cent. This shows that an overnight shift to organic cultivation presents a clear and imminent threat to the country’s food security. Eminent researchers have also noted that organic farming increases farmland due to its low yields. This results in deforestation, leading to large scale extinction of species and a rise in greenhouse emissions. According to the Annual Review of Resource Economics, organic agriculture generates more air pollutants and environmental emissions in the crop production process for a unit of food than chemical farming. Moreover, organic farming has exponentially higher monetary input costs due to a lack of usage of pest and pathogen-resistant chemicals, which increases manual labour, according to experts. The additional processing and marketing costs of organic produce is also significantly higher, analysts said.
- phkahler 5y ago
  >> According to experts, three scientifically rigorous meta-analyses of organic-conventional crop yield comparisons indicate that across all crops, the mean yield reduction in organic agriculture in Sri Lanka is around 19-25 per cent. For a country that is a "net food importer" it seems obvious that would cause some kind of shock. The other stuff: >> Eminent researchers have also noted that organic farming increases farmland due to its low yields. This results in deforestation, leading to large scale extinction of species and a rise in greenhouse emissions. Longer term. Not relevant to this situation. There is also research showing the opposite, but again that's not the immediate isse. >> organic agriculture generates more air pollutants and environmental emissions in the crop production process for a unit of food than chemical farming. Not relevant. Notice the exclusion of pollutants in the chemical (fertilizer) production process. But again, not relevant to the current situation. >> organic farming has exponentially higher monetary input costs due to a lack of usage of pest and pathogen-resistant chemicals, which increases manual labour, according to experts "exponentially" is an exaggeration. The formerly mentioned increase in area means increase in labor. >> The additional processing and marketing costs of organic produce is also significantly higher, analysts said. You don't really need to do ANY marketing when the government mandated that everyone do it. There's a lot here that's basically anti-organic, but the real problem is that it's simply more expensive, requiring a more land and labor and they didn't account for any of that in the rapid transition.
iovrthoughtthis 5y ago
Why would "kerosene oil and cooking gas" prices rise are a result of organic only agriculture?
- jjoonathan 5y ago
  Does organic agriculture use more of them? Organic agriculture uses more of a lot of things.
  - iovrthoughtthis 5y ago
    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.
  - elisharobinson 5y ago
    more precisely, fixed cost of fuel and transport has not changed but yield is lower. Hence price's rise .
- jimlikeslimes 5y ago
  I think widespread panic hording of essentials triggered by the other shortages/price increases.
  - iovrthoughtthis 5y ago
    True, the panic hoarding almost certainly wasn't restricted to foods only. See toilet paper hoarding early in the pandemic.
  - Ayesh 5y ago
    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.
abc_lisper 5y ago
Green revolution is no joke. To do this countrywide without doing pilot projects and studying the results is kinda lame and stupid
- fennecfoxen 5y ago
  A "revolution" which imposed from above is generally trash, for many of the same reasons that big-bang replacement projects fail. Incremental change is the responsible way forward; it will show you the costs of your decision, and give you time to understand the best practices which will mitigate these costs as you perform a gradual roll-out. Even the successful American Revolution was an incremental change: an effort to preserve a tradition which feted the traditional rights and liberties of Englishmen going back to the Magna Carta. The shift in philosophical underpinnings may have been radical, but the political culture barely changed at all.
vimy 5y ago
The EU wants to push the same dangerous idea with the green deal. Switch 25 % of farms to organic in ten years. Edit: People seem to misunderstand. I don't mean overnight, I mean pushing the same idea = organic farming. It's doesn't work at scale. Doesn't matter if you have ten years or one day.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- m_eiman 5y ago
  As a reference, currently 20% of Sweden's area used for crops is organic. Edit: and 17% of milk production.
- tpm 5y ago
  That's not the same at all.
  - vimy 5y ago
    It will push food prices higher and make the EU more dependent on other regions for food security. It's shortsighted and dangerous.
    - nicoffeine 5y ago
      The EU is already dependent on other regions because without imported synthetic fertilizers and other chemicals, they won't be able to produce the same yields anyway. Most countries there already have 10% or more farmland dedicated to organic practices.[1] They have more tooling and expertise available outside the chemical monocropping approach, which is what doomed the change in Sri Lanka. [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/657572/organic-farmland-share-by-country-european-union-eu/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/657572/organic-farmland-...
- frafra 5y ago
  US Organic and EU organic are two different things. In EU organic "bio", copper pesticides are allowed, and even compounds synthesized by humans in some borderline cases. Differences for wines are even more profound.
iovrthoughtthis 5y ago
I wonder what proportion of this is caused by the speed of change vs the changes them selves. I assume everyone would expect lower yields from more primitive growing and processing technologies.
- phkahler 5y ago
  I would assume a shock to the system as happened until the farmers adapt to something different. To call it more primitive doesn't seem honest. Modern farming practices destroy the soil quality while using shortcuts to get higher yield in spite of that. From what I've read I think the jury is still out on which is better. Obviously organic farming is bad for the fertilizer and pesticide business.
  - iovrthoughtthis 5y ago
    I use "more primitive" based on the assumption that less focused development has gone into the technology for organic farming than chemical farming but if the word provides a negative connotation then, well, that's not what I mean. One of the things I wanted to chime in with, somewhere in the discussion, was that this is the sort of policy which pushes people to develop technologies and that perhaps if deployed more slowly it might have driven innovation in organic farming. Something like a pilot scheme + opt in + subsidies.
  - bluGill 5y ago
    Unlike primitive farming, modern farming is aware of the soil. Primitive farming is what works to a minimal extent, but in general isn't very good for soil health. Modern farming looks to science to figure out what really make soil healthy.
iovrthoughtthis 5y ago
I wonder if they could become a net importer of organic waste?
- aliswe 5y ago
  as an island, that would burn much (non-organic) fuel. they probably have the capacity themselves though, it's just that they haven't adapted yet.
Ayesh 5y ago
The government is trying very hard to preserve its USD reserves. Importing vehicles is downright banned for 16 months now, and there are many rules imposed to control the USD outflow and improve the inflow. I don't think this is anything new amidst a global pandemic, in a country that depended on tourism. Saying that chemical fertilizer ban caused a food shortage isn't any fair or accurate, because the sugar crisis (a can of worms by itself) happened before the fertilizer ban, and the government imposing lockdowns caused the food supply issues. That said, there are many companies increasing their organic fertilizer production, and even smaller scale individual investors who are planning to produce organic fertilizers too. Many of us see this as a net positive, but there must be a ramp, as opposed to an overnight switch.
- draw_down 5y ago
  Come on
- metalliqaz 5y ago
  "Many of us see this as a net positive, but there must be a ramp, as opposed to an overnight switch." Yes, absolutely. The move has to be done gradually to allow farming to adapt. An overnight cutoff would surely cause yields to drop. What isn't clear to me is how much warning was given for the ban. Was it announced ahead of time?
  - Ayesh 5y ago
    The current president was elected in 2019, and I believe it was one of his "visions" to change chemical fertilizers to organic. In the northern parts of the country, where the majority of rice farms are, a considerable percentage of people have kidney diseases that attribute to the use of chemical fertilizer. There is a surplus of rice production in the country, so I don't think the reduced crop will make a big difference. However, the state of tea farming is not the same. Price of Sri Lankan tea (Ceylon tea as it's commonly called) at auctions was slowly going down for the past few years, and tea estates expect the government to make an exception for them. Since this ban was announced, the finance minister was changed to the brother of the current president (another can of worms), who might make necessary changes, exceptions, or probably just delay it to make sure the tea industry isn't disrupted.
gibspaulding 5y ago
This is really sad to see. This seems like a potentially good idea (long term) that was horribly executed. Reminds me of the Munich Linux fiasco [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiMux https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiMux
- spaetzleesser 5y ago
  I don’t think Munich is a good example. From what I know things were working reasonably well but Microsoft muscled their way back in with a lot of money and lobbying. If anything Munich is a warning that businesses will do whatever they can to obstruct progress if it doesn’t make money for them. If there was a broad movement towards organic farming I would expect a similar thing: corporations will put out a lot of propaganda and buy off politicians to stop this.
mellavora 5y ago
All posts I'm seeing here are highly critical of organic farming. And most are based on a very short-term picture, which ignores the long-term costs of chemical-based farming: the incredible soil depletion and insect population depletion. Chem-based clearly gives higher yields for a period of 50-80 years, but what happens after that? Organic/permaculture is sustainable and possible even for our large populations. It presents challenges to some other assumptions of our highly industrialized food supply chain, but that doesn't mean it can't feed the globe. It just makes it harder for one or two companies to monopolize everything.
- COGlory 5y ago
  Organic and permaculture are very different things. Studies have shown organic farms use more fertilizer than non-organic to produce the same yield.
  - eurasiantiger 5y ago
    These results may be skewed by use of non-GMO/GMO crops, which tend to correlate with organic/non-organic farming. Organic farming methods can be used with GMO crops, however. Important note: not all GMO is done to vendor lock farmers, most of it is actually beneficial to food quality and availability
    - simiones 5y ago
      I think studies in the EU, which bans GMOs but does plenty of non-organic farming, should address this. However, I don't know of any to cite, or what the results may be.
    - pueblito 5y ago
      > Important note: not all GMO is done to vendor lock farmers, most of it is actually beneficial to food quality and availability I am a farmer, that is absolutely not true. All GMO crops are made to be more profitable to the farmer, with the goals of increased bulk yields, longer shelf stability and decreased water usage. Something like 95% of all corn grown in America isn’t even for human consumption, they’re certainly not selecting for food quality and availability.
addicted 5y ago
This tells us less about the viability of organic farming and more about the idea that one can change an entire nation's agriculture system overnight by fiat. Zimbabwe tried that and failed (no organic farming needed there). And now Sri Lanka is trying it and failing. A more sensible approach would be to phase it in with the right incentives for organic farming and adding the cost of externalizes to the price of non organic farm produce in a phased in manner.
- TMWNN 5y ago
  >Zimbabwe tried that and failed (no organic farming needed there). Recent history of Zimbabwe (<http://imgur.com/a/VdQdD http://imgur.com/a/VdQdD>)
  - imtringued 5y ago
    Some parts of Marxism are incredibly strange. I advocate for land value taxes which is basically a big middle finger to land owners. Yet Marx will suggest people seize the "means of production" in this case the land. But there is a big reason why the evil white land owner had that land. He utilized it the most in the short term even if that means destroying it over the long term. The reason why capitalism works so well for poor countries is that they have decades of growth ahead of them and capitalism forces growth at the cost of exploitation.
vishnugupta 5y ago
> At the root of this economic catastrophe is a bizarre overnight flip by Rajapaksa’s government on 29 April to ban the import of chemical fertilisers and any other agrochemicals to make the Indian Ocean nation the first in the world to practice organic-only agriculture. Time and again we see this top-down police push that don't consult key stake holders (farmers, merchants, consumers etc.,) or fail to consider their feedback ending in a disaster. To top it off they rolled it out 100% (No A/B experiment, so to speak). These big changes have higher order effects that manifest post launch and can't easily be predicted. They denied themselves a chance to adopt to those higher order effects by launching it overnight. The result is not too surprising.
- yarcob 5y ago
  The unsurprising result is that naysayers call the change a failure before the first harvest after the change. They "predict" that they will lose 50% of the harvest. Let's not call it a failure just yet and see how this turns out after a few years. Sure, sudden change is disruptive, but humans are adaptable and can accomplish amazing things in a crisis. If they don't revert it and stay organic only, maybe they'll have an amazing reputation and a huge competitive edge in a decade.
  - bserge 5y ago
    As long as you're not one of those who need to adapt, I guess. They won't have an edge. The green revolution is what allowed population to boom. Now some people are like "yeah, let's go back to before"? Sounds a lot like the people who shun vaccines and medication.
  - Veen 5y ago
    > Sure, sudden change is disruptive, but humans are adaptable Yes, the population can adapt downwards as people starve or migrate somewhere else. After a decade or so, the people who are left will be in an excellent position to sell organic tea to middle-class Americans. Similar arguments were made in defence of collectivization in the 1920s. The complacency is astounding.
- eadmund 5y ago
dathinab 5y ago
What matters is not organic farming, bio farming, no-chemistry farming or anything like that. What matters is substainable farming. And what is often labeled as BIO/organic is often not the most substainable farming method. It's to much focused on categorizing thinks by their origin instead of categorizing them by their effect specific to their usage. (And over night switches to anything tend to not be a good idea.)
xyzelement 5y ago
> Former central bank deputy governor W.A. Wijewardena reportedly termed the organic plan as a “dream with unimaginable social, political and economic costs”. He said Sri Lanka’s food security had been “compromised Those of us who have managed projects and built stuff can recognize the flaw. It is the difference between "what we'd like to be true" and having a solid plan for getting there. Probably having all organic farming is a great goal but probably could have been predicted to backfire if done overnight. Specifically: don't kill your inorganic farming before your organic farming produces enough for you to eat. This pattern of failure can be seen everywhere. Don't give up your strategic base in Afghanistan until all your people are evacuated. Don't shut down your nuclear power plants until your renewables have actually proven to produce enough. Idealism is great for visualizing the future. But unchecked idealism will kill you. I am not sure about the politics of Sri Lanka but I see in the US people rally around which politician can paint the rosiest picture of the future rather than the tempered pragmatic who can make iterative progress towards a better place.
guerby 5y ago
Looks like a hit piece to me. "The result: (...) kerosene oil and cooking gas prices are surging" Hmm what the relation from cooking gas prices to organic farming? "According to the Annual Review of Resource Economics, organic agriculture generates more air pollutants and environmental emissions in the crop production process for a unit of food than chemical farming." Reading the paper : https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/10.1146/annurev-resource-100517-023252#_i17 https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/10.1146/annurev-resource-1... "The evidence suggests that organic agriculture uses less energy per unit of land, and to a lesser extent, also per unit of output than conventional agriculture " No mention of other air pollution I could find. Nice to point to a paper that says the exact opposite of what the press article says. I didn't check the rest, I'm assuming pesticide and chemical fertilizer producer saw a nice opportunity (fall of income due to COVID impact on tourism) to avoid organic contagion to other countries through cheap to corrupt journalists.
- brandmeyer 5y ago
  > Hmm what the relation from cooking gas prices to organic farming? Organic practices -> Lost productivity per acre + increased costs per acre -> Loss of export profits -> Currency devaluation relative to international currencies (USD, EUR) -> Increasing prices of imports All of that process is plainly stated in the article.
- mardifoufs 5y ago
  Probably because a bad harvest can have disastrous results that are felt across the economy? Shortages of foreign currency can usually mean shortages of goods inside a country, as governments either try to minimize forex outflows (and thus imports) or is just forced to after running out. And honestly that's a very very weird argument. You are saying that a real life result has to be discounted because of a... Research paper? Especially one that obviously doesn't take into account the particularities of Sri Lanka? Actually scratch that, the study you linked doesn't say what you are saying at all. It's much more nuanced and frankly it makes the "it's big agro corrupt journalists" narrative even more ridiculous. > These results should not be extrapolated, as unbiased evidence about organic yield effects under real-world conditions is limited (Kravchenko et al. 2017, Leifeld 2016). In any case, given the higher knowledge requirements for successful organic farming, it is likely that the average yield gaps would rise if an increasing number of farmers would adopt organic practices. >However, where modern inputs are available and more commonly used, organic farmers typically have lower yields than conventional farmers. Yield gaps tend to increase during the process of economic development (Valkila 2009).The yield gaps imply that more land would be required to produce the same quantity of output with organic methods >The conclusion that organic farming is not the global blueprint for sustainable agriculture does not mean that organic methods cannot be useful in specific situations. Under certain conditions, organic farming can be clearly positive for the environment, even when the effects are measured per unit of output. So that's exactly what it is saying : organic farming can be good, probably can't replace conventional methods, and if you want the yields to even start comparing somewhat favorably with conventional agriculture you need to build a lot of institutional knowledge, provide resources to farmers and time. It's better than traditional, very small scale agriculture, but if the inputs for "chemical" farming are there you should probably use them. That's a lot of caveats and they mostly don't apply to this situation.
a-nikolaev 5y ago
> “The ban has drawn the tea industry into complete disarray… If we go completely organic, we will lose 50 per cent of the crop, (but) we are not going to get 50 per cent higher prices,” he reportedly said. To break even, you need to double prices (i.e. 100% higher), not 50% higher. Very strange expert.
streamofdigits 5y ago
This feels like a perfect summary of the struggle (political, economic, social) that lies ahead for the entire planet. The post most likely has a political agenda so outsiders commenting walk into a landmine but anyways, here my two cents worth of observations, more as generally commentary Doing nothing is not an option: Controlling the water consumption, chemical effluent, deforestation, biodiversity impact etc of ever growing agricultural activity is a no-brainer. Yet: * any misstep in the so-called "transition" or adaptation will be ruthlessly exploited by those who basically do not care what comes down a few generations. Even well-meaning politicians will be reluctant to be proactive or first movers if they face crucifixion. * more specifically: the food scarcity scare will be used cunningly to protect existing agribusiness interests from lost profits. NB: Tea is a export oriented cash crop. This does not mean its not important (if those exports finance food imports, or even just because a whole bunch of people make their living though this) but conflating unrelated interests is not how an honest society solves problems I just hope that the people of this beautiful and remote island (Arthur C. Clarke lived there BTW I wonder what he would have thought) find a way to transition and thrive in a sustainable future...
- refurb 5y ago
  So your take is: - we have to make this transition - if there is any pushback or stumbles during the transition it’s not because the transition is wrong, but because of nefarious forces?
  - nextaccountic 5y ago
    I think it's more like, there will be people sabotaging the transition at every step, using any misstep as an argument to not do make transition at all.
    - lvs 5y ago
      That seems to be what's happened so far.
  - streamofdigits 5y ago
Jeff_Brown 5y ago
> "a former army general has been appointed as ‘commissioner general of essential services’ to raid and seize food stocks. The officer has been tasked to ensure sale of products at government-named prices or on custom import costs." So many leaders, when their anti-market policies fail, double down. This will further reduce supply, by demotivating farmers. It will help only the lucky few consumers who are first in line, before the shelves are empty.
pueblito 5y ago
I am a commercial organic farmer. I have trouble sourcing something every year and I live in the United States and have resources available to me to afford exotic things like potash from Alaska or pathogens to kill grasshoppers. If it’s a wet spring and I need more pest mitigation I can have a hundred guinea hens mailed express for $200. I’m poorly traveled and ignorant of Sri Lanka but I believe it’s a very poor country where $200 is a lot to ask for let alone luxuries like pest pathogens, ag netting, soil testing etc etc… And if you don’t have all that, then going organic is going to absolutely destroy yields and you cannot have a modern society if everyone is farming
- MomoXenosaga 5y ago
  I frequently buy organic produce and it is consistently more expensive. I am willing and able to pay for it but even in rich Western countries organic farming is a tiny niche.
- quanto 5y ago
  How could one order a hundred guinea hens for $200 shipped? Is this a birds-as-a-service model where you rent birds for farming? A genuine question.
  - pueblito 5y ago
    Here’s an example. The guinea hens eat the bugs and aggressively chase rattlesnakes out, and then coyotes and hawks eat the hens. Like most things it’s a mixed blessing because the snakes keep the rodent and rabbits population in check. https://www.metzerfarms.com/GuineaFowl.cfm https://www.metzerfarms.com/GuineaFowl.cfm
necovek 5y ago
The fun with percentages: people get it wrong even when it hugely affects their bottom line. > “The ban has drawn the tea industry into complete disarray… If we go completely organic, we will lose 50 per cent of the crop, (but) we are not going to get 50 per cent higher prices” Thinking simplistically like that (the entirety of the cost is not in production, ofc), you need 100 per cent higher prices (double) to cover for losing 50 per cent (half) of the crop — this "tea conglomerate expert" has not thought this through :) Percentages are so ingrained in our culture, but with them being a relative measure, they are so easy to confuse. Why not speak in simpler terms to help yourselves? "Losing half the crop, we'll need to double the prices (to break even)."
burglekutt 5y ago
Book recommendation: The Wizard and the Prophet: https://www.amazon.com/Wizard-Prophet-Remarkable-Scientists-Tomorrows-ebook/dp/B071D3CZG4 https://www.amazon.com/Wizard-Prophet-Remarkable-Scientists-... It’s a history of the step changes in ag yield due to (generally “non-organic”) optimizations, and two scientists’ competing visions of what things we should be optimizing for (feeding hungry people now, food security, “naturalness”, long-term soil health, use of chemicals, energy efficiency, aesthetics, crop diversity, etc).
akamaka 5y ago
Here’s a better article that is less ideological: https://www.news18.com/news/explainers/explained-why-sri-lankas-food-crisis-is-actually-a-forex-problem-4167188.html https://www.news18.com/news/explainers/explained-why-sri-lan... In summary, Sri Lanka has been facing an economic crisis and is struggling to pay for imports with rising exchange rates. One of the effects of this has been a push to reduce dependence on foreign imports across many sectors — including fertilizer.
- coldcode 5y ago
  This should be the article discussed. It barely mentions organic farming, other than concerns about the lack of fertilizer.
  - natmaka 5y ago
    Indeed. This is a political (since 2018) and mainly financial crisis, and an attempt to adopt some organic practices is one of the effects. http://www.srilankaguardian.org/2021/07/sri-lanka-manufactured-crisis.html http://www.srilankaguardian.org/2021/07/sri-lanka-manufactur... https://www.bbc.com/news/business-58390292 https://www.bbc.com/news/business-58390292
- duxup 5y ago
  >As the country saw an economic boom in the post-LTTE years, it increasingly turned to foreign borrowings through the issue of sovereign bonds. But outside of tourism and certain exports, the country hardly managed to ensure it was attracting enough FDIs and foreign funds to meet its rising debt obligations. So was this economic boom purely internal demand as a result of the borrowing?
  - baybal2 5y ago
    > So was this economic boom purely internal demand as a result of the borrowing? Yes, correct. The two consequent previous governments borrowed like crazy to pull "economic development" like a rabbit out of a hat.
temporalparts 5y ago
One thing that's worth talking about is the approach that the government took. The sudden ban on a vital component of their agriculture (non-organic chemical fertilizer) had some bad non-obvious impacts. A better strategy towards the shift to organic (regardless of how you feel about the move itself) would have been to impose an ever increasing tax to understand the long-term impacts of moving away from something their economy heavily relied on.
seattle-hippie 5y ago
Organic farming could also depleted soil nutrients the same way as modern agriculture. Regenerative farming could be a sustainable alternative to this problem. I think politics failed here to really understand how to transition to a sustainable model. Check producer Gave Brown https://youtu.be/QfTZ0rnowcc https://youtu.be/QfTZ0rnowcc
temphnaccount 5y ago
Here is the summary in video from the same media house which discusses some other points in detail (it's as opinionated as the original article about organic farming though) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nVHUwvC7Og0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nVHUwvC7Og0
snambi 5y ago
Good decision. but there will be a short term impact. theprint.in artciles are generally biased and paid for by the big industry, so don't take it as fact.
KingOfCoders 5y ago
"The national debt has soared from close to $48 billion in 2016 to $86 billion in 2021." The dollar reserves went from $8bn to $3bn. The country regulated imports including fertilizers.
mikeiz404 5y ago
Some highlights from the article: According to an estimate, tea is Sri Lanka’s single biggest export, bringing in over $1.25 billion/year, which is nearly 10 per cent of the country’s export income. … An island-wide survey of farmers found out that 90 per cent use chemicals for farming and 85 per cent expected sizable reductions in their harvest if disallowed to use fertilisers. Moreover, the survey said that only 20 per cent farmers had the knowledge to transition to completely organic production. … The survey also revealed that many key crops in Sri Lanka depend on heavy use of chemical input for cultivation, with the highest dependency in paddy at 94 per cent, followed by tea and rubber at 89 per cent each. … According to experts, three scientifically rigorous meta-analyses of organic-conventional crop yield comparisons indicate that across all crops, the mean yield reduction in organic agriculture in Sri Lanka is around 19-25 per cent. … The article also states 2-3 million tons is estimated to be produced locally per year, and paddy cultivation requires 4 million tons per year and tea cultivation requires 3 million tons per year. So they are short there.
aaroninsf 5y ago
Problems with the article aside, I will make a de rigeur observation: Unsustainable agriculture, decorously defended as "economic" with its innumerable deferred and eternalized costs neatly ignored in polite company, is a civilizational dead end.
tsjq 5y ago
China will come to the "rescue" and in exchange for take over of some more cities / ports of SriLanka forever.
someonewhocar3s 5y ago
It is well known that incremental improvement wins the race. This was political, which means that the 'economic distaster' is actually just their scram-manouvre. Sri Lanka will be well known for it's healthy and national food. They just refuse to be the land where fertilizer is celled into crisps.
errantmind 5y ago
It is possible to grow organically with nearly equal yield to non-organic, but requires a total shift in philosophy and methods. See KNF and JADAM which had proven this in Korea, Hawaii, and parts of China

262 points by mhb 5y ago

ur-whale 5y ago

Ideology-based management at its finest

kunagi7 5y ago
It's not a good idea to ban chemical fertilizers when your whole food production depends on them. Ecologism may sound like a beautiful thing but it can't be implemented overnight and at scale. It's just ignoring decades of human progress without a proper alternative. 6 months later and the results are already here. Sadly, a lot of people will die from poverty and starvation thanks to this measure. I hope Sri Lankans stand up against this (even if they have to smuggle proper fertilizers into their country).
speed_spread 5y ago
Usage of fertilizers and pesticides also underlies an ideology: Massively importing chemicals to boost agricultural production at the cost of soil depletion, bio accumulation and health risks. At some point, regaining control of land usage becomes a matter of sovereignty.

erfgh 5y ago

Government intervention to the market, never fails to destroy.

i_haz_rabies 5y ago
Yes, this is like that time that the government banned asbestos and destroyed the residential development market.
andybak 5y ago
Yes. That pure regulation free nirvana is the shining example we should emulate. It doesn't exist, you say? Oh but you said...

deleted 5y ago

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kortilla 5y ago

No shit. The biggest problem with organic is that it’s unsustainable for our population. It’s only useful for rich people to brag about amongst themselves. It’s not even sustainable for the US to switch to organic for its own citizens, even setting aside the food it exports. Wtf was the Sri Lankan govt thinking..

ceejayoz 5y ago
> The biggest problem with organic is that it’s unsustainable for our population. It's likely this is also true for the "dump millions of tons of pesticides, fungicides, herbicides, and fertilizers on the Great Plains" approach in the long run.
kareemm 5y ago
> The biggest problem with organic is that it’s unsustainable for our population. Do you have a source on this? I've read things that are mostly good when undertaken in a thoughtful way at a reasonable pace.
pessimizer 5y ago
If it reduced yield by 20%, that doesn't mean it's unsustainable, it means it's somewhat more expensive. The difference between "rich people" and poor people isn't 20%.
- kortilla 5y ago
  If we only produce 105% of the food required to feed humanity, a 20% drop is a huge fucking deal. Food isn’t something people can just go without when there is a shortage.
baybal2 5y ago
> Wtf was the Sri Lankan govt thinking.. It is thinking whatever any other co with Marxist streak does. They want to look cool, and "revolutionary". A lot of stage moves.

1cvmask 5y ago

The gist of the article is at the bottom regarding the externalities to a push to complete organic farming overnight: Threat to food security? According to experts, three scientifically rigorous meta-analyses of organic-conventional crop yield comparisons indicate that across all crops, the mean yield reduction in organic agriculture in Sri Lanka is around 19-25 per cent. This shows that an overnight shift to organic cultivation presents a clear and imminent threat to the country’s food security. Eminent researchers have also noted that organic farming increases farmland due to its low yields. This results in deforestation, leading to large scale extinction of species and a rise in greenhouse emissions. According to the Annual Review of Resource Economics, organic agriculture generates more air pollutants and environmental emissions in the crop production process for a unit of food than chemical farming. Moreover, organic farming has exponentially higher monetary input costs due to a lack of usage of pest and pathogen-resistant chemicals, which increases manual labour, according to experts. The additional processing and marketing costs of organic produce is also significantly higher, analysts said.

phkahler 5y ago
>> According to experts, three scientifically rigorous meta-analyses of organic-conventional crop yield comparisons indicate that across all crops, the mean yield reduction in organic agriculture in Sri Lanka is around 19-25 per cent. For a country that is a "net food importer" it seems obvious that would cause some kind of shock. The other stuff: >> Eminent researchers have also noted that organic farming increases farmland due to its low yields. This results in deforestation, leading to large scale extinction of species and a rise in greenhouse emissions. Longer term. Not relevant to this situation. There is also research showing the opposite, but again that's not the immediate isse. >> organic agriculture generates more air pollutants and environmental emissions in the crop production process for a unit of food than chemical farming. Not relevant. Notice the exclusion of pollutants in the chemical (fertilizer) production process. But again, not relevant to the current situation. >> organic farming has exponentially higher monetary input costs due to a lack of usage of pest and pathogen-resistant chemicals, which increases manual labour, according to experts "exponentially" is an exaggeration. The formerly mentioned increase in area means increase in labor. >> The additional processing and marketing costs of organic produce is also significantly higher, analysts said. You don't really need to do ANY marketing when the government mandated that everyone do it. There's a lot here that's basically anti-organic, but the real problem is that it's simply more expensive, requiring a more land and labor and they didn't account for any of that in the rapid transition.

iovrthoughtthis 5y ago

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

jjoonathan 5y ago
Does organic agriculture use more of them? Organic agriculture uses more of a lot of things.
- iovrthoughtthis 5y ago
  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.
- elisharobinson 5y ago
  more precisely, fixed cost of fuel and transport has not changed but yield is lower. Hence price's rise .
jimlikeslimes 5y ago
I think widespread panic hording of essentials triggered by the other shortages/price increases.
- iovrthoughtthis 5y ago
  True, the panic hoarding almost certainly wasn't restricted to foods only. See toilet paper hoarding early in the pandemic.
- Ayesh 5y ago
  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.

abc_lisper 5y ago

Green revolution is no joke. To do this countrywide without doing pilot projects and studying the results is kinda lame and stupid

fennecfoxen 5y ago
A "revolution" which imposed from above is generally trash, for many of the same reasons that big-bang replacement projects fail. Incremental change is the responsible way forward; it will show you the costs of your decision, and give you time to understand the best practices which will mitigate these costs as you perform a gradual roll-out. Even the successful American Revolution was an incremental change: an effort to preserve a tradition which feted the traditional rights and liberties of Englishmen going back to the Magna Carta. The shift in philosophical underpinnings may have been radical, but the political culture barely changed at all.

vimy 5y ago

The EU wants to push the same dangerous idea with the green deal. Switch 25 % of farms to organic in ten years. Edit: People seem to misunderstand. I don't mean overnight, I mean pushing the same idea = organic farming. It's doesn't work at scale. Doesn't matter if you have ten years or one day.

deleted 5y ago
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m_eiman 5y ago
As a reference, currently 20% of Sweden's area used for crops is organic. Edit: and 17% of milk production.
tpm 5y ago
That's not the same at all.
- vimy 5y ago
  It will push food prices higher and make the EU more dependent on other regions for food security. It's shortsighted and dangerous.
  - nicoffeine 5y ago
    The EU is already dependent on other regions because without imported synthetic fertilizers and other chemicals, they won't be able to produce the same yields anyway. Most countries there already have 10% or more farmland dedicated to organic practices.[1] They have more tooling and expertise available outside the chemical monocropping approach, which is what doomed the change in Sri Lanka. [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/657572/organic-farmland-share-by-country-european-union-eu/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/657572/organic-farmland-...
frafra 5y ago
US Organic and EU organic are two different things. In EU organic "bio", copper pesticides are allowed, and even compounds synthesized by humans in some borderline cases. Differences for wines are even more profound.

iovrthoughtthis 5y ago

I wonder what proportion of this is caused by the speed of change vs the changes them selves. I assume everyone would expect lower yields from more primitive growing and processing technologies.

phkahler 5y ago
I would assume a shock to the system as happened until the farmers adapt to something different. To call it more primitive doesn't seem honest. Modern farming practices destroy the soil quality while using shortcuts to get higher yield in spite of that. From what I've read I think the jury is still out on which is better. Obviously organic farming is bad for the fertilizer and pesticide business.
- iovrthoughtthis 5y ago
  I use "more primitive" based on the assumption that less focused development has gone into the technology for organic farming than chemical farming but if the word provides a negative connotation then, well, that's not what I mean. One of the things I wanted to chime in with, somewhere in the discussion, was that this is the sort of policy which pushes people to develop technologies and that perhaps if deployed more slowly it might have driven innovation in organic farming. Something like a pilot scheme + opt in + subsidies.
- bluGill 5y ago
  Unlike primitive farming, modern farming is aware of the soil. Primitive farming is what works to a minimal extent, but in general isn't very good for soil health. Modern farming looks to science to figure out what really make soil healthy.

iovrthoughtthis 5y ago

I wonder if they could become a net importer of organic waste?

aliswe 5y ago
as an island, that would burn much (non-organic) fuel. they probably have the capacity themselves though, it's just that they haven't adapted yet.

Ayesh 5y ago

The government is trying very hard to preserve its USD reserves. Importing vehicles is downright banned for 16 months now, and there are many rules imposed to control the USD outflow and improve the inflow. I don't think this is anything new amidst a global pandemic, in a country that depended on tourism. Saying that chemical fertilizer ban caused a food shortage isn't any fair or accurate, because the sugar crisis (a can of worms by itself) happened before the fertilizer ban, and the government imposing lockdowns caused the food supply issues. That said, there are many companies increasing their organic fertilizer production, and even smaller scale individual investors who are planning to produce organic fertilizers too. Many of us see this as a net positive, but there must be a ramp, as opposed to an overnight switch.

draw_down 5y ago
Come on
metalliqaz 5y ago
"Many of us see this as a net positive, but there must be a ramp, as opposed to an overnight switch." Yes, absolutely. The move has to be done gradually to allow farming to adapt. An overnight cutoff would surely cause yields to drop. What isn't clear to me is how much warning was given for the ban. Was it announced ahead of time?
- Ayesh 5y ago
  The current president was elected in 2019, and I believe it was one of his "visions" to change chemical fertilizers to organic. In the northern parts of the country, where the majority of rice farms are, a considerable percentage of people have kidney diseases that attribute to the use of chemical fertilizer. There is a surplus of rice production in the country, so I don't think the reduced crop will make a big difference. However, the state of tea farming is not the same. Price of Sri Lankan tea (Ceylon tea as it's commonly called) at auctions was slowly going down for the past few years, and tea estates expect the government to make an exception for them. Since this ban was announced, the finance minister was changed to the brother of the current president (another can of worms), who might make necessary changes, exceptions, or probably just delay it to make sure the tea industry isn't disrupted.

gibspaulding 5y ago

This is really sad to see. This seems like a potentially good idea (long term) that was horribly executed. Reminds me of the Munich Linux fiasco [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiMux https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiMux

spaetzleesser 5y ago
I don’t think Munich is a good example. From what I know things were working reasonably well but Microsoft muscled their way back in with a lot of money and lobbying. If anything Munich is a warning that businesses will do whatever they can to obstruct progress if it doesn’t make money for them. If there was a broad movement towards organic farming I would expect a similar thing: corporations will put out a lot of propaganda and buy off politicians to stop this.

mellavora 5y ago

All posts I'm seeing here are highly critical of organic farming. And most are based on a very short-term picture, which ignores the long-term costs of chemical-based farming: the incredible soil depletion and insect population depletion. Chem-based clearly gives higher yields for a period of 50-80 years, but what happens after that? Organic/permaculture is sustainable and possible even for our large populations. It presents challenges to some other assumptions of our highly industrialized food supply chain, but that doesn't mean it can't feed the globe. It just makes it harder for one or two companies to monopolize everything.

COGlory 5y ago
Organic and permaculture are very different things. Studies have shown organic farms use more fertilizer than non-organic to produce the same yield.
- eurasiantiger 5y ago
  These results may be skewed by use of non-GMO/GMO crops, which tend to correlate with organic/non-organic farming. Organic farming methods can be used with GMO crops, however. Important note: not all GMO is done to vendor lock farmers, most of it is actually beneficial to food quality and availability
  - simiones 5y ago
    I think studies in the EU, which bans GMOs but does plenty of non-organic farming, should address this. However, I don't know of any to cite, or what the results may be.
  - pueblito 5y ago
    > Important note: not all GMO is done to vendor lock farmers, most of it is actually beneficial to food quality and availability I am a farmer, that is absolutely not true. All GMO crops are made to be more profitable to the farmer, with the goals of increased bulk yields, longer shelf stability and decreased water usage. Something like 95% of all corn grown in America isn’t even for human consumption, they’re certainly not selecting for food quality and availability.

addicted 5y ago

This tells us less about the viability of organic farming and more about the idea that one can change an entire nation's agriculture system overnight by fiat. Zimbabwe tried that and failed (no organic farming needed there). And now Sri Lanka is trying it and failing. A more sensible approach would be to phase it in with the right incentives for organic farming and adding the cost of externalizes to the price of non organic farm produce in a phased in manner.

TMWNN 5y ago
>Zimbabwe tried that and failed (no organic farming needed there). Recent history of Zimbabwe (<http://imgur.com/a/VdQdD http://imgur.com/a/VdQdD>)
- imtringued 5y ago
  Some parts of Marxism are incredibly strange. I advocate for land value taxes which is basically a big middle finger to land owners. Yet Marx will suggest people seize the "means of production" in this case the land. But there is a big reason why the evil white land owner had that land. He utilized it the most in the short term even if that means destroying it over the long term. The reason why capitalism works so well for poor countries is that they have decades of growth ahead of them and capitalism forces growth at the cost of exploitation.

vishnugupta 5y ago

> At the root of this economic catastrophe is a bizarre overnight flip by Rajapaksa’s government on 29 April to ban the import of chemical fertilisers and any other agrochemicals to make the Indian Ocean nation the first in the world to practice organic-only agriculture. Time and again we see this top-down police push that don't consult key stake holders (farmers, merchants, consumers etc.,) or fail to consider their feedback ending in a disaster. To top it off they rolled it out 100% (No A/B experiment, so to speak). These big changes have higher order effects that manifest post launch and can't easily be predicted. They denied themselves a chance to adopt to those higher order effects by launching it overnight. The result is not too surprising.

yarcob 5y ago
The unsurprising result is that naysayers call the change a failure before the first harvest after the change. They "predict" that they will lose 50% of the harvest. Let's not call it a failure just yet and see how this turns out after a few years. Sure, sudden change is disruptive, but humans are adaptable and can accomplish amazing things in a crisis. If they don't revert it and stay organic only, maybe they'll have an amazing reputation and a huge competitive edge in a decade.
- bserge 5y ago
  As long as you're not one of those who need to adapt, I guess. They won't have an edge. The green revolution is what allowed population to boom. Now some people are like "yeah, let's go back to before"? Sounds a lot like the people who shun vaccines and medication.
- Veen 5y ago
  > Sure, sudden change is disruptive, but humans are adaptable Yes, the population can adapt downwards as people starve or migrate somewhere else. After a decade or so, the people who are left will be in an excellent position to sell organic tea to middle-class Americans. Similar arguments were made in defence of collectivization in the 1920s. The complacency is astounding.
eadmund 5y ago

dathinab 5y ago

What matters is not organic farming, bio farming, no-chemistry farming or anything like that. What matters is substainable farming. And what is often labeled as BIO/organic is often not the most substainable farming method. It's to much focused on categorizing thinks by their origin instead of categorizing them by their effect specific to their usage. (And over night switches to anything tend to not be a good idea.)

xyzelement 5y ago

> Former central bank deputy governor W.A. Wijewardena reportedly termed the organic plan as a “dream with unimaginable social, political and economic costs”. He said Sri Lanka’s food security had been “compromised Those of us who have managed projects and built stuff can recognize the flaw. It is the difference between "what we'd like to be true" and having a solid plan for getting there. Probably having all organic farming is a great goal but probably could have been predicted to backfire if done overnight. Specifically: don't kill your inorganic farming before your organic farming produces enough for you to eat. This pattern of failure can be seen everywhere. Don't give up your strategic base in Afghanistan until all your people are evacuated. Don't shut down your nuclear power plants until your renewables have actually proven to produce enough. Idealism is great for visualizing the future. But unchecked idealism will kill you. I am not sure about the politics of Sri Lanka but I see in the US people rally around which politician can paint the rosiest picture of the future rather than the tempered pragmatic who can make iterative progress towards a better place.

guerby 5y ago

Looks like a hit piece to me. "The result: (...) kerosene oil and cooking gas prices are surging" Hmm what the relation from cooking gas prices to organic farming? "According to the Annual Review of Resource Economics, organic agriculture generates more air pollutants and environmental emissions in the crop production process for a unit of food than chemical farming." Reading the paper : https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/10.1146/annurev-resource-100517-023252#_i17 https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/10.1146/annurev-resource-1... "The evidence suggests that organic agriculture uses less energy per unit of land, and to a lesser extent, also per unit of output than conventional agriculture " No mention of other air pollution I could find. Nice to point to a paper that says the exact opposite of what the press article says. I didn't check the rest, I'm assuming pesticide and chemical fertilizer producer saw a nice opportunity (fall of income due to COVID impact on tourism) to avoid organic contagion to other countries through cheap to corrupt journalists.

brandmeyer 5y ago
> Hmm what the relation from cooking gas prices to organic farming? Organic practices -> Lost productivity per acre + increased costs per acre -> Loss of export profits -> Currency devaluation relative to international currencies (USD, EUR) -> Increasing prices of imports All of that process is plainly stated in the article.
mardifoufs 5y ago
Probably because a bad harvest can have disastrous results that are felt across the economy? Shortages of foreign currency can usually mean shortages of goods inside a country, as governments either try to minimize forex outflows (and thus imports) or is just forced to after running out. And honestly that's a very very weird argument. You are saying that a real life result has to be discounted because of a... Research paper? Especially one that obviously doesn't take into account the particularities of Sri Lanka? Actually scratch that, the study you linked doesn't say what you are saying at all. It's much more nuanced and frankly it makes the "it's big agro corrupt journalists" narrative even more ridiculous. > These results should not be extrapolated, as unbiased evidence about organic yield effects under real-world conditions is limited (Kravchenko et al. 2017, Leifeld 2016). In any case, given the higher knowledge requirements for successful organic farming, it is likely that the average yield gaps would rise if an increasing number of farmers would adopt organic practices. >However, where modern inputs are available and more commonly used, organic farmers typically have lower yields than conventional farmers. Yield gaps tend to increase during the process of economic development (Valkila 2009).The yield gaps imply that more land would be required to produce the same quantity of output with organic methods >The conclusion that organic farming is not the global blueprint for sustainable agriculture does not mean that organic methods cannot be useful in specific situations. Under certain conditions, organic farming can be clearly positive for the environment, even when the effects are measured per unit of output. So that's exactly what it is saying : organic farming can be good, probably can't replace conventional methods, and if you want the yields to even start comparing somewhat favorably with conventional agriculture you need to build a lot of institutional knowledge, provide resources to farmers and time. It's better than traditional, very small scale agriculture, but if the inputs for "chemical" farming are there you should probably use them. That's a lot of caveats and they mostly don't apply to this situation.

a-nikolaev 5y ago

> “The ban has drawn the tea industry into complete disarray… If we go completely organic, we will lose 50 per cent of the crop, (but) we are not going to get 50 per cent higher prices,” he reportedly said. To break even, you need to double prices (i.e. 100% higher), not 50% higher. Very strange expert.

streamofdigits 5y ago

This feels like a perfect summary of the struggle (political, economic, social) that lies ahead for the entire planet. The post most likely has a political agenda so outsiders commenting walk into a landmine but anyways, here my two cents worth of observations, more as generally commentary Doing nothing is not an option: Controlling the water consumption, chemical effluent, deforestation, biodiversity impact etc of ever growing agricultural activity is a no-brainer. Yet: * any misstep in the so-called "transition" or adaptation will be ruthlessly exploited by those who basically do not care what comes down a few generations. Even well-meaning politicians will be reluctant to be proactive or first movers if they face crucifixion. * more specifically: the food scarcity scare will be used cunningly to protect existing agribusiness interests from lost profits. NB: Tea is a export oriented cash crop. This does not mean its not important (if those exports finance food imports, or even just because a whole bunch of people make their living though this) but conflating unrelated interests is not how an honest society solves problems I just hope that the people of this beautiful and remote island (Arthur C. Clarke lived there BTW I wonder what he would have thought) find a way to transition and thrive in a sustainable future...

refurb 5y ago
So your take is: - we have to make this transition - if there is any pushback or stumbles during the transition it’s not because the transition is wrong, but because of nefarious forces?
- nextaccountic 5y ago
  I think it's more like, there will be people sabotaging the transition at every step, using any misstep as an argument to not do make transition at all.
  - lvs 5y ago
    That seems to be what's happened so far.
- streamofdigits 5y ago

Jeff_Brown 5y ago

> "a former army general has been appointed as ‘commissioner general of essential services’ to raid and seize food stocks. The officer has been tasked to ensure sale of products at government-named prices or on custom import costs." So many leaders, when their anti-market policies fail, double down. This will further reduce supply, by demotivating farmers. It will help only the lucky few consumers who are first in line, before the shelves are empty.

pueblito 5y ago

I am a commercial organic farmer. I have trouble sourcing something every year and I live in the United States and have resources available to me to afford exotic things like potash from Alaska or pathogens to kill grasshoppers. If it’s a wet spring and I need more pest mitigation I can have a hundred guinea hens mailed express for $200. I’m poorly traveled and ignorant of Sri Lanka but I believe it’s a very poor country where $200 is a lot to ask for let alone luxuries like pest pathogens, ag netting, soil testing etc etc… And if you don’t have all that, then going organic is going to absolutely destroy yields and you cannot have a modern society if everyone is farming

MomoXenosaga 5y ago
I frequently buy organic produce and it is consistently more expensive. I am willing and able to pay for it but even in rich Western countries organic farming is a tiny niche.
quanto 5y ago
How could one order a hundred guinea hens for $200 shipped? Is this a birds-as-a-service model where you rent birds for farming? A genuine question.
- pueblito 5y ago
  Here’s an example. The guinea hens eat the bugs and aggressively chase rattlesnakes out, and then coyotes and hawks eat the hens. Like most things it’s a mixed blessing because the snakes keep the rodent and rabbits population in check. https://www.metzerfarms.com/GuineaFowl.cfm https://www.metzerfarms.com/GuineaFowl.cfm

necovek 5y ago

The fun with percentages: people get it wrong even when it hugely affects their bottom line. > “The ban has drawn the tea industry into complete disarray… If we go completely organic, we will lose 50 per cent of the crop, (but) we are not going to get 50 per cent higher prices” Thinking simplistically like that (the entirety of the cost is not in production, ofc), you need 100 per cent higher prices (double) to cover for losing 50 per cent (half) of the crop — this "tea conglomerate expert" has not thought this through :) Percentages are so ingrained in our culture, but with them being a relative measure, they are so easy to confuse. Why not speak in simpler terms to help yourselves? "Losing half the crop, we'll need to double the prices (to break even)."

burglekutt 5y ago

Book recommendation: The Wizard and the Prophet: https://www.amazon.com/Wizard-Prophet-Remarkable-Scientists-Tomorrows-ebook/dp/B071D3CZG4 https://www.amazon.com/Wizard-Prophet-Remarkable-Scientists-... It’s a history of the step changes in ag yield due to (generally “non-organic”) optimizations, and two scientists’ competing visions of what things we should be optimizing for (feeding hungry people now, food security, “naturalness”, long-term soil health, use of chemicals, energy efficiency, aesthetics, crop diversity, etc).

akamaka 5y ago

Here’s a better article that is less ideological: https://www.news18.com/news/explainers/explained-why-sri-lankas-food-crisis-is-actually-a-forex-problem-4167188.html https://www.news18.com/news/explainers/explained-why-sri-lan... In summary, Sri Lanka has been facing an economic crisis and is struggling to pay for imports with rising exchange rates. One of the effects of this has been a push to reduce dependence on foreign imports across many sectors — including fertilizer.

coldcode 5y ago
This should be the article discussed. It barely mentions organic farming, other than concerns about the lack of fertilizer.
- natmaka 5y ago
  Indeed. This is a political (since 2018) and mainly financial crisis, and an attempt to adopt some organic practices is one of the effects. http://www.srilankaguardian.org/2021/07/sri-lanka-manufactured-crisis.html http://www.srilankaguardian.org/2021/07/sri-lanka-manufactur... https://www.bbc.com/news/business-58390292 https://www.bbc.com/news/business-58390292
duxup 5y ago
>As the country saw an economic boom in the post-LTTE years, it increasingly turned to foreign borrowings through the issue of sovereign bonds. But outside of tourism and certain exports, the country hardly managed to ensure it was attracting enough FDIs and foreign funds to meet its rising debt obligations. So was this economic boom purely internal demand as a result of the borrowing?
- baybal2 5y ago
  > So was this economic boom purely internal demand as a result of the borrowing? Yes, correct. The two consequent previous governments borrowed like crazy to pull "economic development" like a rabbit out of a hat.

temporalparts 5y ago

One thing that's worth talking about is the approach that the government took. The sudden ban on a vital component of their agriculture (non-organic chemical fertilizer) had some bad non-obvious impacts. A better strategy towards the shift to organic (regardless of how you feel about the move itself) would have been to impose an ever increasing tax to understand the long-term impacts of moving away from something their economy heavily relied on.

seattle-hippie 5y ago

Organic farming could also depleted soil nutrients the same way as modern agriculture. Regenerative farming could be a sustainable alternative to this problem. I think politics failed here to really understand how to transition to a sustainable model. Check producer Gave Brown https://youtu.be/QfTZ0rnowcc https://youtu.be/QfTZ0rnowcc

temphnaccount 5y ago

Here is the summary in video from the same media house which discusses some other points in detail (it's as opinionated as the original article about organic farming though) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nVHUwvC7Og0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nVHUwvC7Og0

snambi 5y ago

Good decision. but there will be a short term impact. theprint.in artciles are generally biased and paid for by the big industry, so don't take it as fact.

KingOfCoders 5y ago

"The national debt has soared from close to $48 billion in 2016 to $86 billion in 2021." The dollar reserves went from $8bn to $3bn. The country regulated imports including fertilizers.

mikeiz404 5y ago

Some highlights from the article: According to an estimate, tea is Sri Lanka’s single biggest export, bringing in over $1.25 billion/year, which is nearly 10 per cent of the country’s export income. … An island-wide survey of farmers found out that 90 per cent use chemicals for farming and 85 per cent expected sizable reductions in their harvest if disallowed to use fertilisers. Moreover, the survey said that only 20 per cent farmers had the knowledge to transition to completely organic production. … The survey also revealed that many key crops in Sri Lanka depend on heavy use of chemical input for cultivation, with the highest dependency in paddy at 94 per cent, followed by tea and rubber at 89 per cent each. … According to experts, three scientifically rigorous meta-analyses of organic-conventional crop yield comparisons indicate that across all crops, the mean yield reduction in organic agriculture in Sri Lanka is around 19-25 per cent. … The article also states 2-3 million tons is estimated to be produced locally per year, and paddy cultivation requires 4 million tons per year and tea cultivation requires 3 million tons per year. So they are short there.

aaroninsf 5y ago

Problems with the article aside, I will make a de rigeur observation: Unsustainable agriculture, decorously defended as "economic" with its innumerable deferred and eternalized costs neatly ignored in polite company, is a civilizational dead end.

tsjq 5y ago

China will come to the "rescue" and in exchange for take over of some more cities / ports of SriLanka forever.

someonewhocar3s 5y ago

It is well known that incremental improvement wins the race. This was political, which means that the 'economic distaster' is actually just their scram-manouvre. Sri Lanka will be well known for it's healthy and national food. They just refuse to be the land where fertilizer is celled into crisps.

errantmind 5y ago

It is possible to grow organically with nearly equal yield to non-organic, but requires a total shift in philosophy and methods. See KNF and JADAM which had proven this in Korea, Hawaii, and parts of China