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> sacrifice some production Quantify some. TFA claims a reduction of 29-44% and a doubling of food prices. And looking at what happened in Sri Lanka, I have no

• xyzzy123 5y ago
  What happened in Sri Lanka was that the government ran out of foreign exchange and was desperate for something to cut. So they basically pissed in the air and told everyone it was raining ("great news: you're all organic farmers now"). It was a desperate move, backed by magical thinking - a failed attempt at reality distortion. This is not really the way any sane government would organise a transition to organic farming practices. You'd do studies, start small, give people time to adapt. Not announce out of the blue that you've banned all chemical fertiliser and pesticide imports. Seem to be a lot of pundits out there trying to make what happened in Sri Lanka a story about organic farming - eh maybe, maybe not. It seems more like a story about poor governance and predatory international lending.
  • unmole 5y ago
    The government of Sri Lanka banned the import of fertilizer and pesticides to deal with a deepening current account deficit. This was because the government listened to people like Vandana Shiva and decided that a switch to organic agriculture will work out. The result is out there for everyone to see. Rice, the staple food crop and tea the primary cash crop have seen yields plummet and deepened the crisis. Plenty of countries around the world that have had worse governance than Sri Lanka. Plenty of countries have a higher debt burden. What makes Sri Lanka's government unique is that they decided to listen to the nonsense peddled by the organic activists.
    • raxxorraxor 5y ago
      Sri Lanka just didn't have any kind of fertilizer, neither organic nor inorganic. Of course that doesn't work, especially not on farm land that had been heavily fertilized in the past. The ground is dead for years because chemical imbalances can only be corrected in the short term with additional fertilizer. Yearly crops don't root deep so after a harvest the next rain will just remove any remaining nutrition, which at that point is heavily one-sided anyway. You have to practice long term crop rotation and you cannot use the field every year. That will obviously use more land. Plants do grow better if you shower them with nitrogen but there still are ways for agricultural growth without regularly poisoning the soil. But yes, that will inevitably mean more expensive food. They just accelerated their plans "slightly" because there was no money for fertilizer, inorganic or not.
• jvanderbot 5y ago
  Ukraine is one missed harvest. The article opened up with that as a motivating example, for some reason. increasing the amount of land used for farming does not have an impact on its own unless you're deforesting, I guess. but dumping significant amounts of water and fertilizer and pesticide will have an ecological impact, esp on downstream water or maybe drying up the aquafors. So, organic seeks to reduce that impact by zeroing those contributing factors (except water!) This is not unclear, you're trying to slam dunk, I think. Less environmental impact = not as much, say, nitrate runoff, algae toxicity downstream, collateral insect kill off, and so on. On a per-extra-food-unit compared to current baseline (remember we're measuring only new hectares in my example) loss can be 50% and still world food production goes up b/c we're adding hectares. And if organic holds to its claims, we're doing so with less net impact on a per hectacre basis. Anyway, that's one hope of organic farming - its part of a responsible portfolio of cleaner food management that doesn't have unilateral decrees about practices (like TFA does). I'm more in tune with Precision Agriculture, which is a saner, 80/20 solution that has yet to prove itself on a worldwide scale.