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> Without imports, many Sri Lankans will quickly find themselves hungry, stranded How did these island nations sustain themselves before ? In other words, wha

> Without imports, many Sri Lankans will quickly find themselves hungry, stranded How did these island nations sustain themselves before ? In other words, what has changed that they can’t live off the land anymore? And by that, I mean the sea. Has Sri Lanka’s fish been pillaged? Is it being exported to wealthier nations that command higher prices, even as there is a domestic food crisis? How much of this is because of globalism and developing hard dependencies? I’ve traveled to all 47 of Japan’s prefectures and I still see bountiful agriculture in the countryside. Even as developed and wealthy as Japan is, with many global dependencies in imports/exports, it is still heavily invested in agriculture.

lanstin 4y ago
As the article notes the government forced the food production to go all organic in one year with no plan, yields crashed, and now they have to import even rice. It sustained itself thru tourism and local food production. They have sold tea overseas since being a British colony. Also, another factor is they have to import all their medicines and oil, which is also dependent on foreign reserves. So now not enough food, no cooking fuel, no medicines, no petrol, and not enough fuel for electricity. Truly a wretched set of problems. You can buy Dilmah tea to help, Hand made Batik shirts, and visit. It is a truly lovely country, with good tourism facilities.
- markdown 4y ago
  > It is a truly lovely country, with good tourism facilities. Not to mention the people. Absolute wonderful human beings despite years of war and turmoil.
- panarky 4y ago
  Cancelled flights, fuel shortages and street violence aren't helping the tourism sector.
- yunohn 4y ago
  > Dilmah tea to help, Hand made Batik shirts In my experience, exported goods provide very little profit to the original manufacturer. The middle layers greedily absorb all the profit. In fact, in the west, labor costs to stock/sell it in the supermarket are significantly higher than what the manufacturer made for their effort. Instead, I’d really recommend donating the money to an action group or trusted charity, ideally if you can also verify they are doing actual things on the ground.
  - lanstin 4y ago
    It is hard to do from the US. I can donate directly to my family and have them give to local aid groups but have not been able to donate directly except to groups that have a US presence (and no doubt much higher aid overhead). But longer term, having Sri Lanka goods be valued on the world market will help the island. Dilmah employs a lot of people on the island.
- netsharc 4y ago
  > As the article notes the government forced the food production to go all organic in one year with no plan, [...] Because spending on fertilizer was a lot of their foreign currency spending, and the government thought "We'll just force 'organic farming' so our spending will look better!".
- nibbleshifter 4y ago
  I'm looking forward to going back in a year or so, when the situation stabilises. My risk appetite is significantly higher than the average tourist, but even I'm not stupid enough to go there right now when there's the potential for things to get much worse, very quickly.
aetherson 4y ago
Sri Lanka's population is 2x what it was in 1965. https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/LKA/sri-lanka/population https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/LKA/sri-lanka/populati... Japan imports about 60% of its food. https://www.merlofarminggroup.com/agri-view-japan%E2%80%99s-agriculture-imports-exports https://www.merlofarminggroup.com/agri-view-japan%E2%80%99s-...
- asciiresort 4y ago
  I am well aware that Japan imports food. The point is not about whether a country imports at all, but whether it can mobilize domestic production of essential food crops in times of crisis. Even China import and has rice reserves. There is a reason these government have and subsidized rice reserves rather tea reserves.
  - walrus01 4y ago
    I think Japan is well aware it couldn't feed the whole island chain even if it absolutely needed to, but it also has a robust domestic manufacturing and high tech industrial exporting sector which continually acquires funds for foreign currency and food. Totally unlike Sri Lanka. To put it crudely Japan doesn't need to grow all its own food because people send it money for Toyotas and Mitsubishi cargo trucks and such, and it uses that to buy whatever food it wants.
  - mannerheim 4y ago
    > whether it can mobilize domestic production of essential food crops in times of crisis. Sri Lanka could, but not with the chemical fertiliser ban.
plantain 4y ago
Well, not from producing copious quantities of tea. Globalization meant they (thought they) could specialize in growing tea and let someone else specialize in growing food. In theory - everyone wins.
- chii 4y ago
  In theory yes, but in practise, you cannot completely 100% specialize without taking on an asymmetric risk (that of the outside party not selling you food due to their own or some other crisis). The risk is asymmetric because your specialty (tea) isn't an absolute necessity (may be 'cept to the brits), and yet, you _need_ food (an absolute necessity).
- mannerheim 4y ago
  Sri Lanka was self-sufficient in rice as recently as a few years ago. Banning fertiliser cut yields by 35%. https://www.canr.msu.edu/prci/publications/Policy-Research-Notes/PRCI_PRN_3.pdf https://www.canr.msu.edu/prci/publications/Policy-Research-N...
tlear 4y ago
Population grew. In Japan agriculture is heavily subsidized, in particular rice production. Stuff that is not heavily subsidized focuses on high margin premium. They can't compete on volume/price but can on quality. After eating expensive apples or grapes there nothing really compares anywhere else
- asciiresort 4y ago
  That’s my point about Japan. Rice, unlike tea, is a defensive measure for times of crisis. Even as Japan imports food, the point is whether the country can quickly mobilize and ramp up to essential food crops. The point is having options and a hedge, which allows you leverage during economic negotiations for other things. The percentage of imports you can have should be bounded by the runway and time horizon you have. It seems Sri Lanka went all in on one crop without a hedge, and it would infeasibly take years to convert.
  - socialdemocrat 4y ago
    Same deal in Norway where I live. We maintain an agricultural sector in a rocky subarctic climate at exorbitant prices which probably makes Japanese agriculture look like a bargain. We have had enough bad experiences in the past however to give up having some level of self-sufficiency. If you ever wondered why nearly every European country is in the EU, except Norway well there you got part of it he reason.
    - ChuckNorris89 4y ago
      Sorry, from your comment I did not understand why Norway is not part of the EU. Would you mind clarifying? Are you saying EU membership could affect Norway's agriculture?
      - nibbleshifter 4y ago
        The common agricultural policy is a clusterfuck.
    - 4y ago
walrus01 4y ago
> Has Sri Lanka’s fish been pillaged The fishermen can no longer afford or acquire fuel for their boats to go out and catch the fish. Due to the non fish related economic disaster outlined in the article.
- asciiresort 4y ago
  They need fuel because they need boats that go far. They need to go far because the supply of fish has decreased. Fishing is not a modern activity. Rafts existed long before people rode horses.
  - walrus01 4y ago
    And in some very poor locations people do fish by sail and rowing, but even in some of the lowest income countries on earth, using small petrol engines is increasingly common (source: buying local seafood in Sierra Leone some years back).
    - asciiresort 4y ago
      > using small petrol engines is increasingly common (source: buying local seafood Right, because the locals have changed from fishing for themselves to fishing for others. This is market economy dynamics of engaging in activity that produces the most money.
      - walrus01 4y ago
        At least where I was buying fish it was all for domestic consumption in the Freetown metro area. Very little or none of it was being caught to be frozen or canned.
  - yunohn 4y ago
    You also don’t need fuel to go to work, commuting is a modern activity. With COVID and the increase in fuel prices, we should /all/ work from home and let civilisation crumble. /s
BurningFrog 4y ago
Before globalized trade, nations sustained themselves in ways we today see as extreme poverty.
romeros 4y ago
not 100% sure.. my guess is that they depended upon tourism and it was severely impacted by the pandemic. For Sri Lanka, the right thing to have been done (in hindsight) is to keep the country open for tourism and disregard covid impact. Kind of like Texas/Florida. They had to choose between the lesser of the two evils. This is a hard decision to make.
- chii 4y ago
  > the right thing to have been done (in hindsight) is to keep the country open for tourism and disregard covid impact. but even if they did, would tourists still be arriving? I suppose if the leaders thought that the human toll is worth keeping the economy alive - but then again, they wouldn't have mandated "organic" farming if they could come to that conclusion. And in any case, the inflation and war in ukraine raising fuel prices would not have been helped by tourism imho. A double whammy isn't easy to recover or prevent tbh.
- nibbleshifter 4y ago
  Their healthcare system would not have coped - as things were, it was pretty much at breaking point. Also, the rest of the world had curbs on travel, which would have made it non viable anyway.
aaron695 4y ago
socialdemocrat 4y ago
Not producing enough food is pretty normal. In my native Norway we have not been self sufficient in hundreds of years. Only 2.5% of the land is arable. Any time there was a serious war and shipping lanes got blocked like in Napoleonic wars we got into deep trouble. Plenty of people died. Same deal in the Netherlands. They were not self sufficient in their Golden age. The Soviet Union was not self-sufficient. It was a big reason why it collapsed. It got import problems just like Sri-Lanka causing political turmoil and eventual collapse. Funny what being unable to import can do to a country. The US cannot have this problem since it controls the world reserve-currency. It can in principle print itself out of any problem.
- rmatt2000 4y ago
  > It can in principle print itself out of any problem. Except inflation, as we are learning.
  - ncmncm 4y ago
    Strangely, you can print money during a recession without causing inflation. But you have to stop when the recession is over. That has proven hard for people to remember to do.
- chii 4y ago
  > The US cannot have this problem since it controls the world reserve-currency you got that the wrong way around. The US has the world reserve _because_ it cannot have this problem (of not having enough domestic production of necessities). The world isn't entirely controlled by the US - even though they do dictate a large portion of financial policy all over the world, the countries of the world decided to use the US currency as an intermediary because of the stability and assurances (that has recently been shocked by financial sanctions of magnitudes never seen before).
  - runeks 4y ago
    > […] the countries of the world decided to use the US currency as an intermediary because of the stability and assurances (that has recently been shocked by financial sanctions of magnitudes never seen before). After WWII, the world agreed to use the US Dollar as reserve currency because the US promised to exchange every 35 USD for one troy ounce of gold, as per the Bretton Woods agreement. And when the US defaulted on this obligation in 1971 the world continued using the USD since there was no other politically viable alternative.
vishnugupta 4y ago
> In other words, what has changed It's often a series of mis-steps that lead to catastrophic failures such as being suffered by Srilanka. Here are a few that come to my mind, in no particular order. 1. Tourism took a big hit due to COVID lockdowns. 2. They took on huge debt from China to fund their massive infrastructure developments with close to zero plan as to how to reap the benefit of that infrastructure. For instance this airport[1] 3. The knee jerk banning of fertiliser. 4. Corrupt and authoritarian (despite being democratically elected) government favouring their cronies. News articles trying to analyse look for a recent bad policy choice such as fertiliser ban but one could see that even 5 years ago that Srilankan economy was being badly managed. The ingredients of catastrophe were there and COVID acted as the catalyst. [1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/wadeshepard/2016/05/28/the-story-behind-the-worlds-emptiest-international-airport-sri-lankas-mattala-rajapaksa https://www.forbes.com/sites/wadeshepard/2016/05/28/the-stor... [2] https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/sri-lanka-rows-back-organic-farming-goal-removes-ban-chemical-fertilisers-2021-11-24/ https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/sri-lanka-rows-b...
- FooBarWidget 4y ago
  #2 is actually false. Only ~10% of Sri Lanka's debt is Chinese. The majority is from western private market lenders. Chinese debt also have lower interest than western ones. See this detailed report by The Atlantic: The Chinese ‘Debt Trap’ Is a Myth https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2021/02/china-debt-trap-diplomacy/617953/ https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2021/02/ch... And this study by British campaign charity Debt Justice, which found that the situation in Africa is similar: https://debtjustice.org.uk/press-release/african-governments-owe-three-times-more-debt-to-private-lenders-than-china https://debtjustice.org.uk/press-release/african-governments... The Chinese debt trap is a lie made by mainstream media, who for some reason blindly writes negative China articles without any kind of factual investigation. Worse, these lies distract us from actual debt traps initiated by western actors — over we which we have far more control than China. If we actually care about these countries then we need to first demand from the media that they do factually correct reporting.
  - InvertedRhodium 4y ago
spaceman_2020 4y ago
Most countries are simply not meant to have as many people as they do. Its an aberration of history brought about by easy and cheap accessibility to fertilizers, genetically modified crops, and cheap oceanic transport. The true cost of feeding the world is much higher once you take away the subsidies and security architecture that makes all of the above possible.
incomingpain 4y ago
>How did these island nations sustain themselves before ? In other words, what has changed that they can’t live off the land anymore? And by that, I mean the sea. Well the chemical fertilizer ban means no living off the land. ~85% of the farms are expected to fail or have failed. >Has Sri Lanka’s fish been pillaged? Is it being exported to wealthier nations that command higher prices, even as there is a domestic food crisis? No, they have tremendous inflation(54.6%) and therefore fishermen cant afford fuel to go get those fish. Major fuel shortages means no eating food in sri lanka. https://www.scmp.com/news/asia/south-asia/article/3172540/plenty-fish-sri-lanka-no-way-crews-get-them-economic-crisis https://www.scmp.com/news/asia/south-asia/article/3172540/pl... >How much of this is because of globalism and developing hard dependencies? I’ve traveled to all 47 of Japan’s prefectures and I still see bountiful agriculture in the countryside. Even as developed and wealthy as Japan is, with many global dependencies in imports/exports, it is still heavily invested in agriculture. It's not dependencies persay but rather yes globalists are entirely at fault. This is the work of Davos/WEF. https://www.sundaytimes.lk/180902/news/pm-this-is-how-i-will-make-my-country-rich-by-2025-309660.html https://www.sundaytimes.lk/180902/news/pm-this-is-how-i-will... This used to be an article on WEF but they deleted it because obviously WEF is responsible for what is happening in Sri Lanka 100%. The funny thing about the WEF conspiracies or for that matter the sri lanka politicians didnt see the trap they were falling into. Personally I dont believe WEF has done anything, they just convince stupid politicians to do stupid things. Sri Lanka believed and even achieved an ESG score of over 95, beating most countries.
trashtester 4y ago
> How did these islandnations sustain themselves before ? They didn't. At least by today's standards. The poorest parts of the world have become immensely richer over the past 50 years. In the 80s it was still common to have famines that could wipe out millions in a small area. Despite a massive population growth in the world's poorest areas, such famines basically don't exist anymore.

lanstin 4y ago

As the article notes the government forced the food production to go all organic in one year with no plan, yields crashed, and now they have to import even rice. It sustained itself thru tourism and local food production. They have sold tea overseas since being a British colony. Also, another factor is they have to import all their medicines and oil, which is also dependent on foreign reserves. So now not enough food, no cooking fuel, no medicines, no petrol, and not enough fuel for electricity. Truly a wretched set of problems. You can buy Dilmah tea to help, Hand made Batik shirts, and visit. It is a truly lovely country, with good tourism facilities.

markdown 4y ago
> It is a truly lovely country, with good tourism facilities. Not to mention the people. Absolute wonderful human beings despite years of war and turmoil.
panarky 4y ago
Cancelled flights, fuel shortages and street violence aren't helping the tourism sector.
yunohn 4y ago
> Dilmah tea to help, Hand made Batik shirts In my experience, exported goods provide very little profit to the original manufacturer. The middle layers greedily absorb all the profit. In fact, in the west, labor costs to stock/sell it in the supermarket are significantly higher than what the manufacturer made for their effort. Instead, I’d really recommend donating the money to an action group or trusted charity, ideally if you can also verify they are doing actual things on the ground.
- lanstin 4y ago
  It is hard to do from the US. I can donate directly to my family and have them give to local aid groups but have not been able to donate directly except to groups that have a US presence (and no doubt much higher aid overhead). But longer term, having Sri Lanka goods be valued on the world market will help the island. Dilmah employs a lot of people on the island.
netsharc 4y ago
> As the article notes the government forced the food production to go all organic in one year with no plan, [...] Because spending on fertilizer was a lot of their foreign currency spending, and the government thought "We'll just force 'organic farming' so our spending will look better!".
nibbleshifter 4y ago
I'm looking forward to going back in a year or so, when the situation stabilises. My risk appetite is significantly higher than the average tourist, but even I'm not stupid enough to go there right now when there's the potential for things to get much worse, very quickly.

aetherson 4y ago

Sri Lanka's population is 2x what it was in 1965. https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/LKA/sri-lanka/population https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/LKA/sri-lanka/populati... Japan imports about 60% of its food. https://www.merlofarminggroup.com/agri-view-japan%E2%80%99s-agriculture-imports-exports https://www.merlofarminggroup.com/agri-view-japan%E2%80%99s-...

asciiresort 4y ago
I am well aware that Japan imports food. The point is not about whether a country imports at all, but whether it can mobilize domestic production of essential food crops in times of crisis. Even China import and has rice reserves. There is a reason these government have and subsidized rice reserves rather tea reserves.
- walrus01 4y ago
  I think Japan is well aware it couldn't feed the whole island chain even if it absolutely needed to, but it also has a robust domestic manufacturing and high tech industrial exporting sector which continually acquires funds for foreign currency and food. Totally unlike Sri Lanka. To put it crudely Japan doesn't need to grow all its own food because people send it money for Toyotas and Mitsubishi cargo trucks and such, and it uses that to buy whatever food it wants.
- mannerheim 4y ago
  > whether it can mobilize domestic production of essential food crops in times of crisis. Sri Lanka could, but not with the chemical fertiliser ban.

plantain 4y ago

Well, not from producing copious quantities of tea. Globalization meant they (thought they) could specialize in growing tea and let someone else specialize in growing food. In theory - everyone wins.

chii 4y ago
In theory yes, but in practise, you cannot completely 100% specialize without taking on an asymmetric risk (that of the outside party not selling you food due to their own or some other crisis). The risk is asymmetric because your specialty (tea) isn't an absolute necessity (may be 'cept to the brits), and yet, you _need_ food (an absolute necessity).
mannerheim 4y ago
Sri Lanka was self-sufficient in rice as recently as a few years ago. Banning fertiliser cut yields by 35%. https://www.canr.msu.edu/prci/publications/Policy-Research-Notes/PRCI_PRN_3.pdf https://www.canr.msu.edu/prci/publications/Policy-Research-N...

tlear 4y ago

Population grew. In Japan agriculture is heavily subsidized, in particular rice production. Stuff that is not heavily subsidized focuses on high margin premium. They can't compete on volume/price but can on quality. After eating expensive apples or grapes there nothing really compares anywhere else

asciiresort 4y ago
That’s my point about Japan. Rice, unlike tea, is a defensive measure for times of crisis. Even as Japan imports food, the point is whether the country can quickly mobilize and ramp up to essential food crops. The point is having options and a hedge, which allows you leverage during economic negotiations for other things. The percentage of imports you can have should be bounded by the runway and time horizon you have. It seems Sri Lanka went all in on one crop without a hedge, and it would infeasibly take years to convert.
- socialdemocrat 4y ago
  Same deal in Norway where I live. We maintain an agricultural sector in a rocky subarctic climate at exorbitant prices which probably makes Japanese agriculture look like a bargain. We have had enough bad experiences in the past however to give up having some level of self-sufficiency. If you ever wondered why nearly every European country is in the EU, except Norway well there you got part of it he reason.
  - ChuckNorris89 4y ago
    Sorry, from your comment I did not understand why Norway is not part of the EU. Would you mind clarifying? Are you saying EU membership could affect Norway's agriculture?
    - nibbleshifter 4y ago
      The common agricultural policy is a clusterfuck.
  - 4y ago

walrus01 4y ago

> Has Sri Lanka’s fish been pillaged The fishermen can no longer afford or acquire fuel for their boats to go out and catch the fish. Due to the non fish related economic disaster outlined in the article.

asciiresort 4y ago
They need fuel because they need boats that go far. They need to go far because the supply of fish has decreased. Fishing is not a modern activity. Rafts existed long before people rode horses.
- walrus01 4y ago
  And in some very poor locations people do fish by sail and rowing, but even in some of the lowest income countries on earth, using small petrol engines is increasingly common (source: buying local seafood in Sierra Leone some years back).
  - asciiresort 4y ago
    > using small petrol engines is increasingly common (source: buying local seafood Right, because the locals have changed from fishing for themselves to fishing for others. This is market economy dynamics of engaging in activity that produces the most money.
    - walrus01 4y ago
      At least where I was buying fish it was all for domestic consumption in the Freetown metro area. Very little or none of it was being caught to be frozen or canned.
- yunohn 4y ago
  You also don’t need fuel to go to work, commuting is a modern activity. With COVID and the increase in fuel prices, we should /all/ work from home and let civilisation crumble. /s

BurningFrog 4y ago

Before globalized trade, nations sustained themselves in ways we today see as extreme poverty.

romeros 4y ago

not 100% sure.. my guess is that they depended upon tourism and it was severely impacted by the pandemic. For Sri Lanka, the right thing to have been done (in hindsight) is to keep the country open for tourism and disregard covid impact. Kind of like Texas/Florida. They had to choose between the lesser of the two evils. This is a hard decision to make.

chii 4y ago
> the right thing to have been done (in hindsight) is to keep the country open for tourism and disregard covid impact. but even if they did, would tourists still be arriving? I suppose if the leaders thought that the human toll is worth keeping the economy alive - but then again, they wouldn't have mandated "organic" farming if they could come to that conclusion. And in any case, the inflation and war in ukraine raising fuel prices would not have been helped by tourism imho. A double whammy isn't easy to recover or prevent tbh.
nibbleshifter 4y ago
Their healthcare system would not have coped - as things were, it was pretty much at breaking point. Also, the rest of the world had curbs on travel, which would have made it non viable anyway.

aaron695 4y ago

socialdemocrat 4y ago

Not producing enough food is pretty normal. In my native Norway we have not been self sufficient in hundreds of years. Only 2.5% of the land is arable. Any time there was a serious war and shipping lanes got blocked like in Napoleonic wars we got into deep trouble. Plenty of people died. Same deal in the Netherlands. They were not self sufficient in their Golden age. The Soviet Union was not self-sufficient. It was a big reason why it collapsed. It got import problems just like Sri-Lanka causing political turmoil and eventual collapse. Funny what being unable to import can do to a country. The US cannot have this problem since it controls the world reserve-currency. It can in principle print itself out of any problem.

rmatt2000 4y ago
> It can in principle print itself out of any problem. Except inflation, as we are learning.
- ncmncm 4y ago
  Strangely, you can print money during a recession without causing inflation. But you have to stop when the recession is over. That has proven hard for people to remember to do.
chii 4y ago
> The US cannot have this problem since it controls the world reserve-currency you got that the wrong way around. The US has the world reserve _because_ it cannot have this problem (of not having enough domestic production of necessities). The world isn't entirely controlled by the US - even though they do dictate a large portion of financial policy all over the world, the countries of the world decided to use the US currency as an intermediary because of the stability and assurances (that has recently been shocked by financial sanctions of magnitudes never seen before).
- runeks 4y ago
  > […] the countries of the world decided to use the US currency as an intermediary because of the stability and assurances (that has recently been shocked by financial sanctions of magnitudes never seen before). After WWII, the world agreed to use the US Dollar as reserve currency because the US promised to exchange every 35 USD for one troy ounce of gold, as per the Bretton Woods agreement. And when the US defaulted on this obligation in 1971 the world continued using the USD since there was no other politically viable alternative.

vishnugupta 4y ago

> In other words, what has changed It's often a series of mis-steps that lead to catastrophic failures such as being suffered by Srilanka. Here are a few that come to my mind, in no particular order. 1. Tourism took a big hit due to COVID lockdowns. 2. They took on huge debt from China to fund their massive infrastructure developments with close to zero plan as to how to reap the benefit of that infrastructure. For instance this airport[1] 3. The knee jerk banning of fertiliser. 4. Corrupt and authoritarian (despite being democratically elected) government favouring their cronies. News articles trying to analyse look for a recent bad policy choice such as fertiliser ban but one could see that even 5 years ago that Srilankan economy was being badly managed. The ingredients of catastrophe were there and COVID acted as the catalyst. [1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/wadeshepard/2016/05/28/the-story-behind-the-worlds-emptiest-international-airport-sri-lankas-mattala-rajapaksa https://www.forbes.com/sites/wadeshepard/2016/05/28/the-stor... [2] https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/sri-lanka-rows-back-organic-farming-goal-removes-ban-chemical-fertilisers-2021-11-24/ https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/sri-lanka-rows-b...

FooBarWidget 4y ago
#2 is actually false. Only ~10% of Sri Lanka's debt is Chinese. The majority is from western private market lenders. Chinese debt also have lower interest than western ones. See this detailed report by The Atlantic: The Chinese ‘Debt Trap’ Is a Myth https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2021/02/china-debt-trap-diplomacy/617953/ https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2021/02/ch... And this study by British campaign charity Debt Justice, which found that the situation in Africa is similar: https://debtjustice.org.uk/press-release/african-governments-owe-three-times-more-debt-to-private-lenders-than-china https://debtjustice.org.uk/press-release/african-governments... The Chinese debt trap is a lie made by mainstream media, who for some reason blindly writes negative China articles without any kind of factual investigation. Worse, these lies distract us from actual debt traps initiated by western actors — over we which we have far more control than China. If we actually care about these countries then we need to first demand from the media that they do factually correct reporting.
- InvertedRhodium 4y ago

spaceman_2020 4y ago

Most countries are simply not meant to have as many people as they do. Its an aberration of history brought about by easy and cheap accessibility to fertilizers, genetically modified crops, and cheap oceanic transport. The true cost of feeding the world is much higher once you take away the subsidies and security architecture that makes all of the above possible.

incomingpain 4y ago

>How did these island nations sustain themselves before ? In other words, what has changed that they can’t live off the land anymore? And by that, I mean the sea. Well the chemical fertilizer ban means no living off the land. ~85% of the farms are expected to fail or have failed. >Has Sri Lanka’s fish been pillaged? Is it being exported to wealthier nations that command higher prices, even as there is a domestic food crisis? No, they have tremendous inflation(54.6%) and therefore fishermen cant afford fuel to go get those fish. Major fuel shortages means no eating food in sri lanka. https://www.scmp.com/news/asia/south-asia/article/3172540/plenty-fish-sri-lanka-no-way-crews-get-them-economic-crisis https://www.scmp.com/news/asia/south-asia/article/3172540/pl... >How much of this is because of globalism and developing hard dependencies? I’ve traveled to all 47 of Japan’s prefectures and I still see bountiful agriculture in the countryside. Even as developed and wealthy as Japan is, with many global dependencies in imports/exports, it is still heavily invested in agriculture. It's not dependencies persay but rather yes globalists are entirely at fault. This is the work of Davos/WEF. https://www.sundaytimes.lk/180902/news/pm-this-is-how-i-will-make-my-country-rich-by-2025-309660.html https://www.sundaytimes.lk/180902/news/pm-this-is-how-i-will... This used to be an article on WEF but they deleted it because obviously WEF is responsible for what is happening in Sri Lanka 100%. The funny thing about the WEF conspiracies or for that matter the sri lanka politicians didnt see the trap they were falling into. Personally I dont believe WEF has done anything, they just convince stupid politicians to do stupid things. Sri Lanka believed and even achieved an ESG score of over 95, beating most countries.

trashtester 4y ago

> How did these islandnations sustain themselves before ? They didn't. At least by today's standards. The poorest parts of the world have become immensely richer over the past 50 years. In the 80s it was still common to have famines that could wipe out millions in a small area. Despite a massive population growth in the world's poorest areas, such famines basically don't exist anymore.