Guest Essay by Kip Hansen — 11 March 2022
Exotic Ceylon, once a colony of the British Empire and after 1948, an independent country, in 1972, became a republic within the Commonwealth and changed its name to Sri Lanka.
Its location in the warm Indian Ocean made it a haven for scuba divers seeking the best reef diving. That feature attracted the science fiction visionary Sir Arthur C. Clarke who made it his home.
Like many of the newly independent British colonies, it suffered political divisions and unrest for many years. A 26-year civil war involving the Tamil ethnic minority finally ended in 2009.
With peace came relative prosperity until they had a Good Idea.
For the least 50 years, certain segments of the world’s population have been abuzz with the concept of Organic Farming. While there are a lot of different definitions of organic farming, the basic concept is to limit or eliminate the use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides (herbicides, insecticides, fungicides, etc.). In general, this is a good idea – using the natural environment to supply agricultural inputs and more natural methods of controlling pests are net positives when they can be done in a sensible and practical way.
When my wife and I were in our homesteading phase, we utilized basic organic methods in our gardens and with our animals to produce about 75-80% of our own food for our growing family, with a bit to sell or trade on the side. Our advantage, of course, is that our health, livelihoods and lives did not depend on our gardening or husbandry success. If our lettuce crop failed, we could buy lettuce or eat something else, as we live in one of the most prosperous nations on Earth.
Sri Lanka is not a rich nation, but neither is it a strikingly poor nation. The economic situation there has greatly improved since the end of the civil war (2009). However, a large percentage of the population lives on the proceeds of smallholder agricultural.
In 2019, Sri Lankan President Gotabaya Rajapaksa promised in his election campaign “to transition the country’s farmers to organic agriculture over a period of 10 years. Last April, Rajapaksa’s government made good on that promise, imposing a nationwide ban on the importation and use of synthetic fertilizers and pesticides and ordering the country’s 2 million farmers to go organic.” [ source ]
Apparently, President Gotabaya Rajapaksa failed to understand the concept of “transitioning” which should be “undergoing or causing to undergo a process or period of transition” or a shift of one state or condition to another. No gentle or gradual transition in Sri Lanka from the decades of modern agricultural methods which had brought about relative prosperity for smallholding farmers, but an abrupt forced shift to new and untried and unfamiliar methods.
Quoting Ted Nordhaus, the executive director of the Breakthrough Institute, and Saloni Shah, a food and agriculture analyst at the Breakthrough Institute:
“The result was brutal and swift. Against claims that organic methods can produce comparable yields to conventional farming, domestic rice production fell 20 percent in just the first six months. Sri Lanka, long self-sufficient in rice production, has been forced to import $450 million worth of rice even as domestic prices for this staple of the national diet surged by around 50 percent. The ban also devastated the nation’s tea crop, its primary export and source of foreign exchange.”
“By November 2021, with tea production falling, the government partially lifted its fertilizer ban on key export crops, including tea, rubber, and coconut. Faced with angry protests, soaring inflation, and the collapse of Sri Lanka’s currency, the government finally suspended the policy for several key crops—including tea, rubber, and coconut—last month, although it continues for some others. The government is also offering $200 million to farmers as direct compensation and an additional $149 million in price subsidies to rice farmers who incurred losses. That hardly made up for the damage and suffering the ban produced. Farmers have widely criticized the payments for being massively insufficient and excluding many farmers, most notably tea producers, who offer one of the main sources of employment in rural Sri Lanka. The drop in tea production alone is estimated to result in economic losses of $425 million.”
“Human costs have been even greater. Prior to the pandemic’s outbreak, the country had proudly achieved upper-middle-income status. Today, half a million people have sunk back into poverty. Soaring inflation and a rapidly depreciating currency have forced Sri Lankans to cut down on food and fuel purchases as prices surge. The country’s economists have called on the government to default on its debt repayments to buy essential supplies for its people.” [ source ]
Nordhaus and Shah call this a “farrago of magical thinking, technocratic hubris, ideological delusion, self-dealing, and sheer shortsightedness”. And they are certainly correct.
The Rest of the World is being set up for an even greater fall, an even greater disaster, by the misguided mandates of governments who have blindly jumped onto the NetZero bandwagon with no thought of where it is headed and where it will take them and their countries. Wildly mandating, paralleling what Sri Lanka did with agriculture, near-time abandonment of long-term successful transportation methods and energy sources and their replacement with the as-yet-unproven Good Idea of all-electric automobiles and all-renewable energy sources such as wind and solar. Only after several grid disasters have the most strident advocates finally begun to come around to the indisputable fact that nuclear must be a part of any transition to less polluting energy production.
Already all too evident in Europe and at the gas pumps of North America, rapid shifts away from fossil fuels to renewables leave entire nations at risk of energy blackmail from their enemies. With a border dispute in the old Soviet Union ramping up to a full-scale invasion of the Ukraine by Russia, energy supplies to Europe have been hugely disrupted. And they find they have closed nuclear power plants and shuttered coal electrical generating plants that have kept the lights on and the occupants of millions of homes heated by abundant Russian natural gas find themselves at risk. The UK had already suicidally ordered its domestic natural gas supply wells to be cemented over forever – which has been narrowly avoided this week by their Prime Minister.
Championed by rabid misanthropic environmental advocacy groups, the United Nations and its many entities like the IPCC, and the European Union, NetZero madness threatens to destroy the prosperity of modern society.
# # # # #
Author’s Comment:
We see in Sri Lanka’s mis-step with organic farming a cautionary tale for the rest of the world, which is charging blindly ahead with NetZero policies seemingly without even a tiny bit of forethought or understanding what the results will be for everyday people – their citizens — in the real world.
Already, in the United States, people working low paying jobs in grocery stores, mini-marts and dollar stores are finding it hard to pay for the gasoline their cars need to get them to their jobs – spending an extra $25 or more per week just to travel to work. Those same $25 are nothing to the elite who have caused the problem – that’s just the cost of a visit to Starbucks for them which they pay for with their “tap to pay” credit card without even glancing at the total.
Those who know the dangers of NetZero need to speak up and speak out. The war in Ukraine is giving you – us – a break in the cloud cover and lifting the fog that has been preventing the general public from seeing what is happening and where NetZero will lead us.
Thanks for whatever you are doing to help.
and Thanks for Reading.
# # # # #
Nonsense.
I attended several USDA presentations in the early 1970s, courtesy of Pennsylvania’s Extension services that touted “organic” vegetables farming for small farmers.
Their whole concept was that small farmers could prosper by selling “organic” foods at higher prices to prosperous fools.
Fools, because there is zero to negligible differences with zero nutritional differences between “organic” and modern cultivation foods.
The real difference is based on ‘belief’.
USDA and Pennsylvania Extension representatives admitted the whole thing was just a marketing concept with the bald lie that “organic” is healthier.
All those small farmers either went bankrupt or stopped farming “organic”.
Instead, large farms and corporations stole the entire concept, aggressively marketing “healthier organic foods” and flooding markets with “organic” foods. Often farmed in countries that do not practice actual “organic” farming.
Nor did USDA’s nutritional database ever identify nutritional differences between “organic” and conventionally farmed goods as I checked details regularly. Right up to USDA’s changing the easy to use nutritional database into a complex inferior database.
Really?
How many acres?
People with poor soils have a terrible time harvesting enough lettuce for a daily salad. To feed a growing family with organic methods requires extensive work on more than a few acres. People worldwide are stuck in poverty trying to do the same thing without much success.
Grew your own “organic” foods through winter? Or is a lot of that 80% root vegetables?
My Grandmother and grandfather came to America to escape starving and violence in the Ukraine. They only used natural fertilizers, when they had any. Cattle and sheep may defecate frequently, but in small amounts every day.
Their diets were heavy on boiled brassicas, tubers and infrequent very small portions of meat. Scurvy and rickets was common, especially during the winters.
Cheese was valuable, that and eggs could be sold to richer town folk.
When they set up household in Camden, New Jersey one of the first things they did was dig a deep hole in the back yard with a canvas cover for their food storage.
Our small farm?
Broccoli was host to copious aphids. The choice was obvious, spray insecticide or just eat aphids. Soap solutions didn’t work. Alcohol solutions only worked on exterior aphids, those aphids inside broccoli buds survived and quickly raised hordes of new aphids. Far more than ladybugs could cope with.
Strawberries were good for revenue for a couple of months a year. However they required hard work all twelve months if one wants the plants to survive. Where I live now, I’ve lost multiple plantings to deer. Deer browse down to the roots autumn through spring, they especially love any small shoots growing in spring. Entire rows vanish every night. Our local deer have eaten all squash and melon plantings and even have eaten lushly growing tomato plants and rhododendron plants. That’s with the proverbial “Irish Spring” soap bars hung over the growing plants. (Not the rhododendron, I hadn’t thought our local deer to be that stupid.)
Acres of “organic” tomatoes got sold off our porch at the local ‘prices’. Selling tomatoes at lower prices pisses off all of the neighbor farms, selling at higher prices leaves a lot of spoiling tomatoes for the pigs.
One year had perfect weather for tomatoes. Enough regular rain with copious sunlight and our ‘patch’ grew far more tomatoes than we could sell. My father put up a broken scale and we filled shopping bags with 3 pounds of tomatoes. It’s rather shocking how few honest people there were. Only a few told us our scale was broken. Quite a few bit their lips, but their eyes gave them away.
Corn was decent money for a few months. Corn also requires a farmer to plant and till weekly as the ‘sweet spot’ for fresh corn is short. Every morning we harvested fresh corn and every afternoon we fed the pigs what was left after we removed corn for dinner and freezing.
Selling corn by the dozen is the problem. People kept ripping open ears and bitching about the kernel size while ripping open another ear. Opened ears lose their sweetness very fast, and the sweetest corn has small kernels. Large kernels means the corn is approaching maturity, also known as “field corn”.
Another fool was ripping open ears of corn, bitching non stop. Just as my brother and I were going to throw him off the porch, my father appeared at the door.
“What’s the problem here”, he said. He stopped the fool in mid tirade, the fool waved an opened ear at my father and made a number of false accusations; too old, kernels too small, corn wasn’t fresh…
My father looked at the fool for most of a minute while my brother and I waited for the command to throw him out.
Instead my father said, Corns growing in the back. Go pick your own, same price.
The fool gleefully grabbed several bags and ran to the corn plot in the back. A plot several weeks beyond “sweet corn” stage. He soon returned with bags full of corn, paid us a couple of dollars and ran off, afraid we were going to count the corn.
Corn that old is called field corn, great stuff for the pigs, but very starchy and not very sweet at all.
A great lesson taught us, by my father.
We put up tomatoes and corn nonstop during their seasons. We steamed the wallpaper off the kitchen walls boiling the milled tomatoes down into sauce. Spent hours husking fresh corn and running the ears through tools to remove the kernels, packaging, labelling and freezing corn. Corn ears take up far too much room.
After all of that work, seeing the prices for these items in the grocery store gives us the opposite of satisfaction. Commercial packaged vegetables, when bought in quantity, are far cheaper than the work we put into the same amount of home grown vegetables.
I ate that home canned tomato sauce for quite a few years after my father sold that small farm.
Oh, one year I planted a couple acres of “organic” wheat. My father “forgot” that he wanted one the acres for pepper plants and I had to plow under an acre of half grown wheat.
I harvested that remaining wheat by scythe and tried separating chaff from seed during the windless weeks in August. Tossing the harvested kernels up in the air, only to discover the chaff falls back with the wheat when there is no wind. It also turns out, chaff loves to stick to hot sweaty people. Nor is chaff a benign coating for humans.
Obviously, I needed a partner and we could toss the wheat so the chaff could fall between us.
A few folks tried to help me, for five or ten minutes before they remembered other more important things they could be doing.
That entire acre of “organic” wheat, harvested and separated by hand, resulted in a very disappointing amount of wheat, a few bushels.
All of that wheat in the field and in my bushel baskets caused the local rat population to explode.
Those crops were grown on land farmed since the late 1700s. Once plants consume all of the accumulated nutrients laboriously tilled in by nature or farmers, crops will not grow so lush. Natural fertilizer is very labor intensive and requires additional external sources. Local horse farms help, a little.
Those experiences, plus most of a lifetime working outdoors are the root of my skepticism! Especially when alarmists’ froth over fractions of a degree temperature or when natural weather occurs. People raised in suburbia or urban insulated A/C environments, lusting for a return to nature for everyone, are stupidly clueless.
Back in the 1970s and 1980s, one worked at any and every menial job to earn enough money to cover the differences, heat, food, shelter between natural and modern living.
Touting such lifestyles without clear warnings are similarly clueless.
Very interesting post Atheok
ATheoK ==> Any now, without pulling any punches, how do you really feel about it?
(The part about my family is entirely accurate though…not hard, chickens, dairy goats, a lamb every year, a couple of pigs…big garden, good chest freezers….-kh)