From NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT!
By Paul Homewood
h/t Dennis Ambler
Unintended consequences (or maybe they were intended?)
From Foreign Policy News:
Faced with a deepening economic and humanitarian crisis, Sri Lanka called off an ill-conceived national experiment in organic agriculture this winter. Sri Lankan President Gotabaya Rajapaksa promised in his 2019 election campaign to transition the country’s farmers to organic agriculture over a period of 10 years. Last April, Rajapaksa’s government made good on that promise, imposing a nationwide ban on the importation and use of synthetic fertilizers and pesticides and ordering the country’s 2 million farmers to go organic.
The result was brutal and swift. Against claims that organic methods can produce comparable yields to conventional farming, domestic rice production fell 20 percent in just the first six months. Sri Lanka, long self-sufficient in rice production, has been forced to import $450 million worth of rice even as domestic prices for this staple of the national diet surged by around 50 percent. The ban also devastated the nation’s tea crop, its primary export and source of foreign exchange.
By November 2021, with tea production falling, the government partially lifted its fertilizer ban on key export crops, including tea, rubber, and coconut. Faced with angry protests, soaring inflation, and the collapse of Sri Lanka’s currency, the government finally suspended the policy for several key crops—including tea, rubber, and coconut—last month, although it continues for some others. The government is also offering $200 million to farmers as direct compensation and an additional $149 million in price subsidies to rice farmers who incurred losses. That hardly made up for the damage and suffering the ban produced. Farmers have widely criticized the payments for being massively insufficient and excluding many farmers, most notably tea producers, who offer one of the main sources of employment in rural Sri Lanka. The drop in tea production alone is estimated to result in economic losses of $425 million.
Human costs have been even greater. Prior to the pandemic’s outbreak, the country had proudly achieved upper-middle-income status. Today, half a million people have sunk back into poverty. Soaring inflation and a rapidly depreciating currency have forced Sri Lankans to cut down on food and fuel purchases as prices surge. The country’s economists have called on the government to default on its debt repayments to buy essential supplies for its people.
The farrago of magical thinking, technocratic hubris, ideological delusion, self-dealing, and sheer shortsightedness that produced the crisis in Sri Lanka implicates both the country’s political leadership and advocates of so-called sustainable agriculture: the former for seizing on the organic agriculture pledge as a shortsighted measure to slash fertilizer subsidies and imports and the latter for suggesting that such a transformation of the nation’s agricultural sector could ever possibly succeed.
Full story here.
Meanwhile our agricultural policy seems to be dictated by the same sort of idiots:
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/government-unveils-path-to-sustainable-farming-from-2021
Maybe feeding the world should take priority over “carbon storage”?
Of course, many of Juniper’s ilk want to see a much smaller global population. Who needs fertiliser!
Only a government can screw things up this bad. But I bet they are still real proud of their administrators and bureaucrats. Bunch of numbskulls.
Ah now it is becoming clear what is going on in Sri Lankan. So in order to “SAVE” money on foreign exchange the communist government forced the farmers to grow food organically. Not realizing that this would drop the yields of these crops thereby causing the food shortages and the internal prices for products to increase on the island.
These clowns in charge also forgot the main source of foreign income was from Tea sales and if they stopped fertilizing those crops the amount of foreign currency would also drop.
Now that the whole Sri Lankan economy is in a meltdown and the government has spent ALL of their foreign cash reserves there is no money to buy Fuel, Fertilizer and Food. There is a lower Tea export so the one thing that actually was making them money to buy everything else has been reduced by the lack of fertilizer.
Amazing how these leftist governments continue to get this stuff so wrong. Did nobody happen to look at the past history of like China under Moa when he tired to redo the food production and pest control causing the Great Chinese famine in 1958.
What should be a warning to all governments of this earth is been ignored by most. It has been said by farmers that this is going to be the MOST EXPENSIVE crop ever put in this year with the costs of fertilizer and fuel. Now the US is said that there is a diesel fuel shortage coming due to lack of imports and domestic oil production. The present administration has not shown the awareness or the urgency to make this crop happen so it can be there in the fall for us to eat. By the time it becomes apparent there is a short fall it will too late to do anything about it.
An Englsh farmer put out on his Utube cannel, that it would take an increase to 22 billion chickens and an extra 30 million cows to produce enough nitrogen for just The UK to go organic. There is, of course, nowhere to put 22 billion chickens, unless we stored them in somewhere like Africa…… Growing small amounts is very easy, if very time consuming from an organic sense, but the USA wheat fields?????
“Experience keeps a dear [expensive] school, but men will learn in no other.”
—Ben Franklin