It wasn’t green dogma, that was just a retcon.<p>There simply wasn’t enough foreign currency reserves for import.<p>Prices have rocketed and the president instead of admitting that decided to say they were going organic.<p>Sri Lanka presidents children spent all their foreign reserves on a white elephant airport and golf courses and due to Covid the principle sources of foreign reserves (tourism and money sent home from domestic and construction workers in the middle east).<p>It was a perfect storm of black swan and incompetence/corruption.<p>I have several dear friends desperate for help over there. I managed to send some rice and cooking oil but it just got stolen along the supply chain somewhere.
"<i>But the underlying reason for the fall of Sri Lanka is that its leaders fell under the spell of Western green elites peddling organic agriculture</i>"<p>This article feels to me like the author has an axe to grind ("green elites") so I did a quick check:<p><i>Shellenberger's positions and writings on climate change and environmentalism have been called "bad science" and "inaccurate" by environmental scientists and academics, while receiving praise from writers and journalists in the popular press, including conservative news outlets and organizations.</i><p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Shellenberger" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Shellenberger</a><p>The BBC has a different take:<p><i>When Sri Lanka's foreign currency shortages became a serious problem in early 2021, the government tried to limit them by banning imports of chemical fertilizer. It told farmers to use locally sourced organic fertilizers instead. This led to widespread crop failure. Sri Lanka had to supplement its food stocks from abroad, which made its foreign currency shortage even worse.</i><p><a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/world-61028138" rel="nofollow">https://www.bbc.com/news/world-61028138</a>
There’s more to the story. Sri Lanka went organic because they didn’t have the money to buy regular fertilizer. And then when they bought organic fertilizer, it arrived in an unusable state due to shipping delays.<p>Edit: Here’s a BBC story from November about the organic fertilizer shipment. <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-59202309" rel="nofollow">https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-59202309</a>
I wish there were a word or phrase (or better, Internet Law) for when someone rebuts their own conspiratorial claim:<p>> To be sure, there were other factors behind Sri Lanka’s fall. COVID-19 lockdowns and a 2019 bombing hurt tourism, a $3 billion to 5 billion-per-year industry. Sri Lanka’s leaders insisted on paying China back for various “Belt and Road” infrastructure projects when other nations refused to do so. And higher oil prices meant transportation prices rose 128% since May.<p>In other words: Sri Lanka barely weathered a global pandemic, drained its foreign reserves to pay off debts, and had no gas left in the tank (so to speak) to handle the price shock of the first major European war in nearly a century. But no, it's environmentalism that's actually to blame.
The author has no training in economics, government, or science, and he has been criticized by the actual scientific community for promoting his own misunderstanding of science (which isn't quite climate-change denialism, but is definitely not based in reality either).<p>My point is that he has a strong bias about this and also doesn't seem qualified to offer an analysis on this situation in a country he hasn't followed or studied until this crisis.
I would expect the hacker news crowd would be above this deliberately over-simplified take on the situation. Media like this is designed to re-enforce certain incorrect but convenient views of the world.
I wish there were better patterns for new laws and regulations to be phased in gradually rather than all at once. You see it happen occasionally, but it's the exception rather than the norm.<p>So much waste and strife comes from big discontinuous jumps that could easily be made smooth and continuous.
I am reading Vaclav Smil's 'How the world really works', and cay say in the west 3 generations are removed from the farmland and has this rainbows and unicorn view of food production and thanks to American cultural broadcasting are projecting these (insane) ideas to third world elite.<p>Industrial farming is critical to feed a world with 8 billion people. NPKs play a very important role to see people around the world are fed.
Why is this flagged? It is a fact that Sri Lankan government used the talking points of Green/Organic movement of the west to justify its insane agricultural policy. This needs to be discussed and Greens should be exposed for their possibly well-intentioned but criminally damaging policy promotion.<p>I do not know how HN moderates around the serial abusers for flagging, but this is serious violation of spirit of this forum.
> Why did they engage in such a radical experiment?<p>Well, that's where it cut off for me without a subscription.<p>Still, I'm sure it's going to say that the problem was the overhype of "green"/"organic" agriculture, and that this is a cautionary tale of why we need to stay with modern chemical-intense agriculture.<p>Because I've seen quite a few of those.<p>I'll instead quote from <a href="https://science.thewire.in/environment/sri-lanka-crisis-organic-farming-greenwashing/" rel="nofollow">https://science.thewire.in/environment/sri-lanka-crisis-orga...</a> (I couldn't find the original essay I read which describes the underlying isssue, but was able to find this one with essentially the same thesis):<p>> And yet, the collapse of Sri Lanka’s economy had little to do with organic farming per se, and much more to do with the disastrous handling of its economy.<p>> Nonetheless, the banning of inorganic fertilisers, the reasons it was done and the way it was done is a cautionary tale of how not to embark on a green transition. It should be a mandatory exercise to review these failures as the developing world looks for a stable path as the climate crisis intensifies.<p>> The first thing to note about Sri Lanka’s decision to ban the import of inorganic fertilisers is that it was based on desperation rather than planning. It is true that President Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s government had promised when it came into power in 2019 that it would shift agriculture to organic farming – but it had announced that it would do so over a period of 10 years, not overnight.<p>> No large-scale plan was drawn up, no public discussions with farmers was undertaken, and the people in government pushing the policies included those who came up with locally made syrups to combat the COVID-19 pandemic.<p>> In the end, the decision was taken for the simple reason that Sri Lanka was running out of money. The pandemic had hurt the tourist industry, and when the government was elected in 2019, it further cut down taxes, leaving it with money flowing out – much of it for vast infrastructure projects – and little to raise.<p>> Between the end of 2020 to March 2021, the country’s foreign exchange reserves plummeted from $7.6 billion to less than $2 billion. It was because of this huge loss of foreign currency, and the cost of importing inorganic fertilisers that Sri Lanka largely does not manufacture, that the country imposed a ban on it – forcing two-thirds of its population that depends on agriculture to suddenly scramble to deal with the fallout.
> What, exactly, were Sri Lanka’s leaders thinking? Why did they engage in such a radical experiment?<p>It's that the end of the article or is this behind a paywall? I'm not saying anything else after that on the page
All that may be true but it's doubtful anyone ever "fell" for anything. The majority of the Sri Lankan people never supported any of this. First the country came under the control of the corrupt Rajapaksas, then it got destroyed with questionable deals dictated by foreign powers.<p>The Communist Party owns a harbor there now with a 99-year lease. You can't make this up, they're one to one copying the British colonial strategy down to the exact length of the contract used in Hong Kong. There was also the case where authorities rejected a batch of contaminated fertilizer but then under pressure the government had to pay for it nonetheless. Clearly the Sri Lankan elites are not in control anymore when it comes to dealing with foreign creditors. The Rajapaksas have amassed great personal wealth, at the teeny tiny downside of selling out the entire country.
Yet somehow there are still tons of tankies on Twitter - people with actual hammer-and-sickle in their screen names - trying to pin this on "neoliberals" despite the fact that banning chemical fertilizers is the least neoliberal thing I can think of.
This is just the beginning and will be fate of more countries that can't break the spell and return to focusing on the unique fundamentals of their national interests.