Five years ago, the World Bank extolled “how Sri Lanka intends to transition to a more competitive and inclusive upper-middle-income country.” Until the middle of last year, despite the effects of the pandemic, the country’s impoverishment index (inflation plus unemployment) was low and falling. Then the misery index took off like a rocket, quintupling in a year. What happened? There is a simple explanation, which the BBC seems determined to play down. In April 2021, President Gotabaya Rajapaksa announced that Sri Lanka was banning most pesticides and all synthetic fertilizers to become fully organic. Within months, the volume of tea exports was halved, reducing foreign exchange earnings. Rice yields plummeted leading to an unprecedented rice import requirement. With the government unable to service its debt, the currency collapsed. Specialty flavors like cinnamon and cardamom. Staple foods were infected by vermin leading to widespread starvation. As Ted Nordhaus of the Breakthrough Institute put it in March: “The monster of magical thinking, technocratic hubris, ideological delusion, self-serving, and sheer myopia that produced the Sri Lankan crisis involves both the country’s political leadership and the supporters of so-called sustainable agriculture.” The government promised more manure, but it would take at least five times as much manure as the country produces to replace the “synthetic” air-fixed nitrogen, and there aren’t enough animals or land to produce that much. In Glasgow for the climate summit last year, Sri Lanka’s president still boasted that his agricultural policy was “in sync with nature”. At the time, his organic decision was widely praised by environmentalists. Sri Lanka scored 98 out of 100 on the ‘ESG’ – environmental, social and governance – criteria for investment. Vandana Shiva, a noted environmentalist, said, “This decision will definitely help farmers become more prosperous.” She has been quiet recently. Dr Shiva has been relentlessly critical of the Green Revolution of the 1960s, which brought fertilizers and new crop varieties to south Asia, eradicating hunger for the first time in history even as the population grew. Her (and others’) claims that traditional, organic farming could feed the world more healthily remain wildly popular among environmentalists. Sri Lanka has tested this proposal and found it insufficient. As agronomist Professor Channa Prakash of Tuskegee University in Alabama once told me: “Sure, organic farming is sustainable: it sustains poverty and malnutrition.” Farming was organic when millions died in famines every decade and US prairies turned into garbage dumps for lack of fertilizer to hold the soil together during droughts. But if you watch or listen to the BBC, you will hear little of it. On its website, under the headline “Sri Lanka: Why is the country in financial crisis?”, you have to read to the end to find an admission that “When Sri Lanka’s foreign exchange shortages became a serious problem in early 2021, the government tried to limit them by banning imports of chemical fertilizers. He told farmers to use local organic fertilizers. This led to widespread crop failure.” Indian commentator Shakhar Gupta calls Sri Lanka’s organic conversion an episode of “mega-stupidity” on par with Mao Zedong’s order to expel the sparrows. In the Netherlands, too, farmers’ protests are mainly about a policy to reduce the use of nitrogen fertilizers. In this country, organic farming receives publicity far out of proportion to its real contribution: around 3 per cent of Britain’s farmland is organic. If the world were to abandon factory-fixed nitrogen fertilizer, the impact on human living standards would be devastating, but so would the impact on nature. Since about half the nitrogen atoms in the average man’s body were placed in an ammonia plant rather than a factory, to feed eight billion people organically would require putting more than twice as much land under the plow and the cow. This would lead to the oblivion of most of the world’s wetlands, nature reserves and forests.
