Global News: May 2022 Archives

Fertiliser ban decimates Sri Lankan crops as government popularity ebbs | Reuters

Green policies starve people: "'Last year, we got 60 bags from these two acres. But this time it was just 10.' The dramatic fall in yields follows a decision last April by President Gotabaya Rajapaksa to ban all chemical fertilisers in Sri Lanka.... Sri Lanka is in the throes of its worst economic crisis in a decade, foreign exchange reserves are at a record low and inflation is soaring, especially for food. Fuel shortages have led to rolling power cuts across the country. The impact of the poor paddy crop could push up the retail price of rice by around 30%, said Buddhi Marambe, an agriculture professor at the University of Peradeniya, who blamed the decision to ban chemical fertilisers."

Ted Nordhaus and Saloni Shah, writing for the Breakthrough Institute in Foreign Policy: "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."

Now Biden's head of the U. S. Agency for International Development, Samantha Power, hails fertilizer shortages in the US for forcing farmers to organic alternatives. "Never let a crisis go to waste."