In the latest Capital Letter, I discussed Dutch farmers pushing back against rules designed to limit emissions of nitrogen oxide, rules so drastic and so rapidly imposed that they may push many out of business.
Writing in the Daily Telegraph, Matt Ridley observes that:
If the world abandoned nitrogen fertiliser that was fixed in factories, the impact on human living standards would be catastrophic, but so would the impact on nature. Given that about half the nitrogen atoms in the average person’s body were fixed in an ammonia factory rather than a plant, to feed eight billion people with organic methods we would need to put more than twice as much land under the plough and the cow. That would consign most of the world’s wetlands, nature reserves and forests to oblivion.
Ridley’s article contains a brief reference to what’s going in the Netherlands but is mainly about the trouble in which Sri Lanka now finds itself, something that has a number of causes. Writing for Capital Matters, Steve Hanke has highlighted monetary mismanagement, something he first warned about months ago. Our Dominic Pino has also been looking at Sri Lanka, and amongst the topics he mentioned in a June piece was the country’s disastrous experiment with organic agriculture:
[O]n top of the fiscal troubles, in April of 2021, Sri Lanka announced that it would try to become the world’s first 100 percent organic country. President Rajapaksa banned chemical fertilizer, despite warnings from agricultural scientists and farmers that the country wouldn’t be able to produce as much food without it. A blend of protectionism and medical quackery influenced Rajapaksa’s decision, and it was pitched as a way to create a “Green Sri Lanka.” Some organic proponents still defend the policy, saying that the crisis began before the ban, and the ban wasn’t in effect long enough to matter — but that should only increase concern for how much worse things could get.
The proximate cause of the catastrophe that followed was, in no small part, the result of the speed of implementation, but the reality is that, however leisurely the pace, moving away from “synthetic” fertilizers and pesticides was always likely to lead to disaster.
Ridley:
Vandana Shiva, a feted environmentalist, said: “This decision will definitely help farmers become more prosperous.” She has been silent recently. Dr Shiva has led relentless criticism of the Green Revolution of the 1960s, which brought fertiliser and new crop varieties to south Asia, banishing famine for the first time in history even as population increased. Her (and others’) claims that traditional, organic farming could feed the world more healthily remain wildly popular among environmentalists. Sri Lanka has tested that proposition and found it wanting.
Turning to her Wikipedia entry, I read that Shiva is described, among other things, as an environmental activist, food-sovereignty advocate, ecofeminist, and anti-globalization author, often referred to as, oh dear, the “Gandhi of grain” for her anti-GMO activism.
The whole entry is worth reading, and so are some of the articles referred to in the footnotes. To find this in a 2014 piece in Discover magazine did not come as a surprise:
She is often heralded as a tireless “defender of the poor,” someone who “has courageously taken her stand among the peasant farmers of India.” Let it be noted, however, that this champion of the downtrodden doesn’t exactly live a peasant’s lifestyle. If you’d like to learn what qualifies Shiva for a typical $40,000 speaking fee, here is how her representatives package her . . .
“Social justice,” like “sustainability,” can be a profitable enterprise, even more so when, as is often the case with Shiva’s sermons, something vaguely spiritual is thrown in.
But back to Ridley:
Within months [of Sri Lanka going organic], the volume of tea exports had halved, cutting foreign exchange earnings. Rice yields plummeted leading to an unprecedented requirement to import rice. With the government unable to service its debt, the currency collapsed.
Speciality crop yields like cinnamon and cardamom tanked. Staple foods became infested with pests leading to widespread hunger. As Ted Nordhaus of the Breakthrough Institute put it in March: “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.”
Commenting in the Wall Street Journal (do read the whole thing), Tunku Varadarajan has harsh words for Sri Lanka’s now departed President Rajapaksa (a “Sri Lankan Nero”) and his policies, but note the little detail at the end of this paragraph:
Ms. Shiva and other woke environmentalists . . . rejoiced at the epochal nature of Mr. Rajapaksa’s decision. “Let us all join hands with Sri Lanka,” Ms. Shiva tweeted on June 10, 2021, “taking steps towards a #PoisonFree #PoisonCartelFree world for our health & the health of the planet.” Lost in all the ideological ululation was another likely explanation for Mr. Rajapaksa’s action: So debt-ridden was Sri Lanka—to China, in particular—that he may have decided to forgo imported fertilizer and pesticide as a money-saving measure.
China. Oh.