Sri Lanka, How To Ruin Your Economy

[Moonlight]

As I'm from a farming family I saw this coming and predicted that it would fail, little did I realise how catastrophic the effects on Sri Lanka's economy it would be, I'll bet those Green nut jobs in the Western World won't be mentioning Sri Lanka at their next conference.

The Dream
From the ethically sourced produce shops of Islington to the chemical-free acres of the Prince of Wales's Highgrove farm, you could almost hear the cheering three years ago when Sri Lanka's future president pledged a revolution.
It wouldn't be on the streets but in the fields — as Gotabaya Rajapaksa vowed in his successful 2019 election campaign to transform the country into the world's first fully organic farming nation.

Poverty
Rajapaksa's commitment to producing 100 per cent of Sri Lanka's food organically within a decade was accompanied by a ban on the use of all chemical fertilisers, pesticides and herbicides.
The consequences have been nothing short of catastrophic. Going organic — the bold, modern vision of the UK's green lobby — has triggered the devastation of Sri Lanka's economy, plunging much of its 22 million-strong population into desperate straits.

Humiliation
The loss of revenue from tea and other export crops vastly outstripped any savings from no longer importing fertiliser. In a final humiliation, Sri Lanka — a country until recently self-sufficient in rice — had to spend $450 million importing vast amounts of it, which the government then had to subsidise.
By October last year, it was desperately back-pedalling, relaxing the fertiliser ban for crucial export crops including tea, rubber and coconut. That humiliating U-turn didn't stop President Rajapaksa boasting of his organic credentials a month later at Glasgow's UN Climate Change Summit.

Deluded
Such thinking may be fine in a domestic garden or hobby farm, but not in international agriculture, according to experts.
Nearly all organic farming, they note, serves only the very richest and the very poorest people in the world. While the latter are forced to do it by necessity, as they cannot afford chemical fertilisers and pesticides, for the former it's an expensive lifestyle choice.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/a...M-LEONARD.html