Any level headed person, forget a politician, would want to experiment first, see the results, gauge and then expand selectively. That is common sense.
I guess when you are a dictator ish government and you rule the country with an iron first, the institutions of the state stop being anything and simply become rubber stamps.
This also underlines the importance of self sufficiency in necessities. A country ought to feed its people, provide basic services like power and medical facilities on its own, without depending on imports.
The Rajapaksa family gave out jobs based on nepotism not expertise, and weren’t the sharpest knives in the drawer. It is completely insane policy, as was flatly running out of currency before doing anything about it. It will be a long road to recovery. At least they have kicked out the family from the government, and have a pretty solid plan to reverse the authoritarian sections of the constitution put in place by the Rajapaksas a few years ago. And the movement to oust the Rajapaksas has brought the whole populace toghether in a way that Sri Lanka sorely needs, Sinhala, Tamil and Musliam all working together non-violently can only be good.
The immediate problem is that the entire legal order of succession (PM, president, Speaker etc) are Rajapaksa cronies who are busily getting the hell out of Dodge^W Colombo, so it's not at all sure who is going to form or lead the next government.
There are also a lot of unresolved tensions left over from the vicious civil war that devastated the island for decades, so it's sadly possible that things take a turn for the worse.
India, but the two countries have a very complicated and touchy relationship. Sri Lanka's Tamil minority, including the Tamil Tigers, was heavily supported by Tamils in India. However, Tamil Nadu (the Indian state) itself has a fractious relationship and the Tigers repaid India's attempt to send in peacekeepers by assassinating Indian PM Rajiv Gandhi.
Minor correction - Gandhi wasn’t assassinated for sending in peacekeepers. It was for sending in and leaving unchecked a notoriously brutal “peacekeeping” force who terrorized the people they were there to protect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Peace_Keeping_Force#War...
(The original article is very good at providing a beginner's explanation of forex crises, and should be bookmarked for every time someone wants to talk about inflation)
> A country ought to feed its people
This is much harder than it sounds, not just for dense tiny countries like Singapore but for much of Western Europe. The UK hasn't been able to feed its population from native production only since before WW2. I see a Norwegian making the same point in this thread; the proportion of Norway's five million people that could be sustainably fed by fishing, reindeer hunting, and agriculture on the few flat bits of the country is probably very small.
> provide basic services like power and medical facilities on its own
Even harder. Only a superpower could begin to attempt having its own production chain for both of those. Everyone else has to buy from Siemens or Westinghouse, or Pfizer etc.
It sounds like you're saying that only superpowers or mega-countries should exist? Would the EU count as a self-sufficiency unit for this purpose?
Arguably countries are on a logical trajectory to consolidate into economic superblocks, if not in literal than in defacto status.
Gundam 00 comes to mind as an example, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_Suit_Gundam_00 , one of the main characters is a former child warrior from the then severely economically depressed post-oil 'middle east' region, while each of the three economic superblocks has it's own space elevator connecting to an orbital ring of solar collectors.
I read that book (when forced to while in school), and I mostly only remember Big Brother and that dystopias suck. Also I would take everything stated about everyplace, inside the fictional regime or not, with a huge grain of salt. I probably did at the time, which is why the specific world state just never stuck with me.
> The UK hasn't been able to feed its population from native production only since before WW2.
What does this mean though?
That the UK does not generate enough calories to meet a certain minimum baseline?
That the UK does not generate enough calories to meet the current consumption?
That the UK eats things that they do not grow?
Result: The UK grows enough wheat alone to give enough calories to support its population, with plenty to spare. It also produces all the major food groups in quite large quantities. If cut off from the world, the UK people wouldn't starve, but they might have to switch out their caviar for something else.
That's quite an impressive report and it's good to see someone's taking this seriously, even if they might end up ignored by whoever the agriculture secretary of the day is.
> but they might have to switch out their caviar for something else
That's frivolous: the report talks about meeting 100% of caloric requirements from grain in an emergency scenario. The mostly-bread diet would be comparable or worse than WW2 rationing, it's not just luxuries that would be impacted.
For purposes of comparison with Sri Lanka, I also note: "The UK imports roughly 50% of its ammonium nitrate, with 75% of imports for fertiliser use coming from the EU (primarily from Lithuania, Poland, and the Netherlands) and the remaining 25% from Georgia and Russia."
"Because human waste contains shigella bacteria..." we wouldn't put human waste directly on the land. We currently do spread treated human waste that has been digested on land, commonly called biosolids.
Water treatment plants let quite a lot of biological contamination through... If you use that to water crops that people eat, you get quite a nice disease spreading loop...
Specifically, no water treatment process today tests for viruses in treated water, and there are plenty of viruses that can survive sitting in a bubble tank for a few hours..
Boiling the water for 10 minutes first would satisfy me that very little biological contamination can make it out, but it is a huge amount of energy required to boil all the wastewater.
Probably not, but can be a source. Which is why it is regulated and steps are taken to a) reduce E. coli in the sludge and b) apply it at certain times, etc. per the EPA link.
Treatment methods eliminate more than 95% of the pathogens in sewage sludge; the risk of disease from those that remain in biosolids is short-term because most of them do not survive beyond 30 days in the soil environment. In addition to requiring pathogen reduction treatment, Pennsylvania's biosolids regulations contain several risk reduction and management requirements that reduce the likelihood of disease to very low levels. These requirements include:
treatment and management practices to reduce the attraction of disease vectors and thus the probability that pathogens would be transferred from biosolids to humans or animals
application setback requirements from occupied dwellings and from water sources
minimum time requirements from biosolids application to harvest, ranging from 30 days for forage and feed crops to 38 months for some food crops
no grazing allowed within 30 days of biosolids application to pastures
If carefully followed, these requirements make the risk of disease from land-applied biosolids similar to or lower than that of land-applied manures. In fact, there are no documented cases of human or animal diseases being contracted from land-applied biosolids.
Changes in microorganisms have undoubtedly contributed to this increase, as have changes in growing, harvesting, distribution, processing and consumption practices. Listeria monocytogenes, Clostridium botulinum and Bacillus cereus are naturally present in some soils. Their presence on fresh produce is not uncommon. Salmonella, E. coli O157:H7, Campylobacter jejuni, Vibrio cholerae, parasites and viruses can contaminate produce through raw or improperly composted manure, irrigation water containing untreated sewage or manure, and contaminated wash water. Contact with mammals, reptiles, fowl, insects and unpasteurized animal products are other sources of contamination.
Add in the cost of the human waste disposal that you make unnecessary (ah, I guess that's the "nitrogen pollution" bit). But I understand that phosphates are at least as serious a problem; and I believe nitrates are much less persistent than phosphates.
If I remember a fragment of chemistry from 50 years ago, it's something like "all inorganic nitrate salts are soluble in water at STC". Ammonia's also water-soluble (and volatile); rivers and groundwater can recover from nitrogen pollution more quickly than from phosphate pollution.
One other thing: phosphate fertilisers basically have to be dug out of the ground, and as reserves begin to run low, prices are increasing. But human poo is very high in phosphates.
I mean, even if there's a yick factor, let's face it: every glass of water we drink, whether from the tap or the mineral spring, has probably passed through the kidneys of dozens of animals, including fish, mammals and insects, and certainly hundreds of dinosaurs and millions of bateria. Why should we be concerned if the phosphate salt we use was once a part of human poo, which probably contained nasties at some point? And nobody's proposing that humans should chow-down on phosphate salts extracted from human poo; stick to bananas, and put the fertiliser on the banana tree.
One weakness in the report (unless I just missed it) where it covers 'essential inputs' and their costs: it does not address what proportion of those inputs are imported.
Considering a hypothetical where the UK is isolated, it seems like a significant omission.
UK was in EU until recently. 40% of EU budget is dedicated to food security under the name of Common Agricultural Policy. In practice, this is an extremely complex pool of regulations and subsidies that work really well to ensure that the EU can feed itself.
Pretty much every investment in agriculture, from buying tractors to the collection and distribution of organic fertilizers is heavily subsiduzed and controlled.
That might have been true at some point, but with all the "we have to fight Russia" rhetoric they have put that food security in jeopardy. It's by far not the only western country that does so. The Farmers protests in NL triggered by the request to massively slash nitrogen in farming are another example. It does remind be of Sri Lanka a little bit, albeit under a different pretext.
The UK is not self-sufficient in wheat, and depending on harvests has to imports millions of tons.
"Enough wheat to give enough calories to everyone" only means that in an extreme situation and with very strict rationing nutritional needs could be met. Which is self-sufficiency at the limit only.
Indeed. In World War II Britain was dependant upon food imports even with rationing. After a period in which German U-boats happened to be unusually effective at destroying civilian transports, it got down to maybe a week's supply.
The government assumption was that - once the population realises they're going to be starved - they will revolt and insist on agreeing terms with Germany in exchange for food. Given what we later saw in Japan (which did starve its civilian population and they did not in fact rise up and force Japan to surrender) perhaps they were too pessimistic, we will never know because the next convoy got through.
This is a common feature of dictatorships: a boneheaded decision from a central government wreaks havoc on the people in the field that would know better.
It reminds me of Mao ordering all sparrows be killed because they eat agriculture seeds.
This of course caused a much bigger crisis with insects destroying crops - because everyone knows sparrows also eat lots of insects.
Sri Lanka is not a dictatorship. They have regular elections. The Rajapakshas might have been authoritarian, even corrupt. But they won the last election in a landslide. Sri Lankans cannot entirely absolve themselves of blame for repeatedly electing a populist regime.
Are the two mutually exclusive? I don't see why a democracy can't elect a dictator, even a different one every couple of years. In ancient Rome the title dictator was a short-term thing.
In Rome there were two periods when the title of Dictator was used. First during the Republic where it indeed was a temporary role with limitations, then resurrected during the Empire as title only to justify authoritarianism.
You’re not right. What Rome called a dictator is not the modern definition of the term. An elected autocrat can have similarities to a dictator, but they aren’t one. Unless they rig the elections!
You're arguing against something that wasn't said. They said the "title of Dictator" was used, and that is correct, it was used in Roman history as they said.
The Roman title of Dictator is different from a modern day dictator, agreed — but if you read carefully no-one argued otherwise. The Roman title of Dictator more aligns with the modern concept of "emergency powers."
>>Sri Lankans cannot entirely absolve themselves of blame for repeatedly electing a populist regime.
If you have bigoted populace, it's dead easy to bait them into voting for some immediate emotional relief. Sri Lankan's wanted to have fun watching Tamils and Muslims get hurt, so it wasn't all that hard for some politician to get the people vote for him. The worse thing is they even put up with his bad decisions for the same reasons. And they did this for years.
The population is entirely responsible for this.
As it turns out they ran out of time, there's always that one point after which everything comes melting down.
i think its an unfortunate combination of many things, covid being the main. this shows that democracies are not immune to leaders resorting to populist measures to win elections.. hope its a good lesson to lankans and rest of us.
democracy isn't just about elections (otherwise even the totalitarian fascist Russia could have been called democratic :). Elections is just a basic necessary condition of democracy, a starting point. Many of those populist regimes aren't democracies really, they are more like ochlocracies naturally hijacked by authoritarians.
Yes - exactly. Genuine democracies are a complex patchwork of competing interests which somehow balance to generate policy that benefits most of the population.
As soon as you have a government run for the benefit of a small group, you no longer have a democracy.
Elections don't change this. Not even nominally free and fair ones.
The problem - as always - is that any system of government trends towards capture by Dark Tetrad types. No matter what decisions they appear to make, and no matter whether they're left/right populist/monarchist democratic/authoritarian, the consequences are always disastrous.
It's not that, really. There are only so many boneheaded decisions that can come from a central government, and you risk over-weighting one person directly. More frequently, it's the indirect, created conditions typical of centralized power that allow sycophants and incompetents to run decision-making at lower levels -- where there is more impact and volume -- based on purely political and personal reasons.
Which country isn't corrupt? I know many nations that are more corrupt than Srilanka. The major difference is Srilanka depended on tourism which led to this downfall.
Regarding the authoritarian governance, can you please supply the valid examples? Srilanka is just one example. There are many countries like Bhutan, Nepal which seems to be sliding day by day. I hope we won't label them authoritarian when they fail?
Democracy is not immune as people expect. We can't label demagouge who sways people as authoritarian. Democracy is only sucessful if majority of people aren't biased and vote based on merit rather than religion, greed etc.
this is not possible as 'authoritarian' is described as opposite to 'democratic'. Witness the recent posture of US alliance building / NATO to Asia pivoting / Anti-BRI funding.
Sometimes I think a huge percent of communism's economic overhead is simply everyone having to remember another dictionary's worth of current communist truths.
To the extent they have less mental free space to actually do work.
Perhaps Mao appealed too heavily to the sentiment of farmers upset with their seeds being eaten, not realizing that killing the sparrows would have had adverse ecological effects.
Believe me, the organic transition had nothing to do with agricultural practices and all to do with economics, with the logic being that fertilizer was an expensive import, and by banning fertilizer they could hemorrhage foreign exchange reserves a little less. Of course, they also earned a lot less because the bone-headed transition lead to a marked reduction in yield, only worsening the forex problem the ban of agricultural chemicals was meant to solve.
Organic fertilizer requires that the N, P, and K actually came from somewhere. Often, that's from something else that used non-organic fertilizer. So if a country goes all organic not only are yields down on the fields using organic fertilizer, the supply of organic fertilizer itself could dry up.
Nitrogen can come from the air by using nitrogen fixing crops in a rotation, so it can never run out (N2 is the most abundant gas on the atmosphere). The problem is that growing nitrogen fixers take a lot of land time that could otherwise be growing crops. Also not as nitrogen rich as fossil fertilizers (gas N2 is quite stable, difficult to fixers to extract in high quantities).
A phrase to remember: "Exports are made out of imports". Almost every export industry depends on an import in its production chain somewhere, which is why trade wars and sanctions are so destructive. Import-substitution planned economies have to be very clever about how they approach this to get it to work.
Very honestly, it might have worked out fine - organic produce fetches a much higher price overseas. If its already a somewhat niche product like tea, organic produce might go even higher and make up for the loss in yield.
For Sri Lanka, it was the perfect storm of covid decimating tourism AND overseas demand for their produce.
Without Covid, they might have been able to stay afloat on tourism dollars until the organic farming thing started showing results.
Sri Lanka is the second largest tea exporter in the world -- if you converted all of that to organic, then odds are good that the organic tea market just collapses.
Beyond that, it's easy to get rid of modern fertilizers, but the tradeoff is significantly lower yield. To make up for the loss of yield, you need more space. Sri Lanka is a small island that is densely populated, so space is at a premium. Yielding less crop for the same money might have worked out if not for the pandemic, except for the fact that they domestically consumed most of their domestic staple goods, exporting the surplus. Now they've resorted to importing.
> It's not plausible to move the entire agricultural sector towards luxury exports by government fiat.
.. overnight.
Some countries have managed to pivot towards luxury exports, and indeed this is one of the standard things that the IMF tries to make failing countries do, but it's a multi-decade process.
Organic farming is strictly self-regulated. Usually it takes something like five years for a field that was used for traditional farming to be considered organic. The field has to flush the insecticide. With a decision to prevent forex issues by banning fertilizer, Sri Lanka could not afford to wait years for its organic products to be recognized internationally. The plan was foolish.
I guess that makes sense, initially, on paper. I would guess some organic farming fanatic put put the numbers that fertilizers import can be reduced XX%, and the dollar signs in the eyes of the ruling family lit up (All those dollars not spent on imports can be embezzled)
Seems like the switch wasn't about chemical fertilizer vs organic fertilizier but imported fertilizer vs local fertilizer.
"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 fertiliser.
It told farmers to use locally sourced organic fertilisers instead."
Not just a dictatorship problem. Look at the halting of nuclear in Germany - a decision made by Angela Merkel after a bottle of wine with her husband according to The Atlantic.
I would argue that the current energy crisis was also partly caused by the ESG drive which while laudable in aspiration got ahead of physical practical implementation capacity.
Large scale buildouts of natural gas infrastructure is not ESG.
I know it is tempting to pin this one on the environmentalists, but this is on the establishment. Starting with Schröder who realized he could find an easy way to keep German industry competitive and line his pockets and live a comfortable life forever.
This is similar to the Sri Lankan situation. It does not matter how you label it. The lack of fertilizer was clearly not voluntary.
Devemoped countries have underinvested in natural gas infrastructure compared to its importance in keeping their shiny new renewable-heavy grids actually operating though - and in particular ESG campaigners have been very successful at blocking investment in natural gas production in most of the Western democratic world. Which has just resulted in heavy dependencies on imports from unstable dictatorships since there's no real alternative to fossil fuels yet. I know the Guardian here in the UK has been pushing for a continued block on new natural gas production that they admit will only stop it being produced in stable democratic countries, even well after Russia's invasion of Ukraine demonstrated the actual consequences of this.
Substituting electricity made at natural gas fuelled power stations for electricity made at coal fuelled power stations does however result in large carbon emission reductions and is seen as ESG (or was prior to Russia's invasion of Ukraine anyway)
The amount of shilling for nuclear energy on this site is never ceases to amaze me. It's just more expensive than alternatives https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics_of_nuclear_power_pla... and the costs related to storing fuel, decommission old reactors and so on are also huge and paid by the taxpayer.
Wind and solar cannot guarantee production. This means you need storage. The problem with storage is you need to determine how much you want. If you decide on 1 month of storage what happens when you have limited wind and sun for a month and you are running out of stored power?
Nuclear doesn't have that problem. This is why nuclear is a must in the future.
I've been reading a lot of Soviet history lately and it provides a source of a huge number of similar agricultural disasters. Both Russian and Chinese attitudes towards agricultural peasants has been that they are dispensable humans, and it shows in how these countries have had disasters:
* collectivitzation leading to the Holodomor in Ukraine, mass famine in Kazakhstan, and hunger throughout the USSR, killing millions upon millions through starvation. All the act of a single, paranoid, murderous tyrant.
* Kruschev's love affair with corn, that ended up being a crop failure after a few lucky years in smaller trials. This is actually the more level-headed play than Stalin's, but such a large shift, even with a trial, was a gigantic failure.
Lately I've been completely enamored with the book How Asia Works lately, and in detailing the success and failure of many different Asian nations development in the 20th century, it homes in on agricultural independence as a corner stone for further economic development to industrialization. Without a broad base of independent small farmers, that have small farms that they can directly profit from, a large base of a middle class can never develop. Large industrial farms, favored both by capitalists and Marxists concentrate power into too few hands and are also far less productive in total agricultural output, even if they they are more profitable. It doesn't talk much about Sri Lanka, focusing more on north east Asia, but I would be quite curious about how and if Sri Lanka's land reforms from the 70s were effective.
> Both Russian and Chinese attitudes towards agricultural peasants has been that they are dispensable humans
You can see elements of this in the West as well: agricultural work is often done by precarious non-citizens, and every now and again an entire semi-trailer of these people being imported turn up dead.
More specifically pseudo science not guided by empiricism. The line between science and pseudo science is very thin. Scientific theories are often incorrect, especially in life science, but we refine upon them based in empirical and observed data.
There was the context for collectivization as rapidly industrializing agriculture, which did lay the foundation for the rapid urban growth afterwards and the prevention of further famines which were regular occurrences up to that point through the new established agricultural infrastructure. The middle class developed from the resulting maturation of industrialization and urbanization instead. So the economy itself underwent a rapid shift from peasant based to factory worker based and beyond to catch up with the developed world.
Of course there is the human cost of such rapid change, but I wonder if the swiftness was compacting human immiersation into a tighter time frame rather than having it evened out over a long period of time. Perhaps the huge economic disruption led to more overall immiseration? Or did the planners think that rapidness would have resulted in less overall immiseration like a trolley problem? If South Korea was an example, students depised the pro-industrialization military dictators, but later generations have started to appreciated the fruits and sacrifice of pro-industrialization.
Interestingly as a side note, North Korea has a more corn based agriculture out of necessity to adapt to the poorer agricultural conditions of the north versus south, which was traditionally the farmland of Korea.
There's a premium that can be exacted from switching to organic agriculture that isn't be discussed in this article. Sri Lanka has a limited land mass available for food production and they mostly export commodities to other countries. We're talking ~25,000 sq-mi. For context, the US state of Kansas is ~82,000 sq-mi. If you cannot physically expand the footprint of agriculture in Sri Lanka to boost revenues, the thinking in government was probably to try to switch to organic to fetch a higher price for exports. The mistake is that you can't just flip a switch and transition to organic production. That kind of change requires a generational change in farmers to pull off, and you will still fetch far lower yields in the interim.
Not to be rude but did you bother to think before writing that post? Sri Lanka is a net importer of food. It is not self sufficient.
You can’t get a organic premium if you can’t feed your own people, and organic food has a well known yield reduction.
It was abundantly transparent to all commentators at the time that this was purely to try and reduce capital outflows.
Uh, yes, my snarky friend. I didn't suggest Sri Lanka is agriculturally self-sufficient. With so little a land area to work with, that would not be possible.
It's not clear that switching to organic agriculture in any way reduces capital outflows. Do you mean reducing import costs by not having to import chemical fertilizer? If that were the case, I think Sri Lanka would focus on boosting domestic production and finding cheaper suppliers.
And is it likely that buyers who favour organic produce would be looking at food miles and buying locally? Not sure if that's as relevant at export scale.
What country are you in? In the US, I've seen organic tea in the vast majority of grocery stores I've been to. Cafes sometimes have it too, but it's less common.
That's the nice thing about free trade and free markets - everyone is running a decentralized version of that experiment and incrementally updating the data live. If you make both paths available (organic vs fertilizer) and let the farmers whose livelihoods are on the line choose, then they are very likely to make the best choice.
If society values agricultural output or having income in rural areas it's a lot better to have farmers making the choices themselves than to chose whatever non-farmer/urban/plutocrat politicians would mandate.
> A country ought to feed its people, provide basic services like power and medical facilities on its own, without depending on imports.
Ah, wouldn't that be nice!
I live in the UK, a country that hasn't been able to feed itself using only its own produce for centuries; Napoleon called us a "nation of shopkeepers" because we couldn't survive without trade. Our staple is wheat; but our wheat isn't as good as North American wheat, and anyway we are far from self-sufficient.
We used to export coal, oil and gas; but the North Sea has largely dried up, the coal mines are mostly closed, and anyway coal is sort of un-hip these days.
I wish the NHS would stop putting services out to open tender. Private (overseas) medical companies bid for the business, so that more and more of our health services are provided privately, by US medical companies. We're perfectly capable of looking after the health of our population without overseas help; but apparently our politicians don't think it's a good idea.
"A wise prince acts within that which constrains him"
The issue is that often people come to power based on unfulfillable promises and corruption. So the food supply is one constraint, but so is the fact you promises 1001 bribes and special favours. So now you have to deliver on the latter soon and the former can wait for months. So you do and desperately cling on.
There is fundamentally no difference between this happening in Sri Lanka or here in the UK with Brexit and Boris. The only difference is that the Pound devaluing doesn't cause food shortages etc where as the LKR does. In both cases, corrupt leaders picked by a corrupt electorate that think they can get something for nothing.
As I understand it, it was to improve their ESG score (they got up to 98) in order to spur up foreign investments. It did not quite work out as expected...
> The drastic move to organic farming is puzzling.
That's because it was a desperate response to a currency crisis.
They couldn't pay to import fertilizer, so the government trotted out the absurd idea of using domestically produced fertilizer.
The whole "organic" thing was a red herring to dress up what was a last ditch attempt to compensate for gross mismanagement of the economy.
Unfortunately, a lot of politically motivated folks have bought into this narrative--either deliberately or unwittingly--and are using it to attack sustainability initiatives, not recognizing that they're falling for simple propaganda (see cloutchaser's comment in this thread for a good example of that).
>This also underlines the importance of self sufficiency in necessities.
Embarrassingly for your argument, trying to be self-sufficient is exactly what brought on this crisis. Reckless attempts at protectionism and nativism can be just as damaging as reliance on unreliable trade partners.
Economic security is very important of course, but for most countries self-sufficiency is either flat out unattainable or an incredibly expensive luxury. Fortunately there are other ways to achieve economic security, the most important of which is figuring out who you can trust, and hedging the risks of any exposure you have to those you can't.
Every common farmer could have told you that you will run into huge problems if you don't use fertilizer on a soil that has been fertilized for years. The soil probably has zero nutritional value for plants and any water will quickly evaporate. It is basically just sand that may or may not be too acidic or too alkaline because of chemical residues. It would take years to prepare the soil. You will also need more land to plant different crops and let it regenerate.
Chemical NPK fertilizer is something terribly effective for that matter. It would be a huge improvement to regulate how much is allowed and farmers need to be compensated for the additional land usage to be able to do sensible crop rotations and allow the soil to actually build up nutrition. Overall this could easily take a decade or two.
Of course the motivation wasn't ecological, fertilizer got more expensive and there was no money to buy it with. Industrial fertilizer is made from natural gas after all... You could probably also use oil...
> Any level headed person, forget a politician, would want to experiment first, see the results, gauge and then expand selectively. That is common sense.
> I guess when you are a dictator ish government and you rule the country with an iron first, the institutions of the state stop being anything and simply become rubber stamps.
The precautionary principle. I've noticed this is ever-more fiercely applied to anything involving protection of the environment, but never, ever applied to protection of national ethnicities and culture in Western countries - where the mere mention of latter invites being cancelled.
They wanted to cut taxes. To cut taxes, they needed to cut costs. Not paying for fertilizer would be one way. But of course it would destroy the economy.
In most countries I expect the private sector to pay for fertilizer. In Sri Lanka, due to the currency peg the government was paying for fertilizer. It seems that they chose the wrong solution to that problem.
> Any level headed person, forget a politician, would want to experiment first,
We are also not doing that here in the West when it comes to pushing almost of our energy inputs into renewables. Also, see the recent Dutch farmers' revolt and the reasons behind them, seems like not that much thought was given there, either.
> Any level headed person, forget a politician, would want to experiment first, see the results, gauge and then expand selectively. That is common sense.
Are you kidding me? The complete religious level consensus on the "save the planet" or "climate change" side of the discussion is everything should go back to being organic and sustainable, and unquestionably right now, with no testing.
Take a look at the greens in germany, who are still getting the last 3 nuclear plants shut down RIGHT NOW. I mean what the fuck.
And this isn't politicians. Politicians just reflect what their voting base want. There is an insane dogma now that anything artificial is basically evil, for many many of the public.
Any level headed person, forget a politician, would want to experiment first, see the results, gauge and then expand selectively. That is common sense.
I guess when you are a dictator ish government and you rule the country with an iron first, the institutions of the state stop being anything and simply become rubber stamps.
This also underlines the importance of self sufficiency in necessities. A country ought to feed its people, provide basic services like power and medical facilities on its own, without depending on imports.