Unsustainable Sri Lanka, 7/16
a disaster that is organic
Noah Smith walks through the mechanics of debt crises and currency crises before getting to the point, which is
But the most boneheaded, bizarre mistake that the Sri Lankan government made was a disastrous plan to shift the entire country to organic agriculture. In April of 2021 the government banned the import and use of pesticides and synthetic fertilizers. This devastated Sri Lankan agriculture, since, as it turns out, fertilizer is really really important. Production of tea — Sri Lanka’s main cash crop — fell by 18% in a year. Production of rice — the main food crop — fell by even more.
Michael Shellenberger gets to the same point faster. He writes,
The underlying reason for the fall of Sri Lanka is that its leaders—starting with former President Maithripala Sirisena and continuing with his successor, the recently deposed Gotabaya Rajapaksa—fell under the spell of Western green elites peddling organic agriculture and “ESG,” which refers to investments made following supposedly higher Environmental, Social, and Governance criteria. Sri Lanka has a near-perfect ESG score of 98—higher than Sweden (96) and the United States (51).
What does having such a high ESG score mean? In short, it meant that Sri Lanka’s two million farmers were forced to stop using fertilizers and pesticides, laying waste to its critical agricultural sector.
Environmentalists seem to be strongly attracted to primitivism. They believe that hunter-gatherer lifestyles are sustainable, and modern lifestyles are not. In fact, the opposite is true. Hunter-gatherer lifestyles cannot sustain large populations. Sri Lankans are starving so that Western environmentalists can preen.
‘ Environmentalists seem to be strongly attracted to primitivism…’
Paganism, I think.
Worship of Mother Earth, Daughter Moon, Father Sun - ritual Human sacrifice in the Oak Groves to propitiate the gods.
The usual excuse for the Sri Lanka débâclé is being trotted out by Marxist, Malthusians to explain when their policies fail catastrophically - not done ‘properly’. In this case done too quickly without proper preparation.
Oh?
Some might say banning internal combustion engines by 2030 and gas for heating/cooking in the UK, and 2035 in Europe is too quick without proper preparation, such as at least doubling the current generating output capacity to meet the increased demand, major structural upgrade and extension of the grid and local network to carry and distribute the increased load. But what will be required, what resources, what cost, to what schedule hasn’t even been assessed. It’s as if somehow it will just happen by some magical, organic process - chargers will grow out of the pavements, new high tension cables and transformers will just appear, power stations of whatever type will reproduce themselves by binary fission.
My view is CoVid Fakedemic, Sri Lanka are the experiments for the total collapse the Neo-Pagans plan for the World.
https://twitter.com/honjonba/status/1547253124267532292?s=21&t=Be4Kc84oWVU449DPJS95Iw
I remember reading a piece in Harvard Business Review in 2008 about the future being “ex-growth”. It was a horrifying concept, argued as if it were good for people.
The idea that there is someone special or powerful enough to decide we have reached the end and we don’t need any more growth or improvement in living standards is also nuts. We don’t appoint anyone with that power.
Marx believed that to achieve communism, you need capitalism first. That will produce enough that you can then hit the stop button and live in a redistributive utopia. What an infuriating idea. A recipe for dictatorship.