The Conservative Cave
Current Events => General Discussion => Topic started by: Ptarmigan on August 18, 2022, 06:24:45 PM
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Sri Lanka's Food Crisis Reveals the Dangers of Environmental Planning
https://fee.org/articles/sri-lankas-food-crisis-reveals-the-dangers-of-environmental-planning/
On July 14, after months of economic and social unrest, Sri Lanka’s President Gotabaya Rajapaksa resigned in disgrace and fled to Singapore, leaving in his wake an economic crisis and a food shortage.
How Rajapaksa’s fate was sealed is not complicated.
You probably heard that Sri Lanka adopted an all-organic approach to agriculture, banning the import of regular fertilizer and fuel because activists assured the government that organic farming was the future. As a result, in merely one year Sri Lanka went from an exporter of rice to an importer. Sri Lanka was not a wealthy country to begin with, and the organic experiment—combined with Covid-19 and government lockdowns—plunged about half a million people into poverty and caused prices to surge. (Inflation is running well over 50 percent, the BBC notes.)
It is a classic example where a supposedly “green” policy was implemented with a lot of fanfare, achieved very little, and created a lot of suffering.
Moreover, such environmental overzealousness is not limited to countries like Sri Lanka. Rich countries have their share of poorly-thought-through “sustainable” initiatives that create a lot of misery and achieve little good. It’s just that rich countries have capital (or license to print dollars and euros) to hide the effects of bad policies.
Quixotic.
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What happened to the educated people? If they let things come to this, there's not much the world can do about it.
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How anybody couldn't know that "organic" farming is less productive, I do not understand. And being more susceptible to mold and pests probably doesn't help with storage and exports (Sri Lanka used to be a food exporter).
Urban ignorami dictating to experienced farming people is a fail-safe recipe for disaster.