Last year the Cornwall Alliance reported on our blog that Sri Lanka was headed for serious trouble. Now, sadly, our prediction is coming true.

The Associated Press (AP) calls Sri Lanka “a country hurtling towards bankruptcy, with hardly any money to import gasoline, milk, cooking gas and toilet paper.” In late June its prime minister said its economy had “collapsed.” Both he and President Gotabaya Rajapaksa agreed to resign in the face of mass protests that included crowds occupying their residences, setting fire to one of them.

What brought on this disaster in the island nation off the south coast of India that for the last two decades had experienced unusually strong economic growth, rising into the upper-middle-income bracket of nations?

Analysts mention excessive government debt, lack of foreign exchange, political corruption, the Covid-19 pandemic, and other factors, but one of the most serious was the government’s sudden order, in April of 2021, banning all import of chemical fertilizers and requiring that all farming be organic within 10 years. The result has been drastically reduced crop yields, plummeting exports, rising imports, and skyrocketing inflation.

Tea is Sri Lanka’s biggest export. At $1.25 billion per year, it’s 10 percent of export income. “The ban [on chemical fertilizers] has drawn the tea industry into complete disarray. … If we go completely organic, we will lose 50 per cent of the crop, (but) we are not going to get 50 per cent higher prices,” said Herman Gunaratne, an experienced tea planter from Ahangama, last year. He predicted that the “average annual crop of 300 million kg (660 million pounds) will be slashed by half unless the government changes course.”

Vijay Jayaraj, an environmental scientist specializing in the impact of environmental policies on developing countries, wrote last year on the Cornwall Alliance’s blog:

Around 90 percent of Sri Lankan farmers use chemical fertilizers. The percentage is even higher, 94 percent, in paddy cultivation.

The shift to organic farming (across all crops) is expected to reduce the overall mean yield of food crops by at least 25 percent, threatening Sri Lanka’s food security when the country is already in great financial stress, including troubling inflation and the effects of the COVID pandemic, with GDP per capita falling 4 percent in 2020. 

Persisting with the organic-only farm policy will be catastrophic to Sri Lanka’s food sector and economy. Chemical fertilizer has been instrumental in helping farmers there and across the globe to increase production and achieve a sustained source of income.

Many governments across the globe view chemical fertilizers are viewed as lifesavers. Organic farming simply cannot meet demand for food crops, domestically or globally.

The government says chemical fertilizers reduce soil fertility, but that is false. Chemical fertilizers increase soil fertility, making nutrients more available to plants in soils previously depleted.

Further, as yield per acre falls due to organic-only farming, farmers will require more land to achieve the same total harvest. That means converting more forest to farmland, threatening biodiversity.

This leaves Sri Lanka’s government with no justification for its organic-only policy. It has laid undue burden on farmers and jeopardized national food security in exchange for no benefits to soil health or crop yields. If it does not reverse its policy, Sri Lanka may become a deadly reminder for the rest of the world. Common sense suggests an about-face.

Tea production has indeed plummeted, contributing to the country’s lack of foreign exchange. The New York Times reports, “Production of tea—a major source of export revenue—fell some 18 percent and grain output dropped 43 percent. The government saved $400 million by banning foreign fertilizer, but was forced to spend $450 million to import rice.”

According to AP, “The U.N. World Food Program says nearly nine of 10 families are skipping meals or otherwise skimping to stretch out their food, while 3 million are receiving emergency humanitarian aid.” Overall food costs have risen by 50 percent.

The devastating consequences of Sri Lanka’s ban on chemical fertilizers was easy to predict. As environmental and economic statistician Dr. Bjørn Lomborg pointed out in a piece we published a month ago:

Sri Lanka’s organic experiment failed fundamentally because of one simple fact: it does not have enough land to replace synthetic nitrogen fertilizer with animal manure. To shift to organics and keep production, it would need five to seven times more manure than its total manure today.

Synthetic nitrogen fertilizers, mostly made with natural gas, are a modern miracle, crucial for feeding the world. Largely thanks to this fertilizer, agricultural outputs were tripled in the last half-century, as the human population doubled. Artificial fertilizer and modern farming inputs are the reason the number of people working on farms has been slashed in every rich country, freeing people for other productive occupations.

In fact, one dirty secret of organic farming is that, in rich countries, the vast majority of existing organic crops depend on imported nitrogen laundered from animal manure, which ultimately comes from fossil fuel fertilizers used on conventional farms.

Without those inputs, if a country—or the world—were to go entirely organic, nitrogen scarcity quickly becomes disastrous, just as we saw in Sri Lanka. That is why research shows going organic globally can only feed about half the current world population. Organic farming will lead to more expensive, scarcer food for fewer people, while gobbling up more nature.

To sustainably feed the world and withstand future global shocks, we need to produce food better and cheaper. History shows that the best way to achieve that is by improving seeds, including by using genetic modification, along with expanding fertilizer, pesticides, and irrigation. This will allow us to produce more food, curb prices, alleviate hunger, and save nature.

Radical environmentalism’s rejection of modern industrial and agricultural techniques is a recipe for starvation on a mass scale. It’s time for the world to turn its back on it.

Photo by Jelle Taman on Unsplash.