In Sri Lanka, Organic Farming Went Catastrophically Wrong(foreignpolicy.com) |
In Sri Lanka, Organic Farming Went Catastrophically Wrong(foreignpolicy.com) |
What did they expect? Well, they expected their aura of moral superiority to magically save them I guess. Instead, the cruel math of output vs input (rice and tea vs fertilizer) ground their idealism to dust.
We need to start keeping a scoreboard of countries ruined by clueless idealism. Chile, Venezuela, Sri Lanka. What others?
What happened was that they failed to employ competent people who could have managed the transition. There would have been pilot projects for each crop, and staged rollout. Any problems would be noticed long before they became any kind of crisis. Rollout for each problem crop would have paused until the problems were solved.
So, this is not a failure of idealism. It is a failure of management. It is possible that rollout would never have completed, but just as likely problems would have been solved, piecemeal, and outlay for imported fertilizers would have been radically reduced, one of the not-exactly-idealist goals of the project.
China's 30 million people starved by the CCP's management failings is a more stark example.
The article says quite literally that they did -
Rajapaksa’s government made good on that promise, imposing a nationwide ban on the importation and use of synthetic fertilizers and pesticides and ordering the country’s 2 million farmers to go organic
> So, this is not a failure of idealism. It is a failure of management.
Honestly, this sounds like the 'communism didnt work the last x times because nobody did it right'. I'm not saying you or your idea are wrong, to be clear, but it's impossible to say they did it wrong until a shining example proves that you -can- do it right.
> The Breakthrough Institute is a global research center that identifies and promotes technological solutions to environmental and human development challenges.
For most of history and pre-history, literally all farms were strictly organic. Those mostly had lower yields, but on the up side they were not responsible for obliterating 90%+ of the world's wildlife.
Thus organic food is more expensive, so some people won't afford to eat, which is glossed over in all the hype.
It can be argued that civilization happened when the bulk of people were relieved from farming by technology. Instead of 98% of us slaving away in the mud, today 1-2% do that. I'm not sure it's a step forward, to go back to that.
By the report, the sudden switchover made a 20% reduction in absolute yield, for whatever was the reduction in inputs. That is not surprising for any un-pilot-tested step function change in process. Whether it is really a disaster depends on the cost of the inputs abandoned, which was not reported.
There are very strong incentives for this to be treated and reported as a disaster. Omitting key details from the reporting, as here, helps establish that narrative.