{"id":1565469,"date":"2022-07-22T06:00:09","date_gmt":"2022-07-22T10:00:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=1565469"},"modified":"2022-07-22T06:04:59","modified_gmt":"2022-07-22T10:04:59","slug":"how-the-sri-lanka-crisis-reveals-the-dangers-of-green-utopianism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/how-the-sri-lanka-crisis-reveals-the-dangers-of-green-utopianism\/","title":{"rendered":"How the Sri Lanka Crisis Reveals the Dangers of Green Utopianism"},"content":{"rendered":"<aside class=\"mashsb-container mashsb-main mashsb-stretched\"><div class=\"mashsb-box\"><div class=\"mashsb-count mash-medium\" style=\"&quot;\"><div class=\"counts mashsbcount\">22<\/div><span class=\"mashsb-sharetext\">SHARES<\/span><\/div><div class=\"mashsb-buttons\"><a class=\"mashicon-facebook mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/sharer.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.conservativenewsdaily.net%2Fbreaking-news%2Fhow-the-sri-lanka-crisis-reveals-the-dangers-of-green-utopianism%2F\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Facebook<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-twitter mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/intent\/tweet?text=&amp;url=https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=1565469&amp;via=ConservNewsDly\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Twitter<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-subscribe mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"#\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Subscribe<\/span><\/a><div class=\"onoffswitch2 mash-medium mashsb-noshadow\" style=\"display:none\"><\/div><\/div>\n            <\/div>\n                <div style=\"clear:both\"><\/div><\/aside>\n            <!-- Share buttons by mashshare.net - Version: 4.0.47--><p>Last week, a group of Sri Lankan protestors took a refreshing dip in President Gotabaya Rajapaksa\u2019s pool. It was probably a welcome respite from the steamy eighty-degree day in Colombo, as well from the unprecedented economic crisis currently devastating the country. Over the last year, Sri Lanka has experienced an annual inflation rate of more than 50 percent, with food prices rising 80 percent and transport costs a staggering 128 percent. Faced with fierce protests, the Sri Lankan government declared a state of emergency and deployed troops around the country to maintain order.<\/p>\n<p>On Thursday morning, the\u00a0<em>New York Times\u00a0<\/em>published\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2022\/07\/14\/podcasts\/the-daily\/sri-lanka.html\">an episode of\u00a0<em>The Daily<\/em>\u00a0podcast<\/a>\u00a0discussing some of the forces behind the collapse. They outlined how years of irresponsible borrowing by the Rajapaksa political dynasty, combined with the damage caused by Covid lockdowns to Sri Lanka\u2019s tourism industry, drained the country\u2019s foreign exchange reserves. Soon, the country was unable to make\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.bbc.com\/news\/business-61505842\">payments on its debt<\/a>\u00a0or import essential goods like\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.nationalreview.com\/2022\/07\/sri-lanka-collapses-under-the-weight-of-modern-monetary-theory\/\">food and gasoline<\/a>. Strangely, the hosts of the podcast, which reaches over\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.insideradio.com\/podcastnewsdaily\/new-york-times-inks-deal-with-acast-to-monetize-its-u-k-listeners\/article_85601386-fc81-11ec-b023-f3a204c7af23.html\">20 million monthly listeners<\/a>, didn\u2019t mention President Rajapaksa\u2019s\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.reuters.com\/markets\/commodities\/fertiliser-ban-decimates-sri-lankan-crops-government-popularity-ebbs-2022-03-03\/\">infamous fertilizer ban<\/a>\u00a0once during the thirty-minute episode.<\/p>\n<p>The fertilizer ban was, in fact, a major factor in the unrest. Agriculture is an essential economic sector in Sri Lanka. Around\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.reuters.com\/markets\/commodities\/sri-lanka-rows-back-organic-farming-goal-removes-ban-chemical-fertilisers-2021-11-24\/\">10 percent<\/a>\u00a0of the population works on farms, and\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.reuters.com\/markets\/commodities\/sri-lanka-rows-back-organic-farming-goal-removes-ban-chemical-fertilisers-2021-11-24\/\">70 percent<\/a>\u00a0of Sri Lankans are directly or indirectly dependent on agriculture.\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/oec.world\/en\/profile\/country\/lka?compareExports0=comparisonOption1&#038;yearSelector1=exportGrowthYear26&#038;yearlyTradeFlowSelector=flow0\">Tea production<\/a>\u00a0is especially important, consistently responsible for over ten percent of Sri Lanka\u2019s export revenue. To support that vital industry, the country spent\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/apps.fas.usda.gov\/newgainapi\/api\/Report\/DownloadReportByFileName?fileName=Sri%20Lanka%20Restricts%20and%20Bans%20the%20Import%20of%20Fertilizers%20and%20Agrochemicals_New%20Delhi_Sri%20Lanka_05-14-2021.pdf\">hundreds of millions of dollars<\/a>\u00a0a year importing synthetic fertilizers.<\/p>\n<p>During his election campaign in 2019, Rajapaksa\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/foreignpolicy.com\/2022\/03\/05\/sri-lanka-organic-farming-crisis\/\">promised<\/a>\u00a0to wean the country off these fertilizers with a ten-year transition to organic farming. He expedited his plan in April 2021 with a sudden ban on synthetic fertilizers and pesticides. He was so confident in his policies that he declared in a (since\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/euroweeklynews.com\/2022\/07\/13\/the-wef-sri-lanka-wayback-machine\/?fbclid=IwAR1JEnnlyB5sZFCBYswxGGqa4SjA4g7sRapJ_zcM6kqaMwsS1xq0nlZk2X4\">stealthily deleted<\/a>\u00a0and memory-holed) article for the World Economic Forum in 2018, \u201cThis is how I will make my country rich again by 2025.\u201d As the ecomodernist author Michael Shellenberger\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.commonsense.news\/p\/sri-lanka-just-fell-what-do-we-have?utm_source=email\">writes<\/a>, the results of the experiment with primitive agricultural techniques were \u201cshocking:\u201d<\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote\">\n<p>Over 90 percent of Sri Lanka\u2019s farmers had used chemical fertilizers before they were banned. After they were banned, an astonishing 85 percent experienced crop losses. Rice production fell 20 percent and prices skyrocketed 50 percent in just six months. Sri Lanka had to import $450 million worth of rice despite having been self-sufficient just months earlier. The price of carrots and tomatoes rose fivefold. \u2026 [Tea exports crashed] 18 percent between November 2021 and February 2022 \u2014 reaching their lowest level in more than two decades.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>Of course, Rajapaksa\u2019s foolish policy wasn\u2019t revealed to him in a dream. As Shellenberger points out, the ban was inspired by an increasingly\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.humanprogress.org\/against-environmental-anti-humanism\/\">Malthusian environmentalism<\/a>\u00a0led by figures like the Indian activist Vandana Shiva, who\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/drvandanashiva\/status\/1403348156759175171?lang=en\">cheered<\/a>\u00a0the ban\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/youtu.be\/d2k9OY8O70w?t=141\">last summer<\/a>. Foreign investors beholden to the same ideology also\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.ey.com\/en_lk\/news\/2021\/11\/the-flipsides-of-esg-for-investor-and-stakeholder-relations\">praised<\/a>\u00a0and rewarded Sri Lanka for \u201ctaking up sustainability and ESG (environmental, social and corporate governance) issues on its top priority.\u201d ESG represents a trend (or lasting shift, depending on who you ask) in some investors\u2019 priorities. Put simply, it is an attempt to move capital toward organizations that further a set of amorphous environmental and social justice goals instead of toward the enterprises most likely to succeed and turn a profit.<\/p>\n<p>Proponents of ESG have been\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.cato.org\/commentary\/secs-green-name-game\">pushing<\/a>\u00a0for government mandates requiring enterprises to disclose detailed information related to environmentalism and other social goals. That distorts and\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.cato.org\/sites\/cato.org\/files\/2022-06\/schulp-berry-yeatman-public-comments-6-17-22-updated.pdf\">harms<\/a>\u00a0the smooth functioning of the capital markets that keep modern economies running and, in some cases, incentivizes nice-sounding but economically inefficient projects, like a return to primitive agriculture. \u201cThe nation of Sri Lanka has an almost perfect ESG rating of 98.1 on a scale of 100,\u201d\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.forbes.com\/sites\/davidblackmon\/2022\/07\/10\/rising-social-unrest-over-energy-food-shortages-threatens-global-stability\/?sh=2cdc96ac568b\">notes<\/a>\u00a0David Blackmon in\u00a0<em>Forbes<\/em>, and \u201cthe government which had forced the nation to achieve that virtue-signaling target in recent years [has as a result] collapsed.\u201d Sri Lanka, in other words, offers a grim preview of what can result from distorting markets in the name of utopian priorities.<\/p>\n<p>Consider a long-run perspective. Throughout most of human history, farmers produced only organic food\u2014and food was so scarce that, despite the much lower population in the past, malnutrition was widespread. The\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/ourworldindata.org\/grapher\/global-population-defined-as-undernourished\">long-term, global<\/a>\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/ourworldindata.org\/grapher\/share-undernourished-region\">decline in undernourishment<\/a>\u00a0is one of humanity\u2019s proudest achievements. Lacking a sense of history and taking abundant food for granted, some environmentalists want to transform the global food system into an organic model. They see modern agriculture as environmentally harmful and would like to see a transition to natural fertilizers that would be familiar to our distant ancestors, such as compost and manure.<\/p>\n<p>However, conventional farming is not only necessary to produce a sufficient amount of food to feed humanity (a point that cannot be emphasized enough\u2014as the writer Alfred Henry Lewis once observed, \u201cThere are only nine meals between mankind and anarchy\u201d) but it is in many ways better for the environment.\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/ourworldindata.org\/is-organic-agriculture-better-for-the-environment\">According to a massive meta-analysis<\/a><span>\u00a0<\/span>by the ecologists Michael Clark and David Tilman, the natural fertilizers used in organic agriculture actually lead to more pollution than conventional synthetic products. Fertilizers and pesticides also allow us to farm land more intensively, leading to\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/ourworldindata.org\/explorers\/crop-yields?tab=chart&#038;facet=none&#038;country=USA~LKA~OWID_WRL&#038;Crop=Wheat&#038;Metric=Actual+yield\">ever-higher<\/a>\u00a0crop yields, which allow us to grow more food on less land. According to HumanProgress board member Matt Ridley, if we tried to feed the world with the organic yields of 1960, we would have to farm\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.humanprogress.org\/dismantling-free-markets-wont-solve-biodiversity-threat\/\">twice as much land<\/a>\u00a0as we do today.\u00a0<\/p>\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image size-full is-resized\"><\/figure>\n<p>Global agricultural use\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/ourworldindata.org\/peak-agriculture-land\">has peaked<\/a>\u00a0and is now in decline. So long as crop yields continue to increase, more and more land can be returned to natural ecosystems, which are far more biodiverse than any farm. Smart agriculture allows nature to rebound.<\/p>\n<p>In wealthy countries, conventional farming is becoming ever-more efficient, using fewer inputs to grow more food. In the United States, despite a 44 percent increase in food production since 1981,\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.humanprogress.org\/straight-talk-about-modern-farms-and-rural-decline-pt-2\/\">fertilizer use barely increased, and pesticide use fell<\/a>\u00a0by 18 percent. As the esteemed Rockefeller University environmental scientist Jesse Ausubel\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/phe.rockefeller.edu\/docs\/Nature_Rebounds.pdf\">noted<\/a>, if farmers everywhere adopted the modern and efficient techniques of U.S. farmers, \u201can area the size of India or the USA east of the Mississippi could be released globally from agriculture.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Most importantly, it must be restated, conventional agriculture feeds the world. Since the\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.humanprogress.org\/heroes-of-progress-ep-1-norman-borlaug\/\">Green Revolution<\/a>\u00a0of the 1950s and 60s, world agricultural production\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/public.tableau.com\/app\/profile\/laborde6680\/viz\/MonitoringProductionStocks_basedon_USDAPSD\/PSD_USDA\">has exploded<\/a>, causing the global food supply to\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.humanprogress.org\/dataset\/food-supply-combined-methodologies\/?regions=517&#038;view=selected\">reach<\/a>\u00a0nearly 3000 kcal per day in 2017, up from just over 2,000 in 1961. While\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.fao.org\/publications\/sofi\">hunger is now making a comeback<\/a>, that is due to war, export restrictions, and the misguided policies of leaders like\u00a0Rajapaksa,\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/reason.com\/2022\/06\/17\/world-food-supplies-are-enough-to-feed-everyone\/\">not a lack of the ability to produce enough food<\/a>.<\/p>\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image size-full is-resized\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-31680\" src=\"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/07\/thumbnail_GrainsNewsletter.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"550\" height=\"550\" \/><\/figure>\n<p>The fertilizer ban was not the only factor behind Sri Lanka\u2019s economic crash. Much of the damage was also caused by the hastiness of the ban and the\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/foreignpolicy.com\/2022\/03\/05\/sri-lanka-organic-farming-crisis\/\">difficulty of obtaining<\/a>\u00a0enough organic alternatives. However, the idea that organic farming can produce enough food for the world is an unreachable fantasy based on the naturalistic fallacy \u2014 the baseless notion that anything modern, such as agriculture incorporating non-natural components produced by the ingenuity of man, must be inferior to the all-natural precursor.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>As Ted Nordhaus and Saloni Shah from the Breakthrough Institute\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/foreignpolicy.com\/2022\/03\/05\/sri-lanka-organic-farming-crisis\/\">point out<\/a>, \u201cthere is literally no example of a major agriculture-producing nation successfully transitioning to fully organic or agroecological production.\u201d We must never take the relative rarity of starvation in modern times as a given nor romanticize and seek to return to farming\u2019s all-organic past. Unfortunately, the delusion seems to be spreading, helped along by the global shift toward ESG. Last Sunday, Narendra Modi, the prime minister of India,\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.business-standard.com\/article\/current-affairs\/pm-modi-bats-for-natural-farming-asks-farmers-to-join-the-movement-122071000129_1.html\">praised<\/a>\u00a0\u201cnatural farming\u201d during a speech in Gujarat, calling it a way to \u201cserve mother earth\u201d and promising that India will \u201cmove forward on the path of natural farming.\u201d Let\u2019s hope not.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.humanprogress.org\/sri-lanka-is-a-wake-up-call-for-eco-utopians\/\">This Human Progress article was republished with permission<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Last week, a group of Sri Lankan protestors took a refreshing dip in President Gotabaya Rajapaksa\u2019s pool. It was probably a welcome respite from the steamy eighty-degree day in Colombo,<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1574971,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mo_disable_npp":"","fifu_image_url":"","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1565469","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1565469","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1565469"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1565469\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1574971"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1565469"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1565469"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1565469"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}