Just last year the Sri Lankan government, led by 73-year-old Gotabaya Rajapaksa, decided to ban all chemical fertilisers from the country in a mission to go completely organic. The ban lasted only seven months before crops failed, whole industries collapsed, people began to starve and, predictably, riot.
The massive failure in Sri Lanka that has unfurled over the past 18 months provides a warning to other nations as to what can happen if overambitious green policies are pursued too rapidly and too aggressively.
Before the pandemic, Sri Lanka had reached upper middle income status, with per capita gross national income out-competing neighbours such as Indonesia and Vietnam.
Of course, during the first year of the pandemic, Sri Lanka’s economy contracted by 3.6 per cent because of lockdowns and the loss of income from the tourism industry. But other nations’ economies have contracted, too – and have not yet seen catastrophic collapse and unrest on a similar scale to Sri Lanka.
The difference between Sri Lanka and other middle-income countries is that in April last year, when the economy was already under strain, Rajapaksa recklessly introduced a complete ban on imported agrochemicals for health and environmental reasons.
Organic farming is known to reduce the amount of pesticides and nitrogenous compounds found in the soil and waterways, and it is also known to reduce greenhouse gas emissions – when compared with conventional farming – by up to 20 per cent.
The problem is that organic farming cannot be scaled up the way industrial farming can. Synthetic fertilisers, while not perfect, allow for much greater output for much less input in the form of labour and land.
To compound this simple problem of thermodynamics, no warning was given to farmers about the ban, and no training was offered for those who knew how to farm only with chemical fertiliser. It is estimated that more than 90 per cent of Sri Lankan farmers relied on synthetic fertilisers to feed their crops. Banning these crucial products virtually overnight led to crop failure almost immediately.
The real motivations behind the policy have been disputed by Sri Lankan farmers. Some have told reporters the Rajapaksa government simply wanted to save money (before the ban, the government provided subsidies for imported agrochemicals). Others have suggested the government wished crops to fail in a surreptitious land grab.
There appears to be disbelief that a policy so stupid could be implemented for environmental and health reasons alone.
In Foreign Policy this week, Ted Norhaus and Saloni Shah write: “While the proximate cause of Sri Lanka’s humanitarian crisis was a bungled attempt to manage its economic fallout from the global pandemic, at the bottom of the political problem was a math problem and at the bottom of the math problem was an ideological problem.”
This ideological problem is not unique to Sri Lanka, however. Magical thinking driven by an effort to become more green is increasingly responsible for creating havoc in societies across the globe.
In California, far away from the island nation off southern India, the Los Angeles city council has just banned gas heaters, cookers and other appliances in all new homes and businesses to reduce CO2 emissions. (This is despite the fact powering a stove or heater with electricity costs four times as much as natural gas.)
A statewide mandate in California means all new homes and buildings must be topped with solar panels, making housing construction slower and more expensive. To top it off, the aggressive push for renewables to power the electricity grid has led to rolling blackouts and power prices that have increased five times faster than in the rest of the US across the space of 10 years. Blackouts are so common in California that journalists simply have stopped reporting on them.
Australia is not immune to this type of magical thinking. Our own state and federal governments are pledging to inject more renewable energy sources into our electricity grid, despite the evidence showing that aggressive mandates are known to be associated with increased electricity prices. Our own state and federal governments also want to shut down our remaining coal-fired plants, even though the battery storage and transmission lines required to fill in the gap are nowhere near ready yet.
While reasonable people can agree that we do need to make a transition to cleaner sources of energy in an orderly and methodical fashion, this cannot be done while immiserating vast swathes of the population. To attempt to do so will simply invite civil unrest. What has happened in Sri Lanka should provide a warning to governments around the world as to what can happen when green policies are pushed too hard and too fast, without consideration given to their impact on the working and middle classes.
Claire Lehmann is the founding editor of Quillette.
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