Hey readers,
Sri Lanka's economy is in free fall. Runaway inflation reached 54.6 percent last month, and the South Asian country is now headed toward bankruptcy. Nine in 10 Sri Lankan families are skipping meals, and many are standing in line for hours in the hopes of acquiring basic necessities like fuel and medicine.
The dire situation culminated last weekend in an uprising in which an estimated 300,000 protesters took over President Gotabaya Rajapaksa's home and offices and set fire to Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe's home. Rajapaksa has been forced to flee the country, leaving Wickremesinghe as acting president, even as protesters continue to call for his resignation.
There's no singular cause for the crisis, which had been building for years due to political corruption and right-wing authoritarian politics that weakened democracy. In April 2019, the crisis accelerated after suicide bombings at churches hurt the island nation's critical tourism industry, which weakened its currency and made it more difficult for the government to import essential goods.
At the end of 2019, tax cuts slashed government revenue, while in 2020 the Covid-19 pandemic further decimated the tourism industry, with skyrocketing inflation pouring more fuel on the fire.
Pandemic aside, that's not an atypical set of conditions for the collapse of a developing country like Sri Lanka. But in the spring of 2021, President Rajapaksa made an unusual decision: He banned synthetic fertilizer and pesticide imports, forcing Sri Lanka's 2 million farmers to go organic. It proved disastrous.
The president's agrochemical ban was largely made in an effort to save the $400 million Sri Lanka was spending yearly on synthetic fertilizer. But Rajapaksa also argued that chemical fertilizers and pesticides were leading to "adverse health and environmental impacts."
Instead of fixing the crisis, however, the move only worsened it.
"The organic policy was implemented to sort of ameliorate an ongoing crisis … ironically, what it did was that it ended up exacerbating the crisis," R. Ramakumar, an agricultural economist at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences in India, told me.
The agrochemical ban caused rice production to drop 20 percent in the six months after it was implemented, causing a country that had been self-sufficient in rice production to spend $450 million on rice imports — much more than the $400 million Rajapaksa hoped to save by banning fertilizer imports.
The production of tea, Sri Lanka's literal cash crop — it makes up nearly 70 percent of its total export income — fell by 18 percent. The government has had to spend hundreds of millions on subsidies and compensation to farmers in an effort to make up for the loss of productivity.
While agrochemicals cause a host of environmental and public health problems, which in part inspired the ban, they also help farmers grow more food on less land, which is critical for small, developing countries like Sri Lanka that rely on agriculture for both sustenance and export income.
Sri Lanka, which only recently emerged from a catastrophic civil war, had been a bright spot in international development: In 2000, 17 percent of Sri Lankans were undernourished and by 2019, that figure fell dramatically to 7 percent, lifting around 2 million people out of hunger. The economic crisis that has now reached a boiling point, caused in part by the organic farming disaster, will horrifically, and ironically, undo some of that progress.
Agriculture is all about trade-offs
Synthetic fertilizer makes crops grow faster than organic fertilizer, such as animal manure, and pesticides prevent insect infestations that can destroy crops. Experts say the widespread adoption of the two agricultural inputs since the mid-20th century, known as the Green Revolution, helped lift countries like Sri Lanka out of grinding poverty.
"Sri Lanka started subsidizing fertilizers in the 1960s and we saw that rice yields tripled," says Saloni Shah, a food and agriculture analyst at the Breakthrough Institute, a US-based environmental nonprofit that advocates for technological solutions.
That resulted in much of the labor force moving out of agriculture and into higher-paying jobs, Shah says, a story that played out across the globe over the past 60 years. But the expansion of conventional agriculture hasn't been without costs.
Pesticide exposure is linked to a range of health issues, including respiratory and central nervous system symptoms, and around 1 in every 8 suicides worldwide is done by ingesting pesticides, with especially high rates in South Asia.
When synthetic fertilizer and pesticides leach into waterways, they can kill off wildlife and poison drinking water sources, and their production and application emit high amounts of greenhouse gases and degrade soil.
As horrible as the effects of synthetic fertilizers and pesticides may be, they have to be weighed against the consequences brought to bear by yield loss — hunger, decreased export income, increased deforestation, and, if banned outright, as Sri Lanka has shown, political crisis. But there are ways to minimize the effects of agrochemicals without abandoning them altogether.
Minimizing the harms of industrial agriculture
Minimizing the environmental and public health issues brought about by agrochemicals while continuing to increase crop yields is tricky but possible. Shah says a more sustainable approach requires making crops higher yield through breeding, making nitrogen fertilizers more efficient, and instituting "precision farming" technologies, like drones and sensors, to more accurately analyze where fertilizer is being over- or under-applied.
"I think that in the Western world, we can get lost in the organic/conventional debate," Shah said. "Agriculture is the backbone of economic development — for livelihoods, for food security. … It should be less so about ideology and which one is better, but more so what combination of technologies, practices, and market conditions will be helpful to spur development and to empower farmers."
In time, Sri Lanka may get some relief from the tension of its agricultural trade-offs. According to the economic theory of the Environmental Kuznets Curve, once countries reach a certain level of per capita income, economic growth and environmental pollution can decouple as the country can afford to implement stronger environmental regulations and practices without sacrificing economic growth, like crop yields.
Decoupling the two is far from guaranteed, but some countries have achieved it. As Sri Lanka gets richer, it'll be more able to prioritize the environment without millions going hungry, but the current crisis — made worse by the sudden, hastily executed organic transition — has made that day farther away.
—Kenny Torrella
Questions? Comments? Email us at futureperfect@vox.com or find me on Twitter at @KennyTorrella. And if you want to recommend this newsletter to your friends or colleagues, tell them to sign up at vox.com/future-perfect-newsletter.
