Sri Lanka is in a last-ditch effort to stave off economic collapse after an allegedly climate-friendly ban on artificial fertilizers devastated one of the country’s largest industries, according to experts.
Sri Lanka has been wracked with poverty, inflation and fuel shortages on a massive scale, with the Prime Minister declaring Tuesday that the country has gone “bankrupt,” according to Business Insider. A ban on chemical fertilizers, implemented April 2021 in an effort to promote organic farming, proved the final straw after a string of missteps, decimating Sri Lanka’s primary source of income and forcing it into bankruptcy, experts told The Daily Caller News Foundation.
“Our economy has faced a complete collapse,” Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe said on June 23, according to CNN.
The government lifted the fertilizer ban in November 2021, but the damage had already been done, Peter Earle, a former financial markets trader and economist at the American Institute for Economic Research, told TheDCNF.
“The decision to overnight shift away from synthetic fertilizers was an absolute disaster,” he said.
A 2019 bombing and COVID-19 lockdowns crushed tourism in Sri Lanka and lead to a dearth of foreign exchange reserves, putting a strain on imports of fuel and other necessities, according to data from the CIA World Factbook. But a loss of foreign currency only set the stage for catastrophe, according to Earle, when the fertilizer ban devastated Sri Lanka’s domestic crops.
“Agriculture is built not just on science, but it’s built on decades and centuries of trial and error and hard won experience,” said Earle. “There’s a certain degree of know-how in markets and in certain areas where the government should defer to the expertise of people in markets, people who are practitioners, rather than letting bureaucrats rule.”
Earle’s comments accorded with those of Breakthrough Institute founder and leading climate policy thinker Ted Nordhaus, who argued that synthetic fertilizers represent the most “economically and environmentally efficient” way to sustain Sri Lanka’s demanding agricultural sector in an essay from March.
The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs estimated in the report that crop production for the 2021-2022 season decreased by 40% to 50%, and so far farmers have only utilized a quarter of the available land for the upcoming season, according to a report dated June 9.
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