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In April 2021, the Sri Lankan government banned imports of all chemical fertilizers. They were the first country to do this, president Gotabaya Rajapaksa explained in a speech. If we are to preserve the health of our planet and ensure human sustainability, governments all over the world must not hesitate to adopt bold policies. The import ban turned out to be a bit too bold. Amidst plunging farm yields and soaring food inflation, the ban did not last the year. I covered Sri Lanka's economic crisis in a prior video three years ago, but did not mention the fertilizer ban. So let me do it this time. In today's video, the disastrous Sri Lankan fertilizer import ban. Sri Lanka is an island just below the southern tip of India. The island is shaped like a teardrop and is quite large, about the size of the US State of West Virginia and one point times larger than Taiwan Island. The topography is diverse. In the east and west we have sandy coastal plains. The soils in these areas have good drainage but cannot grow much anything other than coconuts. In the south central area there are mountain ranges from which a number of rivers flow down to the sea. These slopes have suitable water and weather for agriculture, but there is little natural flat land available. Farmers have to build terraces. The climate is temperate with two monsoons each year. The growing seasons follow. The first goes from May to August. It brings heavy rain to the southwest, but littlewhere else on the island. The growing season that matches up is called Yala. The second monsoon goes from October to March of the following year. This is the stable wet season, bringing water to the traditionally dry regions. This is Sri Lanka's primary crop growing season, called Maha. Sri Lanka's soils are quite diverse but are on the whole quite poor. With a few exceptions, most of the island country's land sits on very old crystalline rock, essentially ancient bedrock. Since the island sits in the middle of the tectonic plate, it does not experience volcanic events like some other islands like Java do. No volcanic activity means that the frequent rains wash out nutrients from the soil without replenishment. Even the exceptions, like the soils of the Jaffna Peninsula and the country's northern tip, are not better. Different, but not better. The physical reality here is that if we want to do productive mass scale agriculture, we need some sort of fertilizer. Sri Lanka's major agricultural goods are rice, paddy, tea and rubber. While it does not contribute a major part of the country's GDP, about 7%, agriculture does provide significant employment and exports. It employs between 20 to 30% of the country's population. Depending on your definition, it is also a key cultural identity point. For example, the country's most iconic export item is Ceylon tea, worth about 1.1 $1.2 billion each year and makes up 12% of all exports. Ceylon is Sri Lanka's old name during the British colonial days, but the country's most widely grown crop is rice, which provides about 40% of the people's daily calories. As I covered in a prior video, rice is a staple food that has to be cheap and the Sri Lankan government has long pursued domestic self sufficiency in rice production. Between 1950 and 1953, the average rice yield was about 21 bushels per paddy acre sown. This was not enough and the country had to import about half of its rice requirements from neighboring India. In 1951, 45% of the country's imports was food, a third of that being just rice. The government thus sought to produce more of this staple food. To encourage rice production growth, the Sri Lankan government in 1948 set a guaranteed rice price of about 50% above the world market price. In 1951, they started subsidizing up to 50% of the farmers fertilizers. This fueled a massive paddy boom. In the 1950s. Farmers converted more land into rice paddy and by 1960 gross rice output had risen 2.5 times from 1946 figures. But the population grew just as fast, with the crude death rate falling from 20.2 to 14.3 per thousand. We primarily attribute this to the spraying of houses with ddt, which killed malaria spreading mosquitoes, as well as improvement in health infrastructure. In the second half of the 1960s, the country imported and adopted high yielding rice seeds, a core part of what we call the Green Revolution. This provided a second and more permanent increase in rice yields. By 1999, the country's population had grown to 18.6 million from an estimated 8 million in 1950, yet only needed to import about 10% of their rice demand. Yes, this is in part because some rice consumption shifted to wheat, but also because of a fourfold increase of rice production. The downside, however, is the Sri Lankan government subsidizing nearly half of the market price of every bag of fertilizer and in 2019 distributed 300,000 tons of it to farmers. A focus on health, organic agriculture and toxin free food runs particularly deep in Sri Lankan culture. The majority of Sri Lankan citizens are Sinhalese Buddhists, leading to a popular form of nationalist spirit combining ethnic focus with Buddhism. It and the political parties that follow it advocate against killing things for purity and self reliance. Pesticides were marked as doing harm to living organisms in the soil. Agricultural chemicals were perceived as non pure and the introduction of both to Sri Lankan agriculture in the 1960s was seen as a colonial imposition by the West. So the goal of moving towards organic farming is one long held within Sri Lankan society. It is politically popular. Who wants to say that they are against more organically grown toxin free food? One can also point to historical precedent. In the mid-1980s, New Zealand abruptly removed government subsidies on imported chemical fertilizers, causing prices to rise 30 to 50% almost overnight. Exposed to market prices, farmers reduced their use of fertilizers and pesticides. They stopped farming marginal land, that is land that was only profitable because of cheap subsidized fertilizers and that improved nitrogen runoff pollution. Over time, the sector did recover. The issue was that New Zealand's transition took six years and hit the country's farmers, which then made up a big portion of society, quite hard. Many exited, selling their farmland at discounted prices. The 2021 import ban was not unprecedented in Sri Lankan history. Starting in the 1990s, doctors noticed the rising trend of a condition called chronic kidney disease of unknown etiology, or cdku. CDKU largely affects Sri Lankan rice farmers and some districts have prevalence rates as high as 22%. In the early stages, it has no symptoms, but if left untreated, it eventually leads to irreversible kidney damage and renal failure. Patients, or the government end up paying a substantial sum for dialysis treatment or a full transplant. CDKU's causes remain debated. Some studies, for instance, have pointed to high amounts of heavy metals like cadmium in the water. But in 2014, a paper was published pointing to glyphosate based herbicides. Glyphosates are some of the world's most widely used herbicides. Some 747 million kg were used in 2014. And I must add that this herbicide is indeed not without controversy. Monsanto started selling it in 1974 as Roundup, and they later packaged it with seed crops genetically modified to be resistant to glyphosate, making it simple to apply, but also perhaps a bit icky to the sole. In 2015, the international agency for Research on Cancer assigned a rating to glyphosate, marking it as probably carcinogenic to humans. This decision was highly contested by various stakeholders on both sides. A 2014 CDKU paper led to three districts in the country banning glyphosates. Then in 2015, Sri Lanka's President at the time, M. Sirisena imposed a nationwide import ban of the herbicide, the first country to do so. This ban was imposed without any alternative made available. So perhaps it is not too surprising that many tea farmers, overwhelmed by weeds, kept importing the herbicide just illegally. After three years, the government partially lifted the ban with regards to tea and rubber exports. Then a few years later, they lifted it for everything except rice. The 2015 herbicide incident seemed to validate the need for a phased and gradual transition with a focus on the long term. And when President Gotabaya Rajapaksa came to power, he seemed at first in favor of taking this gradual approach. And before we continue, we should briefly consider President Rajapaksa, the brother of a prior president. He was a military Officer and in 2009 he served as Defense Secretary, ending a brutal decades long civil war against the insurgent Tamil Tigers. In 2019, he won the presidential election. In the wake of terrorist attacks on Easter Sunday 2019 that killed over 200, 180 people. He won a majority of the popular vote and thus gained a strong political backing. So upon assuming power, he was seen as this decisive authoritarian leaning nationalist who can bring law, order and a form of technocratic governance after what was perceived as an incompetent government. In his policy speech given in January 2020, he seemed to reflect this approach. Backing a sensible transition to domestically produced organic fertilizers mentioned encouraging the production of food free of pesticides and chemicals by increasing the use of organic fertilizer for agriculture is part of our policy. We must prepare plans to encourage Sri Lanka's entire agriculture sector to shift to using only organic fertilizer within the next decade. Increasing domestic production of organic fertilizer should be included in these plans. And indeed, his national policy framework discussed converting traditional farming villages to organics, starting a program to manufacture all fertilizers at home and leveraging the forests and wetlands to make biofertilizer. All of these policies sound good and reasonable, establishing a direction towards a long term goal. However, work of such magnitude would need time and for a few months the current discourse was thinking more like 10 years. So it came as a surprise when the Sri Lankan government decided to push through an abrupt import ban. A banhammer. On April 27, local news reported an announcement from Agriculture Minister Mahendananda Uthgamake that the cabinet had approved a proposal from the President to ban imports of chemical fertilizers, insecticides and herbicides. Yeah, so it just showed up. The government added at the end that it was working on implementing organic fertilizer imports as a replacement. Minister Aluthgamage clarified that fertilizers for the current Yala season, the first monsoon, had already been imported, so the ban only applies to the forthcoming second monsoon. He said. From the next Maha season onwards, we will decide how to provide fertilizer to the farmer. We will not import chemical fertilizer and we will not allow a shortage of fertilizer. This assurance feels a bit hollow. Remember that the second monsoon season, the big one that is Sri Lanka's primary growing season, begins in September. The ban happened in late April, so the government has maybe four, five months to switch over all the chemical fertilizer supply chains to organic fertilizer, while also rewiring decades of fertilizer habits for all the farmers in the country. The Minister then tries to assure the farmers that the government would support this transition. If in moving towards this transformation you suffer any injustice, the government is prepared to compensate you for any loss incurred. We will give the subsidy that was given for chemical fertilizers to organic fertilizer instead. He also tries to tap nationalist feeling, telling people to set their eyes on the prize. Keep in mind that Sri Lanka will become the only island in the world to engage in agriculture using only organic fertilizers. As soon as early May, opposition parties pointed out that the import ban was being rammed through with few if any consultations or committee work. This led people to suspect ulterior motives. The country was then undergoing an economic crisis and US dollar shortage due to a combination of high fiscal deficits and and the COVID pandemic annihilating tourism. Sri Lanka's chemical fertilizer subsidies were costing $400 million a year in foreign exchange. So parties surmised that the President was trying to gain immediate economic relief while also pleasing certain constituents and claiming to meet certain election promises. Win. Win. Opposition parties also pointed to the nature of organic farming. The math did not look good. Organic fertilizers, like manure compost, have multiples lower nitrogen content than synthetics, which implies Sri Lanka would need to produce or import that much more tons of organics for the same amount of nitrogen. The precedents did not look good either. In 2021, about 1.5 to 2% of all the world's farmland was considered organically farmed. Over 60% of that is just grassland for animals to eat rather than crops. Only a dozen or so countries have pulled off a transition to even 10% certified organic farming as of 2021. Of those countries, most were European that is rich Australia, Sweden, Estonia. Many hailed the example of one state in India, Sikkim, which went 100% organic. But their transition was gradual and took some 13 years and their culture was already extensively using organic fertilizers prior to the start of the transition. And to start and to add, Sikkim is India's most sparsely populated state at 86 people per square kilometer. Sri Lanka is nearly four times denser. So truly no country had ever tried what Sri Lanka was now pledging to do. Dense, lower middle income country, total ban done in one growing season, full yolo. I admire the balls except for the stakes involved. As I mentioned, nearly a third of the country's population worked directly in agriculture. Moreover, a significant portion of industrial and service workers work in something related to food processing, rubber factories, tea processing, what have you. Even for those who are not a literal farmer, their livelihood still depended on its outputs. At first, the government's perspective of these complaints seemed to be yeah, few people are going to complain, but the government is taking steps to make the food supply safe. If you disagree with the ban, you're implicitly saying that you want toxic, poisonous food. Co Cabinet spokesman Mass Media Minister Kehelia Rambukwela said in early June. This is not a popular decision at this moment, but if the government fails to do this, no one else can do this. There will be criticism, various arguments and ideologies. Sometimes people will blame the government considering the short term outcome of this decision. But this is a powerful and complicated decision taken by the president and the government for the betterment of the country. The goal was never the issue, though. It was the speed and abruptness with which the government was trying to implement it. They had until September four months to do 10 years of work is irrationally optimistic. Immediately, farmers could not find sufficient organic fertilizer to replace the chemical fertilizer they were about to lose access to. While there were about 200 registered organic fertilizer manufacturers in the country, their combined capacity can only accommodate about 224,000 hectares of land. This fell far, far short of the 1.1 million hectares they needed to cultivate. Most farmers felt no choice but to buy and hoard whatever chemical fertilizer still available. Prices doubled, leading to accusations of gouging. In early June, Sri Lankan media reported that the president was instructing officials to allocate state and military factory resources to manufacture fertilizer equipment domestically to complement equipment imports. By now, this starts looking less like a thoughtful transition plan and more like a mad scramble to justify a spur of the moment decision. Also during that June media report, President Rajapaksa instructed that education and testing programs for farmers be implemented. Prior to the ban, just about a quarter of farmers used organic fertilizers to produce their crops, including all the potato farmers. The vast majority of farmers, however, leaned heavily on chemical fertilizers. It is not that they didn't want to. A survey of over 1,000 Sri Lankan farmers in early July 2021, a few months after the ban was implemented, found that 2/3 supported the idea of moving towards 100% organic agriculture. But 78% of Sri Lankan farmers did not think they can do it within a year, 64% did not think they can do it within two years, and 20% of the farmers at the time felt that they knew how to apply the right fertilizer. Most relevantly, over half believed they would lose over 40% of their crop production. It was not long before Sri Lankan media shifted their focus from debating the merits of the import ban to the gurgling emergence of a national food crisis. With the September growing season deadline looming and domestic supply still short, the government got entangled in another debacle. In September 2021, two state owned fertilizer companies awarded a tender to a Chinese company called Qingdao seawind biotech for 99,000 tons of organic fertilizer. But then the Sri Lankan quarantine authorities said that they had tested advanced samples of the fertilizer and found a species of living microorganisms called Irwininia in it. Erwininia is named after the famed plant biologist Erwin Frink Smith, who you might recall from my previous video on bananas. Anywho, considering that this is organic fertilizer like manure, this should not be surprising. The conflict is that Sri Lankan import law requires that organic fertilizers have to be sterile. Perhaps it's a flaw in the law, which had been hastily Revised after the April 2021 import ban. Tsingdao vehemently protested the Sri Lankan's test methodology as well as the implication that their products are dirty. But by then, the first batch of fertilizer had already gone out on a cargo ship steaming toward Sri Lanka's capital without import clearance. What should have been a simple administrative dispute somehow grew beyond that. When the Sri Lankan fertilizer companies issued a court order to get their banks to hold back payment, the Chinese embassy in Sri Lanka got involved, tweeting that the shipment should be tested by a third party. When that was rejected, the embassy called for a blacklisting of Sri Lankan banks by all of China's businesses. Now China is Sri Lanka's second largest trading partner and biggest fertilizer supplier. So this presented a serious problem. Unsurprisingly, China got its way and Seawind eventually received their payment. The Sri Lankans took a heavy financial loss at a time when they can least afford it. It was a debacle within a debacle and several years later the agricultural minister at the time, Oluf Gamagi, was remanded for allegedly facilitating the Tsingdao Siwen transaction with fertilizers and pesticides. Do not forget the government banned that too. In short supply. The farmers protested. A first wave of protests had occurred with about 30 events in both June and July 2021. But the largest wave yet occurred in October as the growing season started, with over 60 recorded events in that month alone. The Sri Lankan government tried to quietly backtrack. Sometime in October, the country ordered limited amounts of Indian potassium chloride and nano nitrogen liquid fertilizer. It arrived in November. The media quickly picked up on the fact that these fertilizers are urea based and thus about as certified organic as a Twinkie. A government spokesman at first tried to spin it that a liquid sprayed on plants was not fertilizer, but denied that the policy had changed, saying the government will not deviate from the policy of using organic fertilizer for the good of all. Don't forget the Sri Lanka have been branded as the granary of Asia and exported rice when our farmers used only organic fertilizer in the good old days. But they were not fooling anyone. And thusly, on November 24, 2021, the Sri Lankan government officially lifted the import ban, retaining a modicum of face by insisting that the long term goal of a green Sri Lanka remained. And this was a mere speed bump. The import ban ended, but its economic damage would be felt for months thereafter, primarily in its two core crops, tea and rice. The country would lose $138 million in exports due to large declines in crop yields. The tea industry declined nearly 25% in March 2022 compared to the previous year. Trade union workers organized protests. Rice yields declined anywhere from 20 to 30% in 2022 alone, forcing the country to import 800,000 tons of rice the first time in a long time. The cost of this was way higher than the $400 million supposedly saved from not importing chemical fertilizers for a few months. In early 2022, President Rajapaksa refused to resign despite substantial political pressure from opposition parties. Finally, he fled in a military airplane to Singapore, where he resigned via email, the first president of Sri Lanka to resign midway through his term. In addition to this dumpster fire of an organic farming effort, his steep tax cuts and white elephant projects will be remembered for contributing to economic devastation. In September 2022, the Central bank of Sri Lanka reported that food inflation reached 94.9% year over year. Over 30% of the country became what the World Food Program classified as food insecure, reducing or skipping meals. The loss of an estimated $600 million in foreign currency earnings meant that there was no currency to pay for vital imports. There were shortages of medicines, fuel and food. Protesters and police clashed on the streets. In March 2023, Zarlanka received a $3 billion loan from the International Monetary Fund after many months of refusing to take outside help. This finally helped in bringing the country out of what considered the worst economic crisis in the country's independent history. Alright everyone, that's it for tonight. Thanks for watching. Subscribe to the channel, sign up for the Patreon and I'll see you guys next time.