The President of Sri Lanka, Gotabaya Rajapaksa, implemented a sudden ban on chemical fertilisers in April of last year, plunging the country into its worst financial crisis since 1948, when it became independent, and leaving it facing an impending food shortage. Hannah Ellis-Paterson in the Guardian has more.
The full implications of the ill-advised policy – which has now been reversed – are only just being realised. Farmers say their livelihoods are under threat and for the first time in its modern history, Sri Lanka, which usually grows rice and vegetables in abundance, could run out of food as harvests drop and the government can no longer afford the food imports the country has become overdependent on in recent years. The rice yield dropped to 2.92 million tonnes in 2021-22, down from the previous year’s 3.39 million, and the speaker in parliament last week warned of imminent starvation among the island’s 22 million people.
“We are a tropical country full of rice paddies and banana plantations, but because of this stupid fertiliser ban, now we don’t even have enough food to feed ourselves,” said Rajith Keerthi Tennakoon, 52, former Governor of the southern province. “We have had past economic crises, security crises but never in Sri Lanka’s history have we had a food crisis.”
On the face of it, a push to organic farming would be seen as laudable, given concerns over the use of chemical fertilisers. Yet it was the sudden and obtuse manner in which the ban was introduced – imposed virtually overnight and with no prior warning or training – and the questionable motives behind it, that have left even organic farming advocates furious.
The Adam Smith Institute’s Tim Worstall sees a dark irony in that final paragraph.
Well, yes, the organic farming advocates would be furious, wouldn’t they? Imagine devoting your energies to an insistence upon a more land hungry, less productive form of agriculture. Then finding out that when it’s actually implemented it turns out to be just that, more land hungry and less productive. In fact, the results have been just what critics have been saying they would be all these decades of struggle.
Tim, a prolific journalist as well as a Senior Fellow of the ASI, has lambasted the Sri Lankan Government for this and other similar blunders in his latest column for the Dhaka Tribune. Definitely worth reading in full.
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If you haven’t filled your stomach with beef the are you really going to feel like some chocolate? This is nothing. You will have no meat no fresh produce just insect-meal. It strikes me that you are clinging to a bygone age.
Just imagine the hordes of insects being marched into molten chocolate only to solidify in rows in their eco-boxes.
That reminds me of the chocolate covered ants you could buy in Exeter when I was a kid (unless you preferred the fried grasshoppers). They were clearly ahead of the curve. But I think they may have been in a tin, and those use fossil fuel
Personally I preferred the cockroach cluster or crunchy frog.
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2odo4b
Our times have no anthems or music in this country. You might want to look at that. Given that we live in a time of great upheaval and yet there is no poetry. Even in The Great Depression in America you had the likes of Woody Guthrie talking about A Better World a’comin. Are we really that deflated as a nation I think we need to acknowledge that we are if it is to improve.
Well I woke up this mornin
My plastic done left me
Well I woke up this mornin
My plastic done left me
I ain’t about to be messin
with none of dat cardboard—cause
I got the Recycled Plastic Blues.
I no longer got my Blue Swede Shoes
My cartons are no longer to be used.
I got the recycled plastic blues.
https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/breaking-news-mark-drakeford-resigns/
The rapist’s Dad has called it a day.
TFFT!
I hope Annie, once of these parts and more lately of Lockdown Sceptics reddit, is rejoicing. Dungford, as she called him.
You won’t bring your country back to life by talking about it. Most of the battle is seeing how they robbed or occluded you. My only wish is to try and help a people heading foir disaster because I love the language and the literature and all the regions. I hope that there is the energy left to save it. They will never beat it out of me I carry the mythos around. Just don’t take it for granted and in our time we should support each other.
We are talking about imminent escalation on two fronts. It is easy when its just on a sceen but honestly you need to have the physical conditioning and alacrity to be able to deal with things. If you are an out of shape couch potato then that is perfectly understandable but it will make a difference if you switch into a different mode.
No chocolates then?
Marzipan fruits are my favorite
On a slightly less posh shopping mission, I looked in Sainsbury’s for some decent chocs for my missus. Picking up a box of a very well known British brand, with a cardboard top,
I immediately noted that there was some plastic, six pieces of sellotape about 10mm wide and 25mm long, three per side, fastening the top to the bottom of the box. Amazingly, someone had run their thumbnail across the strips on one side and had removed three chocolates.
Obviously I purchase a box of a Swiss brand that was enveloped in a thin but secure transparent and hygenic wrapping.
Note that even with all six sellotape strips intact, the box was quite open to dust and any bug that passed by.
One hopes that some pensioner didn’t buy a box with missing chocolates. And perhaps others that have been licked.
How long before we have cretins and crims holding Sainsbury’s to ransom because they have very easily inserted something toxic into a box somewhere?
Proper packaging isn’t just to make the box shiny, you know.
But of course, Sainsbury’s think that saving the planet is most important.
Plastic is a great product. And guess what it NEVER chucks itself on the ground. It is people who do that. So why do we blame innocent plastic for destroying the planet?
To avoid the queues at F&M use the St Pancras one. No idea what kind of chocolates they well but their mince pies and cognac butter are nice, especially washed down with their Irish Breakfast tea. But I am now worried at what might be in the mince pies!