Posted on 07/11/2022 10:01:10 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
Over the weekend, a mass of angry Sri Lankan citizens swarmed the presidential palace over an absolute economic collapse in the country, forcing the nation’s prime minister to resign and leading to more civil unrest.
There has been a lot of talk over the country’s struggles, but ultimately a lot of the blame comes down to western environmental activism taking hold of the country’s policies and encouraging Sri Lanka to switch how it grows its own food. This has led to smaller crop yields, a massive increase in importing food, and plenty of angry citizens.
The problem in Sri Lanka comes from two separate issues that, together, absolutely devastated their ability to be largely self-sufficient. The first was the push to ban chemical fertilizers.
The dramatic fall in yields follows a decision last April by President Gotabaya Rajapaksa to ban all chemical fertilizers in Sri Lanka – a move that risks undermining support among rural voters who are key to his family’s grip on Sri Lankan politics.
Although the ban was rolled back after widespread protests, only a trickle of chemical fertilizers made it to farms, which will likely lead to an annual drop of at least 30% in paddy yields nationwide, according to agricultural experts.
This is coupled with a reluctance on the part of the island nation to introduce GMOs to their farming practices. As a result, the all-organic farming experiment in Sri Lanka has failed.
The farrago of magical thinking, technocratic hubris, ideological delusion, self-dealing, and sheer shortsightedness that produced the crisis in Sri Lanka implicates both the country’s political leadership and advocates of so-called sustainable agriculture: the former for seizing on the organic agriculture pledge as a shortsighted measure to slash fertilizer subsidies and imports and the latter for suggesting that such a transformation of the nation’s agricultural sector could ever possibly succeed.
The second issue that is leading to the Sri Lankan crisis is the same series of unfortunate events that has hurt many countries across the globe. Before the COVID-19 pandemic swept across the globe, the World Bank reported that Sri Lanka had achieved upper-middle-income status, only for the pandemic to drop half the country back down to below-poverty levels. Inflation, also being seen worldwide, also hit the country hard.
But it’s the push of a foolish western religion – the issue of climate change – that is at most to blame here. The country was largely self-sufficient in rice production until the fertilizer ban and its top export, tea, was also crippled by the ban. Rice production fell by 20 percent in less than a year. Tea farming, which is the country’s biggest source of jobs, and its collapse has had a major impact on the nation’s citizens, leading to the civil unrest we’re seeing today.
In all likelihood, COVID-19 sped up this particular collapse. The economic disaster that was our global COVID policy hurt everyone, but it really showed the ugly reality in a lot of economic areas.
A friend pointed out recently that America as a country is both wealthy enough and, for lack of a better term, tolerant enough of foolish western liberalism that we can survive their agenda much better than, say, a small island nation on the other side of the world with nowhere near the economic engine we have. As it turns out, you have to be able to actually afford the losses you’d incur to put these policies in place, and you’ll be operating at a loss for pretty much the foreseeable future.
These policies aren’t sustainable for anyone, but especially for those countries in the developing or only recently-developed world, it’s especially harmful. That won’t stop the left from pushing its religion on others at home and abroad, potentially crushing more nations along the way to their twisted version of utopia.
It brought about chaos and great unrest. That is when the communists can slither in and take over.
Shri Lanka is just the first domino to fall. Most of the third world (and fourth if you include much of Africa and the Middle East) have been playing economic games with their currency to artificially lower prices to create stability. This runs through foreign reserves pretty fast when the economic tide reverses. This means an increasing number of failed nation’s citizens will hop on ships to Latin America where they can convoy to America’s southern border. We really don’t have three more years to get ready. We need reasonable policies to protect Americans NOW.
Global warming.
The cure is a lot worse than the disease.
To save us from mildly higher temperatures we are all going to starve and freeze to death!
In all likelihood, THE MISHANDLING THE RESPONSE TO COVID-19 sped up this particular collapse.
There, fixed it.
Reversing the green revolution of the 1960s (fertilizers, high yield varieties, mechanization and irrigation), unsurprisingly, reversed the gains that it brought.
De-industrialization would be a similarly predictable disaster, also advocated by the Left. So would shutting down “fossil fuels”.
I think it was Thomas Sowell who said that Left sought to replace what works, with what sounds good.
Of course the left is going to blame the crop shortage on the “climate crisis”
Fixed it.
An excellent quote. Thomas Sowell is a national treasure.
https://thecountersignal.com/trudeau-nitrogen-policy-will-decimate-canadian-farming/
Canada trying to do the same as the Netherlands. Kill farming.
Killing Kulaks is back in vogue.
They also borrowed a lot of money from China to build a coastal railroad to transport agricultural products to the port more efficiently and slow-walked the project. I suspect a lot of the loan proceeds ended up in the pockets of politicians.
Depopulation is the goal. War and hunger are good ways to get there.
Of course the left is going to blame the crop shortage on the “climate crisis”
________________
Of course! Everything bad is caused by the climate change.
Without it, we would be living in paradise!
In this case, they are right, sort of! The starvation in Sri Lanca is caused by stupid response to it.
BTW, the basepoint for the “climate change” was chosen somewhere in the beginning of 1800ties. During the tail end of Little Ice Age.
The life was quite rough then, the agricultural yield were very low, people were starving, Thames was freezing over, etc.
We really do not want to go there!
It sort of helped America then.
The starving Europeans moved to the USA en masse to find warmer place!
You say you'll change the constitution
Well, you know
We'd all love to change your head
You tell me it's the institution
Well, you know
You better free your mind instead
Those lyrics still get me. He was talking about Democrats
wanting to change the constitution, not Republicans!
Some suggest that Lennon liked Reagan after they met briefly during halftime of a Monday Night Football game
It’s for their own good. As Chomo Joe says, “this is an incredible transition.”
Par for the course.
Sri Lanka ****ed up. Let the UN handle this.
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