Organic and constitutional folly

“Going green” in this way, to this extent, was going boldly where literally no economy had gone before. And 22 million people were to be guinea pigs and then victims to a new national delirium-riddled flight from rationality

From shops in the UK, preened on ethical assurance, to the rolling acres of Prince Charles’ Highgrove farm, a chorus of cheers rang out as our misguided future President three years ago declared a “revolution” …the world’s first fully organic farming nation. 

It was “revolutionary” though more as a crackpot notion, contesting as it had to, with overwhelming data from the EU and other avid practitioners of this gospel.

A revolutionary fervour would sweep the fields of Sri Lanka. In unison with other fervent advocates, our soon-to-be President here in Lanka was vocally “outraged” by still unproven claims of a link between chemical fertilisers and Sri Lanka’s high rate of chronic kidney disease. 

Deliverance was to be forthcoming. His plan was brandished with all attendant hoopla.

Exponential poverty

And so the blinkered commitment to banning chemical fertiliser, immune to data, hostile to facts much less “expert” opinion, to producing 100% of Sri Lanka’s food organically within the decade was accompanied by an almost overnight impulse that dispensed with the “decade.” These folks, as we see the pattern, really like “sudden” flights from sanity. 

As an example of this predilection, recall the “sudden” curfewing back in March 2020 against an airborne pathogen that had already spread, days after stating the country would never shut down. Suddenly we had panicked people scampering desperately for last minute provisions, tens of thousands of suddenly stranded tourists, expats with no arrangements for food and other necessities, at a time when cases were utterly flat, there was no “exponential” surge.

After holding the currency in place since April 2019, without first restructuring debt, or following the IMF guidance of a controlled, gradual float, the overnight free fall of the rupee decimated what remained of the economy at that time and sent ripples of devastation through an already battered country.

But back to the fertilisers. This was “catastrophe” writ large. “Going green” in this way, to this extent, was going boldly where literally no economy had gone before. And 22 million people were to be guinea pigs and then victims to a new national delirium-riddled flight from rationality. 

Ideology should not run a country in place of analysis and expertise. We have now painfully discovered that with useless, socially and economically destructive lockdowns or backfiring “vaccines” that now seem to encourage reinfection and foster greater vulnerability to the mildest current variants. Australia’s rebounding infection and heightened death rate shows that, for example, relative to the “zero COVID” mafioso prescriptions.

Bangladesh with far less frequent and far less draconian lockdowns, and Japan never having locked down fully at all, with no Covidian disaster to show for it, and still flourishing economies in relative terms, provide a tutorial in this distinction. And yes, there’s always Sweden…and Florida…

Spiralling consequences

The fertiliser induced poverty has indeed grown exponentially, queues for essentials (before the fuel queues), frayed nerves and pitched battles, utter exasperation and eventually militant outrage at government leaders, all have been exacerbated by this.

Anyone who thinks they can deliver “mandates” without attending to likely consequences, could ask for no better a masterclass in folly than the spring 2021 declaration that two million farmers had to go organic “overnight.” The global cheerleaders, bloviating charlatans dictating world salvation via “organic food” are surely less captivating in their appeal, in the visceral aftermath of this debacle.

Sri Lanka had actually been economically flourishing before the bungee jump without the bungee. We then had twin disasters. First, the never-ending curfews, the world’s most restrictive lockdowns in response to some of the world’s most tame COVID numbers. 

Of course, PCR tests can be readily manipulated by changing their Ct (cycle threshold settings) to proliferate false positives, especially since “cases” were redefined to be “positive tests” for the first time in medical history without requiring “symptoms.”  Therefore, out of whole cloth we can “create” a surge! And then by ignoring the number of comorbidities or primary causes of actual death, the mere “presence” of a positive test was enough to proclaim something a “COVID death”. And despite all that, we couldn’t get the needle on excess mortality to go up appreciably, much less approach the number of car accident deaths per annum! 

Now after economic suspended animation, inflicted repeatedly, capriciously and extended for reasons that defied any rational thresholds (particularly compared to our regional neighbors), we had the fertiliser fiasco.

Remember, Sri Lanka had over 7.5 billion dollars in foreign currency reserves circa 2019. In 2019 the World Bank had upgraded its status to that of an upper middle-income country! Months later, they downgraded this assessment as part of the “new regime” effect.

Desperate agronomists tried valiantly, and with increasing futility to sound the alarm. The Sri Lanka Agricultural Economics Association proved that even when genuinely sound advice is zealously administered, as opposed to the witch doctor’s brew being dispensed medically on the Covidian front, it didn’t matter. 

Even if everything was true about water contamination, soil degradation, biodiversity damage and kidney damage (a large compilation of “ifs” indeed), the downside of this overnight enforced transition was far greater than any of the purported benefits.

Studies have consistently shown crop yields dropping by a terrifying 30% from organic farming. Sri Lanka had from the 60s subsidised synthetic fertilisers which doubled yields of many crops. 

Modern agriculture is premised on pesticides and herbicides, and indeed the past needn’t dictate the future, but the way forward has to be strewn with data and milestones and sustainable alternatives. 

Hence after decades of concerted efforts, the EU reports countries who have made the greatest progress here, perhaps having managed 20 to 25% of a shift to organic. 

So, those are benchmarks to be consulted. Just tuning in to sustainable farming advocates chanting their homilies is not a basis for making such sweeping national decisions.

Those backfiring plans

So first let’s take a country dependent, literally, on rice to feed itself and tea as an export crop – a national badge of pride and forex lifeline besides. Experts were unambiguous in warning that yields would plummet, 35 to 50% respectively. Rice is a nitrogen-intensive crop and very difficult, and extremely expensive to manage without chemical fertilisers. Hence, undertaking such things, you usually “test” and not just “proclaim.” Again, this tendency has been repetitively present in the playbook trotted out. 

Sri Lanka had been garlanded as an “eco-tourist” destination, though there weren’t really any full-scale “farm to table” destinations (which are exorbitantly expensive) like say a Blue Hill at Stone Barns outside Tarrytown. That was viable because it operates on a Rockefeller Dairy Farm, with their blessings. Nevertheless, so much is “natural” in the surroundings in Lanka that can be tapped, the intoxicants were too much for rational faculties to subdue apparently.

Rather than face facts, the danger is you attempt to deny them. So the fevered fantasy of two million organic home gardens and turning over wetlands and forests to producing bio-fertiliser, was touted as a response to the pandemic fall-out, which at least in significant part was due to the disastrous, economy undermining “management” of the pandemic. 

Everyone kept congratulating the Government for being able to lock up their populace repeatedly as if this was a masterstroke of public health handling. And this without any sane restructuring of the economy, or careful reinvestment, or adding to reserves, again as our regional neighbours were doing. 

So seeking to avoid the $ 300 million in fertiliser purchases, we forgot the over $ 2 billion in tea revenue. Amazing! And of course, the balance-of-payments deficit soared as crop production tumbled, and the prices of rice, vegetables and sugar skyrocketed. And then the country was unable to get hold of much organic fertiliser even, leaving farmers simply bereft and ultimately devastated. Hence, the seething anger! We have made the peasantry a revolutionary force. It is not a historically soothing achievement.

No guidance was ever provided on how to farm organically because that would have taken energy, or mustering expertise or nuance. Farmers despaired of being able to survive, many just surrendered, which made the food shortages ever more acute.

National disaster

As tea and other export crops were no longer there to offer deliverance, any “savings” evaporated, a cruel hoax by any final accounting. And Sri Lanka, readily self-sufficient in rice, now had to pay ($ 450 million and more) in importing it, requiring government subsidy.

Utterly immune to the building shock waves, at the UN Climate Change Summit in Glasgow the President was undertaking victory laps. This was just as desperate measures were underway to relax the fertiliser ban for crucial export crops like tea, rubber, coconut and more. Too little, far too late.

Having missed a crucial harvest, it was essentially too late. Annual food price inflation has topped 50%. Strikes and violent clashes are made that much worse channelling outrage at this persistent bungling.

And then we had the sheer unwillingness to restructure debt and the sheer ineptitude of managing the exchange rate, until the Molotov cocktail we kept hurling at our own economy led to a complete meltdown.

Prince Charles may indeed strut his organic prowess; it is a province of the very rich. “Whole Foods” the brand may go for healthier labels, and that is alluring, though prices demonstrate the premium it represents. The nutritional windfall it represents, is still debated. But let us just say, this needs to be a process and it has to be holistically integrated with agricultural and farming realities. 

But while there are debates about benefits, we also have to be aware that for poorer countries in particular and countries without large swathes of land, this option leads to lower crop yields, so more land has to be cultivated. That same land arguably could grow trees and reduce carbon emissions for example. Tilling fields is heavily relied upon which can also aggravate soil exhaustion.

This needs not to be a theological badge of faith as the carnage and chaos this has helped to engender in Lanka demonstrates. This tendency to bypass critical faculties needs to be resisted with everything else too.

For example, pointlessly hyping “boosters” of “vaccines” long irrelevant to current variants such that the Moderna CEO says he is having to dispose of expiring excess stocks, in his words, “throwing them in the garbage.” He says global demand has collapsed for mRNA products (his comments in Davos this last week). That would be a mercy if sustained, given the surging adverse effects that continue to be whitewashed and ignored. 

So, as a sidebar, why are we continuing to peddle them here, even though less obtrusively? We need a renewed love affair with facts and data, on all fronts.

Our ailing Constitution

Well, this is the quandary of the day. As I write, Friday, 27 May, the 21st Amendment is slated to be debated, with critiques and suggested addendums. This may well spill over into Monday of course.

The issue is this. If the Gota clan and Parliamentary entourage assert that their electoral majority allows them to “demand” and “command” what is or isn’t included, then they are making a de facto case for being overthrown. 

People gave breathing room to this controversial “interim” government on the grounds of urgent, targeted economic and social relief and Constitutional reform. Now, if we show it is the charade many have asserted, then indeed, fresh volatility will be the brew of the day, and we cannot then play the “interim government” card again…certainly not without a massive purge.

And for those who think this would be just fine, for those already agitating for a “march on Colombo” on the other side of the O-Levels, they would do well to cast their fitful gaze next door at Pakistan. 

Imran Khan did go to the IMF in good time and negotiated a $ 6 billion aid package. Given the marches underway contesting the “unelected government” after the vote of No Confidence “deposed” the Prime Minister, the IMF is holding off dispensing this very aid due to the political instability and uncertainty. No petrol, no food…sound familiar?

We are on the cusp of hoping for an aid package that would be critical, and against which other restorative fund-raising could take place. Already, in their otherwise positive assessment, the IMF virtual team that just concluded its review here, has said they will be closely monitoring the Sri Lankan “economic and political situation”. This is a clear statement that everyone here would be wise to pay heed to.

So, this will coalesce now around the Constitution. So, to the President and pals, please beware, when you have urban masses in an uprising driven by acute anguish as well as the outcry of the peasantry, you are asking for mounting cataclysm. 

The aim of the current redraft is to begin to whittle away at the centralised executive Presidency and redistribute authority pragmatically. And the key is to do this without triggering a Referendum. 

“The perfect is the enemy of the good” and you must seek to achieve and consolidate whatever progress is possible, and then build on that. All human progress has taken place with imperfect, incomplete steps that established a fresh threshold by which to move forward. 

The BASL Statement offers critiques that can enhance without derailing the effort. This can and should be moved by the Opposition. The SJP position is a more maximalist battering ram. Hopefully a middle path can be woven as has been suggested by some commentators, aiming for more than cosmetic changes, meaningful reform, even if not perhaps quite getting to the abolition of the Executive Presidency in one fell swoop.

We need to ensure that we push for “impactful” not “incendiary” or immediately “explosive” ways forward. We must anchor the progress then made and embed it in our civic culture, and in our own community habits and reflexes.

The world at large

Elsewhere, madness continues to abound. The Pfizer CEO predicts “constant waves” of COVID-19 because of “complacency” around the coronavirus and the “politicisation” of the pandemic. 

Maybe someone can point out that a whole world was held hostage, while far superior (on evident stats) and more affordable “therapeutics” were mercilessly and unfairly panned and smothered. 

$ 100 billion and further billions of doses of an experimental gene therapy that does not work were inflicted (his product premier among them). 

And it now seems the mRNA “vaccines” stimulate reinfection in some of the current variants and predispose one to greater mortality as we’re seeing in Iceland and Australia and New Zealand and Portugal (where earlier they at least protected against serious illness for a short time). Ergo, woefully inadequate, negligently tested, rushed through product, which shows the fraudulent sham “public health” has become in so many aspects is the culprit, not “complacency.” To show the “politicisation” of medicine further, the Monkeypox scare seems to be gathering PR momentum. We are told it spreads via sexual contact, primarily between men. But that is not politically acceptable in Woke terms, there is the danger of “stigma” (a new medical term doubtless) we are told. 

And while we can all campaign for an illness not to become a morality play, we wonder where all this sensitivity was when civil liberties leeching nincompoops were condemning children to years of social isolation, insisting on useless house arrest for the planet over (yet again) an airborne pathogen that had already spread, restricting public life and wrecking lives and businesses, and forcing unwanted medical interventions on millions. 

Back then, if a person attended a party maskless, they were a grandmother murderer, but now bacchanals must not be stigmatised! No hedonistic “lock downs” are being recommended to “stop the spread”, just deep introspection. 

On the other hand, panic can be parlayed, as when NYC rushed to reinstate a mask mandate with two cases of Monkeypox in the entirety of the United States! That count has now after a CDC crusade “swelled” to 9 cases across the entire US. Some have pointed out the similarity in symptoms between this and Shingles…but that’s a controversy for another day.

Time to fasten our senses back on

Lanka has real issues, granular issues. Lanka has to recreate, reweave the fabric of a functioning society. This land deserves so much better than the hapless, feckless leadership, and dead-end subsidised welfare living it has received. But then people did sign up for it, before this playbook revealed itself as the shameful sham it was. 

Though you didn’t need to read portents, it was clear as day. And the professional classes couldn’t read, or wouldn’t read, a balance sheet either it seems. What happened? We cannot keep dispensing more and more rope by which to be hung.

We need more vigour in critical thinking skills. We have to stop coddling our youth with distractions and getting seduced by living beyond our means. We have to upgrade our earnings, our skills, the calibre of our organisations, and the cost/benefit equation of our governmental institutions. If we had “Singapore Inc.” why not “Sri Lanka Inc.?” 

Yes, I know there’s still that missing Lee Kuan Yew, but not every such evolution needs a figurehead. The right Executive team could be a viable stand-in. We need the humility and passion of what Collins described as “Level 5 Leadership” not just the “charisma and energy” of the “Level 4 Leader”. 

Pathologised totalitarianism is currently a global outbreak. It seems we are to be perpetually menaced by proxy wars, exotic pathogens and interchangeable levels of shortages and emergencies, most of them avoidable and at least partially self-inflicted.

Let’s not get “used” to low standards or low expectations. Let’s expect and demand greatness from Sri Lanka, but our version, not a globally homogenised version. Independence has to be earned, again and again. And we are now at everyone’s whim. Time to reclaim ourselves.

And high time, as the world needs us as an oasis believe it or not. The reason support is pouring out is no one wants Sri Lanka to be a domino that falls. Sri Lanka is a microcosm of the world seeking to steady itself, to find regenerative energy.

Otherwise, we’ll keep taking our shoes off at airports while getting groped by security staff wrestling water bottles away from us decades after we even remember why. And this while wars are escalated to drive printing press profits into the coffers of the military industrial complex and then manic outbreaks to enrich the pharmaceutical industrial complex, and for what? What’s the end game?  Maybe Lanka can take a stand for intelligent sovereignty while being a good neighbour. Maybe we can “opt in” to what makes sense developmentally on a global basis and “opt out” rather than follow the herd where it is ridiculous. 

So “The World’s Emptiest International Airport” (close to the Rajapaksa hometown Forbes made clear) became iconic here for “white elephant” projects that have delivered nothing to this Island nation. So, turning the corner, in addition to all of the above, transparency and accountability, scrupulously applied, have to be our new watchwords. 

So, going forward, whoever partners with Sri Lanka, including the IMF, must clearly ensure they are partnering with and on behalf of its people, and the package they offer has to reflect that. 

After all, only that public, vitalised, organised, energised and focused, will ever repay these debts and pave for themselves and their partners, a prosperous, viable and creative future.