First up, some background for folks who were busy living their lives at the time, from Al-Jazeera, May 18, 2022:
Sri Lanka faces ‘man-made’ food crisis as farmers stop planting
Once self-sufficient nation reels from fall-out of ill-conceived shift to organic agriculture, compounded by fuel shortages.
Mahinda Samarawickrema, 49, will not be planting paddy this season.
After a government ban on chemical fertilisers cut his rice yield in half during the March harvest, the farmer, who owns eight hectares (20 acres) of paddy and banana, said he no longer has the income to maintain a farm. Especially as his banana crop also looks set to fail.
“It’s a total loss,” the father of five said in mid-April, standing in a field of stunted banana trees in Sri Lanka’s southern Hambantota district. “When I look at this, I know I cannot get the usual yield.”
By this time of the year, most of Samarawickrema’s trees should be twice their height and in bloom, but only a few of the 1,300 trees in the weed-strewn fields have any flowers. The famer says he used to get up to 37,000kg (81,571 pounds) of bananas a year, but this time, he expects only 6,000kg (13,228 pounds).
“Everything has collapsed,” he said. “I don’t know what to do, but to look up at the sky, look down at the ground and just wait.”
Most smallholder farmers in Samarawickrema’s Walsapugala village also say they will not be irrigating their fields in the current growing season, which runs from May to August and is known as the Yala season. They say the fertiliser ban induced crop failures, coming amid nationwide fuel shortages, make farming untenable....
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And from Asia Times, the headliner and source of the above link, January 3:
After reaching upper-middle income status in 2019, the misgoverned nation is now lower-middle if not outright impoverished
Economically, 2022 will rank as Sri Lanka’s worst year ever. The immediate reason for the year’s economic carnage was a balance of payments crisis.
It was exacerbated by high debt, the Covid-19 pandemic, the Russia-Ukraine War, global central banks hiking interest rates and dumb policy decisions made by the Gotabaya Rajapaksa administration.
The crisis prevented Sri Lanka from purchasing essential goods – especially cooking gas, gasoline, fertilizer and medicine. The year 2022 will be associated with the days-long queues people grappled with to procure essential items and seeing and hearing of people dying while standing in those same lines.
It was also the year of the political aragalaya (struggle) that dethroned the Rajapaksa family. The aragalaya was tamed, but not before it forced former prime minister Mahinda Rajapaksa to flee his official residence in May and his brother, former president Gotabaya Rajapaksa, to flee the presidential palace in July 2022.
The aragalaya powerfully expressed the spirit of democracy and individual rights. But its demand for “system change” was utopian. Its participants clamored for better governance without interrogating the ethnocracy that undergirded Sri Lanka’s majoritarianism, corruption and impunity.
It is best viewed as a mass agitation against corruption stemming from the scarcity of essentials. But the spirit of the aragalaya and its demands will resonate with the government as it negotiates the writing of a new constitution....
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You know how this works right? Create a crisis. Propose a solution. Install strong-man politician to implement proposed solution. Pass draconian "emergency measures."
Coming to a country near you.
Related, last night:
"Are We Entering a New Golden Age of Guano?"
We'd better be, if the Dutch and the U.N. and the WEF have their way with nitrogen.
And it won't be easy, we are talking, in round numbers, three billion people whose food is dependent on fertilizers of the nitrogenous sort....
