The Fall of Sri Lanka

Late last week the president of Sri Lanka, Gotabaya Rajapaksa, fled the country after the Prime Minister, Ranil Wickremesinghe, declared that the country was bankrupt. The following comes from a Newsweek article reporting on the latest events in Sri Lanka with links to their own reporting and one from CNN: “There have been largely peaceful protests in Sri Lanka calling for Rajapaksa to resign since March but those calls appear to have been intensified by a severe foreign exchange shortage that has limited imports of food, fuel and medicine. Many blame the president for the economic crisis facing the country, where people have had to queue for fuel for hours in Colombo and there have been some clashes with police and the military while they’ve waited. Schools have also been closed due to fuel rationing. Inflation is expected to reach 60 percent by the end of the year.”

What Newsweek and other mainstream media outlets fail to report is the underlying reason for the fall of Sri Lanka – unmitigated green policies. Last week GMC published an essay about the immeasurable amounts of human suffering that can be caused by eco-activists, governmental bureaucrats and politicians that have no functional knowledge about how anything really works and do not understand the complexities and interconnectedness of supply chains when mandating ineffective and unproductive climate change policies.

This was certainly true for the failed ruling party in Sri Lanka. In April 2021 the government banned all chemical fertilizers  to be the first country in the world to rely entirely on organic farming. They also banned the use of pesticides, weedicides and fungicides. This unprecedented dictate created widespread food shortages and a huge increase in the cost of food as harvests predictably dropped. One Sri Lankan farmer noted his yield was down from 60 bags of rice to only 10 (per 2 acres of land) after the fertilizer ban – a full 84% decline.

No nation can reasonably deal with this kind of shortage without financial collapse. In the past, natural events like plagues, droughts, floods, and other disasters have contributed to numerous famines, but this time the starvation was caused entirely by unrealistic, unproven policies.  Eventually the bans were reversed, but it was too little, too late to solve the man made crisis. By November 2021, Reuters reported that Jeevika Weerahewa, a Sri Lankan agricultural economist, said “This was an unnecessary experiment. The time for fertiliser [sp] application for rice is past and the crop will not recover.”

In response to the lack of food, the inflation rate in Sri Lanka has soared to a crippling 57%.  This created a chain of events  that has now bankrupted the country as they were once a huge international exporter of grain and tea.

No wonder President Rajapaksa fled his luxury home. This also proves that not only was this particular climate activist ignorant and reckless, he was also a coward unwilling to face the consequences of his imposed ideological catastrophe. The fertilizer ban was to promoted by Rajapaksa to address the extensional crisis of climate change. In a speech given in October 2021 in Scotland entitled “Rediscovering Nitrogen: Solutions and Synergies for Climate Change, Health, Biodiversity and Circular Economy” Rajapaksa claimed the following, “As we are all aware, climate change is one of the greatest crises the world currently faces.” Later in the speech Rajapaksa gives this arrogant, deluded and miscalculated declaration, “My Government’s policy frameworks emphasizes sustainability.” Who in their right mind would ever call, famine, poverty and human suffering “sustainability” and how “circular” is bankruptcy?

Sri Lanka is a cautionary tale for all of us. In little over a year, a once functioning and stable country has been reduced to anarchy. If we let the short sidedness of the climate change pseudo-intellectuals from academia and advocacy lead us down the path to net zero emissions and zero nitrogen usage without a serious and realistic discussion of the dire consequences, we will all be Sri Lanka – a people forced into immense misery and death for a childish, imagined and idealistic utopia that can never exist in the modern world.

GMC readers are encouraged to begin stocking up on non-perishable basic food items in preparation for the fall and winter. We are beginning to see the signs of doom already around us. The US inflation rate has risen to the highest levels since 1981 with notably fuel and food occupying the highest increases. The Ukraine/Russia conflict has limited the sale of fertilizer and will definitely impact our food supply as US farmers are planting less food and prices will also be impacted by the rising fuel costs to bring products to market. This is a wise and easy way to protect your family and if by the grace of God, we ever get our country back from the radical Marxists currently ruining it, you can always donate the leftover items to local food banks to help those in need.