Is organic farming to blame for Sri Lanka’s crisis?

Jul 19, 2022 View in browser   By Debra Kahn, Jordan Wolman and Lorraine Woellert THE BIG IDEA Protestors burn an effigy of acting President and Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe as they demand his resignation in Colombo, Sri Lanka. | Rafiq Maqbool/AP Photo The dramatic implosion of Sri Lanka's economy has a lot of culprits. Is organic farming one of them? The right and contrarian types are seizing on the country's banning of chemical fertilizers as the proximate culprit that led to President Gotabaya Rajapaksa turning over his palace to protesters last week. The reality: It's complicated (as usual). While Rajapaksa's abrupt ban on chemical fertilizers did jolt farmers, yields didn't fall so precipitously that it would have dented exports that much, says David LaBorde, a senior research fellow at the International Food Policy Research Institute. The bigger issue is that Covid-19 sent droves of overseas workers home to Sri Lanka. Money sent home by Sri Lankans working abroad normally totals about $6 billion per year, well above the $1.2 billion that comes from tea, the country's largest cash crop. "The remittances shock is several orders of magnitude bigger than the worst scenario we can imagine about tea," LaBorde said. Without the remittances and tourism dollars, Sri Lanka had to spend more of its own currency on imports and interest on debt, which combined with inflation sent it into the spiral that led to its economic collapse. "The thing that is pretty evident is that there was macroeconomic mismanagement in Sri Lanka for months, if not years," LaBorde said. Rajapaksa also may not have been as "in thrall to green nostrums" as the WSJ alleges. He might have been using green rhetoric to justify a purely money-saving decision — which in turn was forced by the lack of income, LaBorde said. "They didn't want to spend their foreign currency on fertilizer," he said. "That was already a kind of reverse causality." While the drop in yields and exports didn't cause the economic meltdown in Sri Lanka, it is extremely possible to go too far, too fast with organic farming. Focusing on going organic is too reductive: Take farms in Africa, where lack of access to fertilizer often leads to depleted soil. "That's the kind of organic farming, because they don't use synthetic inputs, that destroys their long-term sustainability," LaBorde said. And there's a bigger picture: Forgoing larger yields in order to avoid conventional fertilizer just forces more land to be turned over to agriculture. "Instead of using fertilizer in Europe, you can get more deforestation in Brazil," he said. "There is an inherent tension between food security goals and environmental goals with fertilizer," said Colin Christensen , global policy director for One Acre Fund, a nonprofit that supplies seeds, fertilizer, crop insurance and other services for small farmers in eastern and southern Africa. "We haven't been able to feed 9 billion people on our planet without synthetic fertilizer." How to keep Sri Lanka's example from inflaming Western fault lines? More nuance when it comes to fertilizer, Christensen says: "Different regions of the world require different approaches: For example, U.S. and European farmers need to reduce overall use for environmental reasons, while African farmers deserve more access to it, to be used efficiently, so their kids don't go hungry." "We should not draw any generalities or conclusions out of the Sri Lanka situation, except that bad macroeconomic policy can destroy your country and destroy your farm system," LaBorde said. "That's the only lesson I really want to draw about Sri Lanka." CORPORATE PROMISES TUG OF WAR — Executives at U.S. utility companies apparently know they need to slash greenhouse gas emissions. Most just don't have a plan to actually do it. That's according to a new survey of 190 utility leaders released by ICF International Inc., a Fairfax, Va.-based consulting firm that advises utilities on managing clean energy goals, extreme weather threats and energy equity challenges. The survey found 9 in 10 utility leaders said cutting greenhouse gas emissions was a high or moderate priority, but only 38 percent were executing a strategy to turn that priority into reality. In addition to the 38 percent of utilities with active plans to tackle decarbonization, 32 percent of executives said their organizations were currently planning a strategy, and 29 percent said they expected to produce a strategy in the next five years. Barriers to hitting clean energy goals include a lack of capital and concern that regulators would not permit rate increases needed to cover the cost of investments in technology. "Utilities are moving as fast as public policy will support," ICF senior fellow Val Jensen said in an interview. "They can't get ahead of their regulator." Read more from Peter Behr at POLITICO's E&E News. EXTREMES Unusually high temperatures have stultified swaths of Europe, where some countries are also experiencing extended droughts and others have seen fire season come early. | Rolf Vennenbernd/via AP EUROPE'S BIG DRY — Drought alerts have been issued for much of Europe, fires have driven villagers from their homes, once-great rivers are sluggishly low and a brutal heat wave — which could reach a record-breaking zenith in the coming days — is straining agricultural production and nature's resilience on the continent. The drought has crimped production of hydroelectric power and food, adding to market pressure from the war in Ukraine, our POLITICO colleagues in Europe write. In many cities, residents have been asked to limit use of drinking water. The U.K. issued its first-ever red alert for Monday and Tuesday as it forecast temperatures over 40 degrees Celsius for the first time in history, and Italy declared a state of emergency. Fires are burning in France and Portugal. Airport runways melted near Oxfordshire outside of London. Is this climate change? Maybe. Friederike Otto, a senior lecturer at Imperial College London and a leading expert in finding the fingerprints of global warming, believes climate change was behind an increase in Europe's droughts. But humans play a role by over-stretching water resources. "A huge part of the problem is draining of land," Otto said. In China, flash floods have left at least a dozen dead and put thousands of others in harm's way. Stateside, more than 40 million people are under heat alerts across the Plains and Central California today as temperatures surge to 10 degrees to 15 degrees above normal. Dozens of high temperature records are being broken. Finally, in Antarctica, global sea ice reached a record low for June, according to scientists from the National Centers for Environmental Information at NOAA. YOU TELL US Welcome to the Long Game, your source for news on how companies and governments are shaping our future. Team Sustainability is editor Greg Mott, deputy editor Debra Kahn and reporters Lorraine Woellert and Jordan Wolman. Reach us all at gmott@politico.com, dkahn@politico.com, lwoellert@politico.com and jwolman@politico.com. Want more? Don't we all. Sign up for the Long Game . Four days a week and still free! WHAT WE'RE CLICKING — President Joe Biden could declare a climate emergency as soon as this week, according to the Washington Post. — Microsoft's president is envisioning a "new era" in which labor shortages and pressure to pay higher salaries are permanent. — America's sluggish supply chain could be slowed even further by a California trucker protest. — Experts are skeptical that the aviation industry can meet its emissions-reduction goals.   Follow us on Twitter Debra Kahn @debra_kahn Greg Mott @gwmott Lorraine Woellert @Woellert Jordan Wolman @jordanwolman   Follow us

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