“Sri Lanka is a classic twin deficits economy,” an Asian Development Bank working paper said in 2019. “Twin deficits signal that a country’s national expenditure exceeds its national income, and that its production of tradable goods and services is inadequate.”

The situation was worsened by the Covid pandemic. President Gotabaya Rajapaksa and his brother, Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapaksa, also did a lot of damage to their nation because of their economic mismanagement. The country could still have weathered the storms, but then the Rajapaksas [forced] the nation to go organic by outlawing chemical fertilizers in April 2021.

The opposite of whatever green fanatics say is always true; the Sri Lankan experiment was no exception. The fall in farm yields was steep. The ban was withdrawn in the wake of extensive protests, but the damage was done, with the paddy yields declining by around one-third all over the country.

It is not that organic farming is bad or fertilizers and pesticides are good. But organic farming can’t become beneficial for the greater good by executive fiats; it has to grow naturally, indeed organically; it has to adjust to the economic ecosystem. But it was thrust upon the market as a result of a politician’s fancy.

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