Sri Lanka vs chemical fertilizers: did organic farming ruin the country?
On April 22nd 2021, the President of Sri Lanka announced a ban on importing chemical fertilizer:
The President’s Media Division yesterday informed that the import of chemical fertilizers will be completely banned in the near future. President Gotabaya Rajapaksa has stated that it is more important to conserve human and animal life than to yield a better harvest using chemical fertilizers … He also urged authorities to develop the process of carbon-based fertilizer manufacturing locally.
“There is more of a need to develop a healthy population than a harvest. Therefore, the import of chemical fertilizers will be stopped as soon as possible.”
Things didn’t really go according to plan after that:
By March 2022 it was clear that reduced access to fertilizer significantly reduced rice yields
By May the country defaulted on their debts for the first time in history
By June inflation reached 54.6%, prompting unrest in the country and shortages of food, fuel and imports
On July 7th the Presidential Palace was stormed and on July 14th President Rajapaksa fled the country
But why did Sri Lanka ban fertilizer and was this a major root cause of the economic collapse as claimed by the media? Did organic farming destroy Sri Lanka and is this a warning for other nations trying to adopt “green” farming?
What fertilizers did Sri Lanka use?
As per the latest available stats by the “National Fertilizer Secretariat” from 2017, the following types of fertilizer were imported into Sri Lanka:
Urea, 50% of imports by volume. Can be formed naturally by animals and plants, however it is normally produced from synthetic ammonia and carbon dioxide. It’s used as a source of nitrogen for plants.
Potassium chloride (MOP), 21% of imports. Usually manufactured by extraction from minerals. Used as a source of potassium
Ammonium sulfate (SA), 16% of imports. Manufactured by treating ammonia with sulfuric acid or from gypsum. Has the unfortunate side property of being useful for making explosives, so it was banned in Pakistan and Afghanistan back in 2010. Used as a source of nitrogen in alkaline soils.
Triple superphosphate (TSP), 7% of imports. Usually obtained by treating phosphate rock with phosphoric acid. Used as a source of phosphorus.
Kieserite or magnesium sulfate monohydrate, 3% of imports. Primarily obtained from deep underground deposits of minerals. Since kieserite is an earth mineral mined from naturally occurring deposits, it is permitted as an organic nutrient source by the EU and other certifying agencies. Used as a source of magnesium.
As we can see the only organic or “non-chemical” fertilizer on the list is Kieserite, which was only a small fraction of Sri Lanka’s imports. Other “organic” fertilizers include manure and compost, which have been used since the beginning of agriculture. According to estimates they’re 40% less efficient than chemical fertilizers due to a much lower content of nitrogen and other elements, which explains why Sri Lanka primarily relied on non-organic fertilizers before the ban.
Timeline of the ban
On May 6th 2021 the government published the full list of fertilizers that are no longer allowed for import. Since all “chemical” fertilizers were banned, at least 95% of Sri Lanka’s former imports were no longer legal. The full ban didn’t last too long as two months later the government relented and decided to allow limited imports of superphosphate and ammonium nitrate. This was explained as follows:
Secretary S.R. Attygalle said that no chemical fertiliser would be imported in bulk as had been done previously. He emphasised that the licenses would be granted under the supervision of the Agriculture Ministry in order to enhance the quality of the organic fertiliser. The list includes nitrogen fertiliser, phosphate fertiliser, potassium fertiliser, and chemical fertilisers containing a combination of fertilising elements.
“In order to produce carbonic fertiliser, one needs both compost and a liquid. Compost contains about 1% nitrogen. However, nitrogen is required to produce the said liquid component of organic fertiliser and the percentage of nitrogen needed for this purpose is about 4%. That is why this import is taking place.”
Wait… did no one figure out that you need some chemicals to make “organic” fertilizer before introducing a ban? It appears not, as the government only started setting up new fertilizer plants in June 2021. And it’s not like their manufacturing capacity was fantastic before that - as per World Bank data from 2018 only 8% of their fertilizer needs were covered by domestic manufacturing. Sri Lanka has been making plants to build out their fertilizer manufacturing capacity since at least 1973 but the constant internal conflicts and insurrections probably didn’t help.
The ban ended up being fully lifted on November 30th 2021, so the policy lasted for a grand total of 6 months and 24 days. Now let’s try to figure out what prompted this ban in the first place.
Official reason: fertilizer can be poisonous
In 2010 Prof. Bandara published a highly-cited paper showcasing that fertilizer is the source of cadmium in the environment and linked it to negative health effects. How big of an impact this has?
An endemic form of CRF emerged in 2002 in the major farming provinces of Sri Lanka. A 2–3% mean prevalence is reported as background, the prevalence exceeds 10% in North Central Province and North Western Province of Sri Lanka, the traditional farming areas of lowland rice. The number of hospital-reported deaths due to CRF is 300–600 annually; however the total number is ∼1400 per year.
On a normal year Sri Lanka records around 130,000 deaths, so chronic renal failure fatalities amounted to ~1% of all deaths in 2010 for the country as a whole. Since the prevalence rates are ~4x higher in the farming provinces, we can extrapolate that up to 4% of their deaths were caused by renal failure. Therefore up to 3% of deaths in the farming provinces could be attributed to the use of fertilizer, assuming the numbers above could be trusted.
So there’s at least a bit of truth to the claim that switching to organic fertilizer will result in a “healthy population” but it doesn’t seem to be problematic enough to warrant such a drastic move.
The real problem: Sri Lanka was running out of foreign currency
Since 92% of Sri Lanka’s fertilizer is obtained from abroad, they needed foreign currency reserves to pay for them. These reservers started running out in the middle of 2020 due to the COVID lockdowns, which harmed the economy and shut down foreign tourism:
And tourism was a pretty big deal for Sri Lanka, amounting to 24% of all exports before COVID hit:
Further compounding the problem was the sudden increase in fertilizer prices in 2021:
In February 2021 the Sri Lanka government was still cautious, planning to increase the share of organic fertilizer to 30% within 3 years. However by April the country’s foreign reserves started collapsing right as the price of fertilizer started shooting up, so one could see why the government panicked and decided to ban imports before it’s too late. A dumb decision in retrospective but perhaps it would’ve worked out if they managed to get their finances in order and avoided bankruptcy?
This theory is supported by a former government advisor quoted in the NYT:
As Sri Lanka’s economy struggled and global prices rose, its foreign exchange reserves shrank by about 70 percent. Shaving foreign-made fertilizer from the country’s shopping list would help stem the slide.
“The country was hit not with chronic kidney disease,” said Dr. Aruna Kulatunga, a former government adviser on primary industries and agriculture, “but with a chronic shortage of dollars.”
Why not at least allow the private market to import fertilizer if they were low on reserves?
In 2017 the Sri Lanka government was only importing 3% of the fertilizer, the other 97% was imported by the private market. However businessmen need to exchange local currency for foreign currency every time they pay someone abroad, which puts pressure on the local exchange rate. And since the Sri Lanka central bank pegged the rupee to the dollar at a fixed 1:200 rate until March 8th, this required the country to spend down it’s foreign currency reserves to maintain the exchange rate. Noah Smith explained this in more detail on his blog.
Confounding factor: corruption?
The leader of the far-left People’s Liberation (JVP) party said the following back in May 2021 when the ban was first announced:
Although the president claims that this decision had been taken to provide food free of chemicals and making the soil healthy a doubt arises whether by arriving at this decision he is enabling his close associates to import rubbish from foreign countries as organic manure.
The president’s statement that organic manure would be imported confirms this doubt. It is certain that close associates of the president are in the process of obtaining licenses, to form companies to import organic manure. In accordance with the plant safety act implemented in 1981, it is prohibited to import manure, as it may contain bacteria and viruses which could invade the country, through decaying animal and plant waste.
More importantly the question arises as to whether the president took this decision with the ulterior motive of dissuading the farmers from agriculture, so that the land would be abandoned and thus given over to multinational companies at a later stage. This could be the initial stage of such a scenario.
It’s hard to say if these allegations are true but I suspect they might’ve influenced the government’s decision on what imports should be cut off first to save the foreign currency reserves.
What about ESG ratings?
Right-wing media quickly used the collapse of Sri Lanka as another example of how harmful ESG-oriented policies are:
Advised by the Rockefeller Foundation, Sri Lankan President Gotabaya Rajapaksa promised to transition the nation’s agriculture industry to organic farming within ten years. In April 2021, he banned “the importation and use of synthetic fertilizers and pesticides and order[ed] the country’s 2 million farmers to go organic,” according to Foreign Policy magazine. The Western green revolutionists were so pleased that they bestowed Sri Lanka with a near-perfect Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) score of 98, much higher than the United States’ score of 51.
However I can’t find any proof that Sri Lanka actually had such a high ESG rating in 2021:
Global Risk Profile ranks it at #86, far below the United States at #46.
Sustainable Competitiveness Index ranks Sri Lanka at #59, which is again much lower than USA at #30.
WorldEconomics.com has an Emissions index of 99 for Sri Lanka, however there’s 63 other countries with a score of 99 or 100 as pretty much all developing countries are highly ranked, not just those who have switched to organic farming.
I’m not sure how much influence the Rockefeller Foundation really had in the fertilizer ban decision however Sri Lanka’s ESG scores don’t seem to be that great.