The images of a crowd invading the residence of the president of Sri Lanka went around the world a little over a week ago. The island Asian country of 22 million inhabitants, has entered into collapse dragged by the worst economic crisis since its independencein 1948. At the base of the current financial ruin is the decision of its president, Gotabaya Rajapaksanow fled the country, to ban chemical fertilizers and pesticides and to implement overnight the ecological agriculturewhich caused a drastic drop in the production of rice and tea, key for the country, among other crops.
In April 2021, the president Gotabaya Rajapaksa banned all chemical fertilizers. He was thus fulfilling his 2019 election promise to make Sri Lanka the world’s first fully organic farming nation. Months later, the import of 99,000 tons of organic fertilizer based on algae and produced by the Chinese group Qingdao Seawin Biotech Group.
Already last March, the country was going through a serious economic crisis, with currencies at their lowest point, galloping inflation, especially in food, fuel shortages and electricity cuts.
The yield of rice crops, a staple food that Sri Lanka used to produce in abundance and even export, had experienced a reduced yields of about 30%. For the first time in decades, ancient Ceylon had to import this grain. In addition, heTea production, the country’s main export, fell by 18%, which reduced foreign exchange earnings. Paradoxically, Rajapaksa’s decision was intended to save Sri Lanka between $300 million and $400 million in foreign exchange, amounts that the country spent each year on importing agrochemicals.
Overwhelmed by citizen protests, the Government of Sri Lanka announced on November 21st that it would immediately lift the ban on importing chemical fertilizers, pesticides and other agricultural inputs. The previous month, the authorities had already lifted restrictions on imports of fertilizers for tea, the country’s main source of export earnings. But it was too late. Crops were decimatedprices continued to rise and the country had run out of foreign currency with which to buy fuel, among other essential goods.
The ideologue of this failed radical turn towards organic farming was Vandana ShivaIndian activist and guru of ecofeminism. The so-called “Gandhi” of cereals She is a defender of food sovereignty and an enemy of genetically modified foods and globalization. Specialized in Philosophy of Physics, she is part of the Scientific Committee of the IDEAS Foundation, the think tank (laboratory of ideas) of the PSOE.
And it is here where this story, until now distant, links with our shopping cart. “Sri Lanka is in chaos and in terrible famine because of the government’s decision to convert all farming to organic. Europe wants to do the same by 2030. You are warned”. The warning is from the professor of Biotechnology and disseminator JM Mullet, which has long been warning of the limitations of organic farming. He warned on his Twitter account of the impending disaster in Sri Lanka, and points out that the European Union is on the same path. The EU plan is gradual. The goal is for 25% of farmland to be organically farmed by 2030 and 50% by 2050. “Curiously, they always talk about surface area, never about production,” says the scientist.
Other factors concur in the crisis in Sri Lankaas the pandemicthe drop in tourism after the 2019 attacks and the leaders’ greed of this Democratic Socialist Republic, but Mulet defends that the differential element has been the prohibition of chemical fertilizers. “The Sri Lankan president himself announced it with great fanfare at the [cumbre del clima de 2021] COP26. Vandana Shiva, who was the ideologue, also announced it, and they held an event in Sri Lanka to celebrate it. Some of us said it was a catastrophe, and within six months it turned out that the Sri Lankan harvest had fallen by 50% for most crops. Hardest hit was tea, which is the country’s main export. The result is in sight”, he explains to FARO.
“In Europe we have been in an ecological transition for 20 years, and the only thing we have achieved is to be more dependent on food imports from countries that use the fertilizers and pesticides they want, many of which are not authorized in Europe”, denounces JM Mulet. “In the Agriculture Commission of the European Parliament there was Lidia Senra [sindicalista agraria gallega que en 2017 cuestionó las vacunas], and it is the one that has said the most nonsense on this subject. If you put people like that in the Agriculture Committee, what do you expect? Starve”.
JM Mulet, professor of Biotechnology and disseminator: “Some of us have been saying for some time that it is a formula for disaster”
“The main problem is cereals, which is what needs the most nitrogen”
Scientific researcher and disseminator José Miguel Mulet (Denia, Alicante, 1973), professor of Biotechnology (Biochemistry and Molecular Biology area) at the Polytechnic University of Valencia, has been warning about the limitations of organic farming for some time. Where he has analyzed this issue most profusely is in his book “Eating without fear”, but he has also addressed it in “Transgenics without fear” and “Real environmentalism”, the last volume of his disclosure.
-The issue has implications for Europe. The EU plans go for organic farming.
–Some of us have been saying for some time that it is a formula for disaster. It will be absolutely impossible to implement. Against thermodynamics you can not fight. If a plant needs nitrogen, you have to get it from somewhere, and of course, with cow shit there’s not enough for everyone.
–The ideologue of this turn of Sri Lanka, Vandana Shiva, does she have any scientific training?
–She is a philosopher, although she says she is a physicist. She studied Philosophy and did a thesis on the philosophy of quantum physics. She has become an ideologue of ecofeminism, which is a concept that mixes politics with ecology. Let’s say that she is a proponent of organic farming. For her Sri Lanka was going to be an example, the first country that was going to be absolutely ecological. And there you have the result, what some of us have been saying for a long time.
– You warned about it on your social networks.
-Organic agriculture is condemned to be something of a minority, it does not serve to feed 7,000 million people. In a discussion I had on Twitter they said that the mistake was to do it all at once, not little by little. And you ask yourself: What country has done it little by little and has reached somewhere? None, because in Europe we have been in this ecological transition for 20 years. In fact, in Spain we already have the Ministry of Ecological Transition. But the question is: transition to where? Where do you intend to go? That all the food is organic? I’m telling you, it’s impossible. There is no food for everyone.
–Without chemical fertilizers many decades ago, humanity could not have been fed?
-Exact. And we would be half of the world’s population. There are data that are very brutal: 75 percent of the nitrogen atoms in your body come from a chemical fertilizer, they come from the Bosch-Haber cycle [reacción de nitrógeno e hidrógeno gaseosos para producir amoniaco]. To maintain the current harvest based on organic fertilizers, we would need 14,000 million cows, that is, two cows per inhabitant. And those cows would have to be fed. We would be in an impossible cycle.
–And it is also said that cattle contribute to global warming, so their number should be reduced.
-Of course. It amuses me, because there are people who say that they produce organically and ecologically and that they don’t lose production. And I ask them if they cultivate olive groves or vineyards. They are two crops that do not need too much fertilization, they are robust crops. But try to produce wheat, corn or barley without fertilization… The main problem is cereals, which need the most nitrogen, and are the basis of world food.