Sri Lanka’s Green New Deal Was a Human Disaster An ill-advised national experiment in organic farming yielded starvation, poverty and political chaos. By Tunku Varadarajan
The Green Revolution of Norman Borlaug, the American agronomist who did more to feed the world than any man before or since, set Sri Lanka on the path to agricultural abundance in 1970. It was built around chemical fertilizers and crops bred to be disease-resistant. Fifty-two years later, Sri Lanka has pulled off a revolution that is “antigreen” in the modern sense, toppling its president, Gotabaya Rajapaksa. In an uprising that has its roots in Mr. Rajapaksa’s imperious decision to impose organic farming on the entire country—which led to widespread hunger after the agricultural economy collapsed—Sri Lanka’s people have wrought the first contra-organic national uprising in history.
Footage of protesters swarming the presidential palace—splashing in the swimming pool, watching cricket on television in the bedroom, making tea in the lavish kitchen—resembled the mass break-in at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, but with none of the menace of the American trespass. Mr. Rajapaksa was in fact an American citizen until 2019, the year he was elected Sri Lanka’s president. He has now fled the country.
Will this environmental visionary be offered refuge at Berkeley? At the headquarters of the Sierra Club? Or even by the Biden administration? Perhaps not, for he bears on his head some serious accusations of war crimes that would make housing him inconvenient. But the truth is, Mr. Rajapaksa was driven from office in part because he was an overzealous green warrior, who imposed on his countrymen a policy that the American environmental left holds sacred.
Sri Lanka came to detest Mr. Rajapaksa for other reasons too. He was an autocrat, the latest in the Rajapaksa political dynasty to be president after his elder brother Mahinda, who held the office from 2005-15. Mahinda was a ruthless president, waging a scorched-earth war against Tamil separatists in the country’s north that resulted in a resounding victory for the Sri Lankan army in 2009. Gotabaya Rajapaksa was defense secretary during the war and is accused of signing off on tactics that resulted in the deaths of thousands of civilians.
The Rajapaksa method—take the action you want, the consequences be damned—may have worked to win one of the bloodiest civil wars in modern times. But it was jarring in peacetime, as Sri Lankans found themselves ruled by a pair of brothers who consulted no one and did as they pleased. Corruption soared alongside the nepotism and despotism. Sri Lankans, whose literacy rate is among the highest in Asia and who are classified as middle-income by the World Bank, found this state of affairs increasingly intolerable.
Perhaps because of the seven years he spent living in America during the late 1990s and early 2000s, Mr. Rajapaksa was in thrall to green nostrums. He campaigned for president in 2019 on a platform that promised a form of technocratic utopia, including the commitment to turn Sri Lankan agriculture completely organic in a decade. He was particularly attentive to Vandana Shiva, a rabid Indian opponent of modern scientific agriculture. She considers Borlaug the enemy.
Covid hit Sri Lanka particularly hard, wiping out tourism, its economic mainstay. Heedless of this calamity, and of the wider impoverishment caused by lockdowns, Mr. Rajapaksa took a step that poleaxed Sri Lanka. On April 27, 2021—with no warning, and with no attempt to teach farmers how to cope with the change—he announced a ban on all synthetic fertilizers and pesticides. Henceforth, he decreed, Sri Lankan agriculture would be 100% organic. Agronomists and other scientists warned loudly of the catastrophe that would ensue, but they were ignored. This Sri Lankan Nero listened to no one.
Except, of course, to Ms. Shiva and other woke environmentalists, who rejoiced at the epochal nature of Mr. Rajapaksa’s decision. “Let us all join hands with Sri Lanka,” Ms. Shiva tweeted on June 10, 2021, “taking steps towards a #PoisonFree #PoisonCartelFree world for our health & the health of the planet.” Lost in all the ideological ululation was another likely explanation for Mr. Rajapaksa’s action: So debt-ridden was Sri Lanka—to China, in particular—that he may have decided to forgo imported fertilizer and pesticide as a money-saving measure.
What happened next? Rice production fell by 20% in the first 180 days of the ban on synthetic fertilizer. Tea, Sri Lanka’s main cash crop, has been hit hard, with exports at their lowest level in nearly a quarter-century. Whether from indignation over the new laws or an inability to go organic, farmers left a third of all farmland fallow. Food prices soared as a result of scarcity and Sri Lanka’s people, their pockets already hit by the pandemic, began to go hungry. To add to the stench of failure, a shipload of manure from China had to be turned back after samples revealed dangerous levels of bacteria. The farmers had no synthetic fertilizer, and hardly any of the organic kind.
So extensive was the damage done by his organic diktat that Mr. Rajapaksa had to reverse himself by November 2021. His scientific ineptitude was now matched by his economic illiteracy. Battling to salvage his political reputation, he agreed to compensate farmers for their losses, the bill for which totaled more than the money he’d ostensibly saved the country by banning imports of fertilizer in April 2021.
Organic activist groups are still in denial. The U.K.-based Soil Association tweeted this: “Lots of lessons to be learnt from Sri Lanka, but ‘see, organic doesn’t work’ isn’t one of them.” Mr. Rajapaksa, for his part, has had to pay for his hubris with his job. Had he not fled the country, it is more than likely that he would have paid for it with his life. Would that have made him a Green Martyr? We’ll never know. Sri Lanka must now turn to better ways: accountability, democracy, the rule of law and yes, modern scientific farming that can feed all of its 22 million people.
Mr. Varadarajan, a Journal contributor, is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and at Columbia University’s Center on Capitalism and Society.
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