Last July, the UN released a startling report documenting the effect of the pandemic on global food security in 2020: “In many parts of the world, the pandemic has triggered brutal recessions and put access to food at risk.” In total, three billion people could not afford to eat a nutritious diet, and just under 10% of the world’s population was classified as undernourished, an increase from 8.4% in 2019. Overall, the report continues. ,
“… more than 2.3 billion people (or 30% of the world’s population) lacked access to adequate food throughout the year: this indicator, known as the prevalence of moderate or severe food insecurity, jumped in one year as much as in the previous five combined”.
What is the worst thing a government could do in these circumstances? Make it more difficult for farmers to produce food. Sadly, that’s exactly what Sri Lanka did in 2021. Heeding the advice of head-in-the-clouds environmental activists, the island nation banned imports of synthetic pesticides and fertilizers as part of its push to achieve 100 percent organic food production. . [1] When this policy led to shortages, as any economist or agricultural scientist knew, the government blamed the rich for hoarding staples and put price controls on staples like sugar, onions, and rice.
The results of the Sri Lanka experiment are out, and they are nothing short of devastating. Al Jazeera reported on January 26 that the government has agreed to pay $200 million in restitution to rice farmers “whose crops were destroyed,” the country’s agriculture minister said, in addition to another $149 million in subsidies to help these farmers rebuild. your operations. In all, in the midst of a pandemic that has left so many people hungry, Al Jazeera noted that
“About a third of Sri Lanka’s agricultural land went idle last year due to the import ban.
A predictable result
Economist Alex Tabarrok’s concise take on the Sri Lanka experiment: “A good example of central planning in action”. The government was forced (or, rather, forced its citizens) to learn the hard way that public officials are incapable of dictating how a nation’s food should be produced. They literally cannot know, for example, how much rice consumers will eat in a given year or how many inputs (such as fertilizers) farmers will need to grow the crop.
Lofty goals like protecting “people’s health and the environment” are no substitute for market mechanisms that precisely guide the decisions farmers and consumers make. The same rule applies to any good or service that we consume. Leonard Read outlined this argument in his classic essay I pencil, in which he stated that no “brain” has the expertise to produce something as simple as a pencil. Even that requires the contributions of millions of people with specialized knowledge:
“I, Pencil, am a complex combination of miracles: a tree, zinc, copper, graphite, etc. But to these miracles that manifest in Nature has been added an even more extraordinary miracle: the configuration of human creative energies— millions of tiny pieces of know-how that form naturally and spontaneously in response to human need and desire and in the absence of a human mastermind!”
Lesson learned?
The people least likely to learn this lesson are the ones most in need of education: organic food activists and the popular media that provides them with a platform. Despite their ignorance of science and economics, they wield tremendous influence around the world, including in the European Union, which is about to do serious damage to its agricultural sector by demanding significant cuts in the use of agrochemicals and increases in organic production.
For now, the organic food dispute is mostly an academic debate for us in the United States, wealthy and well-fed as we are. But as the Sri Lankan experience confirms, bad policies can have tragic consequences. We can only ignore reality for so long before people really start to suffer.
[1] “Synthetic” is a meaningless term in this context. I use it here for convenience. The reality is that “natural” chemicals are often highly toxic, even those approved for use in organic farming.