RATNAPURA, Sri Lanka — This year’s harvest worries MD Somadasa. For four decades, he has sold carrots, beans and tomatoes grown by local farmers using foreign-made chemical fertilizers and pesticides, helping them reap bigger and richer crops in the green hills surrounding his hometown.
Then came Sri Lanka’s sudden and disastrous turn to organic farming. The government campaign, apparently fueled by health problems, lasted just seven months. But farmers and agriculture experts blame the policy for a sharp drop in crop yields and soaring prices that are worsening the country’s mounting economic woes and raising fears of food shortages.
Prices of some food products, such as rice, have increased by almost a third compared to a year ago, according to the Sri Lankan central bank. The prices of vegetables such as tomatoes and carrots have risen five times more than a year ago.
“I haven’t seen times as bad as these,” said Somadasa, a 63-year-old father of two who sells vegetables in the small town of Horana, outside the island’s capital, Colombo. “We can’t find enough vegetables. And with the price increases, it is difficult for people to buy the vegetables.”
Now the Sri Lankan government, led by members of the Rajapaksa family, is racing to avert a crisis. Late last month, Sri Lanka’s plantation minister, Ramesh Pathirana, confirmed a partial reversal of the policy, telling the country’s parliament that the government would import fertilizers needed for tea, rubber and coconuts, which constitute the main agricultural exports of the country.
“We will import fertilizers according to the requirements of the country,” Pathirana told The New York Times. “So far we don’t have enough chemical fertilizers in the country because we don’t import them. There is a shortage there.”
Understanding the supply chain crisis
Food costs are rising around the world as pandemic-related supply chain knots slowly unravel and prices for raw materials such as natural gas used to make fertilizers and other supplies rise. Sri Lanka added to those pressures with its own mistakes.
Chemical fertilizers are essential tools for modern agriculture. Still, governments and environmental groups have become increasingly concerned about its overuse. They have been blamed for growing water pollution problems, while scientists have found an increased risk of colon, kidney and stomach cancer due to excessive exposure to nitrates.
President Gotabaya Rajapaksa cited health concerns when his government banned the import of chemical fertilizers in April, a promise he initially made during his 2019 election campaign.
“Sustainable food systems are part of Sri Lanka’s rich socio-cultural and economic heritage,” he told a United Nations summit in September. “Our more recent past, however, saw increasing use of chemical fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides that led to adverse environmental and health impacts.”
Rajapaksa’s critics pointed to another reason: Sri Lanka’s dwindling cash reserves.
The Covid-19 lockdowns have devastated Sri Lanka’s tourism industry, which generates a tenth of the country’s economic output and provides a major source of foreign exchange. The national currency, the rupee, has lost about a fifth of its value, limiting Sri Lanka’s ability to buy food and supplies abroad just as prices were rising. That added to lingering problems like his huge debt load, including high-interest loans from Chinese state-owned banks that required him to take out even more loans.
“Our annual revenue from tourism, amounting to nearly $5 billion, has not materialized for the last two years,” Basil Rajapaksa, the finance minister and brother of the president, told parliament last month. “As a government, we recognize that our foreign exchange reserves are being challenged.”
As Sri Lanka’s economy struggled and global prices rose, its foreign exchange reserves dwindled by 70 percent. Removing foreign-made fertilizers from the country’s shopping list would help stem the decline.
“The country was not hit by chronic kidney disease,” said Dr. Aruna Kulatunga, a former government adviser on primary industries and agriculture, “but by a chronic shortage of dollars.”
The push for organic farming did not start with the current government of Mr. Rajapaksa, nor when another brother, Mahinda Rajapaksa, currently the prime minister, was president from 2005 to 2015. Some farmers and agriculture industry officials say they are excited about the idea of reducing dependence on chemicals in agriculture. But the change was too sudden for farmers who didn’t know how to work organically, said Nishan de Mel, director of Verité Research, a Colombo-based research firm.
Verité found in a July survey that three-quarters of Sri Lankan farmers relied heavily on chemical fertilizers, while only around 10 percent farmed without them. Almost every major crop grown in the country depends on chemicals. For crops crucial to the economy such as rice, rubber and tea, dependency reaches 90 percent or more.
The April ban came into effect just before what is known as the Yala planting season, which lasts from May to August, and was felt almost immediately. The Verité survey showed that 85 percent of farmers expected a reduction in their harvest due to the fertilizer ban. Half of them feared that their crop yields could drop by as much as 40 percent.
How the supply chain crisis unfolded
The pandemic unleashed the problem. The highly intricate and interconnected global supply chain is in crisis. Much of the crisis can be attributed to the Covid-19 outbreak, which led to an economic slowdown, mass layoffs and a halt in production. This is what happened next:
Food prices soared in September and people lined up outside stores to buy basic items like powdered milk and kerosene. Mr. Rajapaksa declared a state of emergency to regulate prices and prevent hoarding of essential items. The government also introduced import restrictions on non-essential items in hopes of coping with declining foreign exchange.
Now that the government is relaxing the policy, it is unclear whether Sri Lankan farmers will get the fertilizer they need in time. Maha planting season runs from September to March.
“The damage is so much to agriculture and agriculture-related exports,” said WA Wijewardena, former deputy governor of Sri Lanka’s central bank, “that the country will take some time to recover.”
It is also unclear whether the government will continue to subsidize fertilizers, which have made them more affordable for poorer farmers. Lalith Obeyesekere, general secretary of the Ceylon Planters’ Association, said the price of a tonne of urea, a type of fertilizer, had risen so high on the world market that farmers would pay five times what they used to, unless that the government helped with subsidies.
“We know that the government has decided to import chemical fertilizers,” said Obeyesekere. “But now we won’t get fertilizer at a subsidized price.”
Tea growers, some of whom feared the harvest could be cut by as much as 40 percent, said they were still hoping the subsidized fertilizer would arrive in time. Tea accounts for about 10 percent of Sri Lanka’s total exports, generating about $1.2 billion a year.
Many of the tea planters and tea factory managers asked to remain anonymous for fear of angering the government at a vulnerable time. One manager said tea production had dropped by 40 percent. He said there simply wasn’t enough organic fertilizer in the country to replace chemical fertilizers.
“I used to pick around 35 kilos of tea leaves a week, but now for about a year we have been picking less than 25 kilos a week,” said R. Muniandi, a tea picker in Ratnapura, a town. southwest. “I can see that the harvest is gradually shrinking.”
Aanya Wipulasena reported from Ratnapura and Mujib Mashal from New Delhi.