Loading ...SRI LANKA EXPLAINED
From Jeff Childers
? The unfortunate president of Sri Lanka, Gotabaya Rajapaksa, resigned and fled the country in disgrace yesterday. Massed protestors invaded the presidential palace, set first to the prime minister’s residence, and overran the country’s central bank, generating fun video like scenes of overheated protestors cooling off and frolicking in the presidential swimming pool.
Sri Lanka is bankrupt. Inflation is topping +50%, with food prices up +80%. But it has a near-perfect “ESG”¹ score of 98 — far greener and woker than the United States, which got an embarrassingly-low score of only 51. The point is, Sri Lanka has been all-in on the green agenda.
Perhaps the most significant example was when Sri Lanka banned chemical fertilizer in April last year. The government mandated that farmers adopt green “organic farming techniques,” because climate change. Experts were baffled when, within six months, rice output fell -20% and prices leapt +50%. Always a rice producer and exporter, Sri Lanka was forced to import $450M in rice last year. The price of carrots and tomatoes exploded even more destructively, by +500%.
President Rajapaksa declared an emergency in November, and soon thereafter lifted his chemical fertilizer ban, just in time for the start of the Ukraine war, when chemical fertilizer became dreadfully expensive and almost impossible for smaller countries like Sri Lanka to get.
The island country’s food sector has always been under attack. It’s modern economic renaissance started in the 1960’s with the modernization of agriculture and the use of techniques like chemical fertilizers, which exploded the island nation’s standard of living and made it into a middle-class country. Almost immediately, deranged Malthusians like infamous mass-murderer-in-waiting Paul Erlich, author of “The Population Bomb,” criticized countries like Sri Lanka claiming their enhanced agricultural success would only push the human population to unsustainable levels.
Erlich and his followers argued that third world countries NEEDED a certain amount of starvation to keep world population levels within a sustainable range. Modern agriculture defeated survival of the fittest, they claimed. But the Sri Lankans somehow survived Erlich’s psychotic brand of neo-Malthusianism, even though it infected the brains of scores of world leaders.
But they couldn’t survive the newest attack. Within the last ten years or so, climate change activists from the U.S. and Europe focused on the little country, and in 2019 managed to help elect president Rajapaksa on a woke green platform. At one U.N. summit, Rajapaksa announced “Sustainable food systems are part of Sri Lanka’s rich sociocultural and economic heritage… [but] increasing use of chemical fertilizers, pesticides and weedicides [have] led to adverse health and environmental impacts.”
Ironically, Rajapaksa called his plan to eliminate modern agricultural methods, “Vistas of Prosperity and Splendour.” It was a vista all right. Just not of prosperity. It was a vista of blasting the country back to the Stone Age in only six months.
But Rajapaksa’s vista was also a vista of green ecstasy. President Rajapaksa developed his plan by working closely with a radical firebrand environmental activist from India named Vandana Shiva. The “plan” failed to provide any training for farmers in organic techniques, or allow for any kind of phase-in time or trial period. It was a mandate in its purest, and for leftists, most delightful form.
Within 30 days following the ban, the European Union and the World Bank showered money on the island nation to reward it for meeting green ESG goals. Good little doggie!
Yeah. They “modernized” agriculture in Sri Lanka the same way Stalin “modernized” agriculture in Ukraine in the Holodomor.
Trumpeting its $125M “grant” in May 2021, the World Bank explained on its website that “Agriculture is important for Sri Lanka’s economy, and we continue to work with all our partners to promote inclusive and resilient growth, through increasing agricultural productivity, farmer incomes and creating jobs in the sector.”
The World Bank increased productivity all right. Productivity of poverty, famine, and total societal collapse. Thanks, experts.
Along with the EU’s $1B “grant” came this happy boast, “The European Union is pleased to be partnering with the World Bank and the Government of Sri Lanka to move towards a more sustainable, resilient and productive agriculture,” and even more ironically, claimed the new organic farming mandate would help achieve “poverty reduction, democratic governance, local development, agriculture, water [and] health.”
Sustainable, resilient, and productive? You bet it was sustainable! It was a sustainable and resilient failure that took just 18 months to drive the hapless president and cowardly prime minister into literally running down the docks hauling a single suitcase — even without their families — to escape the country with their lives. (I wonder what was in that suitcase. Cash?)
?? BREAKING NEWS?? Footage emerges said to be of President Rajapakse fleeing Sri Lanka aboard a Navy Vessel.
July 9th 2022
These NGO grants are not innocuous gifts. They come with strings attached. In taking the money, Sri Lanka agreed to KEEP meeting ESG targets and to not roll the mandates back. And on top of the tricksy grants from international NGO’s, well-funded environmental activists infested Sri Lanka, flush with cash from U.S. foundations and big corporations like Disney, Google, JP Morgan, Mastercard, and even the History Channel.
The idea of mandating that farmers switch to organic techniques overnight is so ridiculous, so idiotic, so literally unbelievable that one wonders whether Sri Lanka is really a failure at all. How could all these highly-educated environmentalists and world experts advising governments have been so badly wrong? Conspiracy theorists might describe the mandates as a test.
Either way, Sri Lanka survived covid mandates. But agricultural mandates cratered the country.
The crisis leading to a “revolution” or “insurrection” in Sri Lanka is apparently the bad kind of crisis. Sri Lanka’s ports are empty. Nobody is sending food or oil or medicine. The U.N. is not racing to provide any humanitarian aid. The Red Cross is nowhere to be found. Congress is totally silent while Sri Lanka’s government falls and its people starve.
Ukraine good, Sri Lanka invisible.
Where are the experts? Where is Greta? Where are all the wealthy ESG activists now? Where’s Disney, and Google, now that their little experiment has gone up in flames? How about the EU and the World Bank, who surely must bear SOME of the blame?
I bet I know where they all AREN’T. I bet they aren’t in Sri Lanka. In fact, I know they aren’t.
Next up: The Netherlands
IMF, World Bank and UN loans and assistance all comes with strings attached.
“Follow our climate change and woke ideology” otherwise you get no money.
Now that it has all blown up in their faces, what next? Let it burn to the ground, then “build back better”?
Another solid history lesson.
Pity no one studies and learns history anymore.
This will not be an isolated incident. This Summer will bring many surprises to the WEF, EU, World Bank and our indoctrinated so called leaders.
More people will die from starvation but where is the tremendous response that was mobilized for Covid? Where?
I learned power of the “Mama Bear” this morning. We have a Robin’s nest in the rafter of our covered deck. Other than cleaning up the bird dropping daily, it was pleasant to see the three chicks grow. During my morning mopping of the deck, I got too close. A chick flew down from the nest at my feet. I stopped mopping and was about to leave the area. Within seconds I was viciously attacked by the mother about the head. I could have sworn it was a couple of Robin’s. I immediately left so that she would calm down. Now all three chicks have flown the nest.
Lesson learned. When the Moms of all the jab damaged children catch on to what has been done in the name of science, there is no greater force than motherhood.
I really feel for those kids but it may be the straw that breaks the camels back. They will come for the Fauci’s, PHOs and Gates of the world with a vengeance that can not be stopped. Grandmothers will join in. On and on it will go.
It is entirely possible I believe that the motive of the globalists here in Sri Lanka was always to simply reduce the food supply. The covid injections have a vague death rate but starvation will be much clearer. They can kill half the planet if they can get everyone to go (back to) organic agriculture. The only reason 8 billion people can be fed is because of the increased agricultural production made possible by the “Green Revolution” advancements of fertilizers, pesticides, and better plant strains. The surest way to kill off a lot of the world’s population is by making it impossible for them to survive. Apart from removing all the oxygen from the atmosphere or nuking every large city, removing food is the simplest and surest way.
Any government pushing to reduce fertilizer use is pursuing a plan of starvation. So, the Dutch farmers are literally fighting for their lives. If there’s not enough food, who is going survive. Who can? It’s a simple stategy. And Trudeau has already implemented it here in Canada.
Trudeau’s nitrogen policy will decimate Canadian farming
https://thecountersignal.com/trudeau-nitrogen-policy-will-decimate-canadian-farming/
“In December 2020, the Trudeau government unveiled their new climate plan, with a focus on reducing nitrous oxide emissions from fertilizer by 30% below 2020 levels by 2030….”