Commentary
On July 14, after months of economic and social unrest, Sri Lanka’s President Gotabaya Rajapaksa resigned in disgrace and fled to Singapore, leaving in his wake an economic crisis and a food shortage.
How Rajapaksa’s fate was sealed is not complicated.
You probably heard that Sri Lanka adopted an all-organic approach to agriculture, banning the import of regular fertilizer and fuel because activists assured the government that organic farming was the future. As a result, in merely one year Sri Lanka went from an exporter of rice to an importer. Sri Lanka was not a wealthy country to begin with, and the organic experiment—combined with COVID-19 and government lockdowns—plunged about half a million people into poverty and caused prices to surge. (Inflation is running well over 50 percent, the BBC notes.)…