There are also a lot of unresolved tensions left over from the vicious civil war that devastated the island for decades, so it's sadly possible that things take a turn for the worse.
Quite justified in my opinion.
This only really works with a UN declaration/international support. Having historically friendly ties makes this a better proposition.
> A country ought to feed its people
This is much harder than it sounds, not just for dense tiny countries like Singapore but for much of Western Europe. The UK hasn't been able to feed its population from native production only since before WW2. I see a Norwegian making the same point in this thread; the proportion of Norway's five million people that could be sustainably fed by fishing, reindeer hunting, and agriculture on the few flat bits of the country is probably very small.
> provide basic services like power and medical facilities on its own
Even harder. Only a superpower could begin to attempt having its own production chain for both of those. Everyone else has to buy from Siemens or Westinghouse, or Pfizer etc.
It sounds like you're saying that only superpowers or mega-countries should exist? Would the EU count as a self-sufficiency unit for this purpose?
(edit: Singapore imports 90% of its food! https://www.sfa.gov.sg/food-farming/singapore-food-supply/th... - not really suprising given that it's an island megacity with a population of 20,000 per square mile)
Gundam 00 comes to mind as an example, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_Suit_Gundam_00 , one of the main characters is a former child warrior from the then severely economically depressed post-oil 'middle east' region, while each of the three economic superblocks has it's own space elevator connecting to an orbital ring of solar collectors.
Nineteen Eighty-Four (from 1949) literally has Oceania, Eurasia, Eastasia :-)
What does this mean though?
That the UK does not generate enough calories to meet a certain minimum baseline? That the UK does not generate enough calories to meet the current consumption? That the UK eats things that they do not grow?
https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/united-kingdom-food...
Result: The UK grows enough wheat alone to give enough calories to support its population, with plenty to spare. It also produces all the major food groups in quite large quantities. If cut off from the world, the UK people wouldn't starve, but they might have to switch out their caviar for something else.
> but they might have to switch out their caviar for something else
That's frivolous: the report talks about meeting 100% of caloric requirements from grain in an emergency scenario. The mostly-bread diet would be comparable or worse than WW2 rationing, it's not just luxuries that would be impacted.
For purposes of comparison with Sri Lanka, I also note: "The UK imports roughly 50% of its ammonium nitrate, with 75% of imports for fertiliser use coming from the EU (primarily from Lithuania, Poland, and the Netherlands) and the remaining 25% from Georgia and Russia."
See the section on meat, dairy, fruits, vegetables, etc... It would be a decent diet.
And obviously within a year or so, land use could be adjusted to make it an even better diet.
For that matter, I don't understand why human poo is treated as pollution, rather than being composted.
Because human waste contains shigella bacteria which would be disastrous if runoff makes it to the water supply.
https://www.epa.gov/biosolids/basic-information-about-biosol...
Specifically, no water treatment process today tests for viruses in treated water, and there are plenty of viruses that can survive sitting in a bubble tank for a few hours..
Boiling the water for 10 minutes first would satisfy me that very little biological contamination can make it out, but it is a huge amount of energy required to boil all the wastewater.
https://www.epa.gov/biosolids/basic-information-about-biosol...
In the USA, food poisoning rates are far higher than Europe, and part of that is probably the biosludge...
https://extension.psu.edu/use-of-biosolids-in-crop-productio...
Treatment methods eliminate more than 95% of the pathogens in sewage sludge; the risk of disease from those that remain in biosolids is short-term because most of them do not survive beyond 30 days in the soil environment. In addition to requiring pathogen reduction treatment, Pennsylvania's biosolids regulations contain several risk reduction and management requirements that reduce the likelihood of disease to very low levels. These requirements include:
treatment and management practices to reduce the attraction of disease vectors and thus the probability that pathogens would be transferred from biosolids to humans or animals application setback requirements from occupied dwellings and from water sources minimum time requirements from biosolids application to harvest, ranging from 30 days for forage and feed crops to 38 months for some food crops no grazing allowed within 30 days of biosolids application to pastures If carefully followed, these requirements make the risk of disease from land-applied biosolids similar to or lower than that of land-applied manures. In fact, there are no documented cases of human or animal diseases being contracted from land-applied biosolids.
https://extension.colostate.edu/topic-areas/nutrition-food-s...
Changes in microorganisms have undoubtedly contributed to this increase, as have changes in growing, harvesting, distribution, processing and consumption practices. Listeria monocytogenes, Clostridium botulinum and Bacillus cereus are naturally present in some soils. Their presence on fresh produce is not uncommon. Salmonella, E. coli O157:H7, Campylobacter jejuni, Vibrio cholerae, parasites and viruses can contaminate produce through raw or improperly composted manure, irrigation water containing untreated sewage or manure, and contaminated wash water. Contact with mammals, reptiles, fowl, insects and unpasteurized animal products are other sources of contamination.
Animal manure is a far more common source.
If you would include nitrogen pollution and use of fossil fuels/CO2 production into the cost, using natural fertilizer would be a no-brainer.
If I remember a fragment of chemistry from 50 years ago, it's something like "all inorganic nitrate salts are soluble in water at STC". Ammonia's also water-soluble (and volatile); rivers and groundwater can recover from nitrogen pollution more quickly than from phosphate pollution.
One other thing: phosphate fertilisers basically have to be dug out of the ground, and as reserves begin to run low, prices are increasing. But human poo is very high in phosphates.
I mean, even if there's a yick factor, let's face it: every glass of water we drink, whether from the tap or the mineral spring, has probably passed through the kidneys of dozens of animals, including fish, mammals and insects, and certainly hundreds of dinosaurs and millions of bateria. Why should we be concerned if the phosphate salt we use was once a part of human poo, which probably contained nasties at some point? And nobody's proposing that humans should chow-down on phosphate salts extracted from human poo; stick to bananas, and put the fertiliser on the banana tree.
Pretty much every investment in agriculture, from buying tractors to the collection and distribution of organic fertilizers is heavily subsiduzed and controlled.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-06-08/high-gas-...
"Enough wheat to give enough calories to everyone" only means that in an extreme situation and with very strict rationing nutritional needs could be met. Which is self-sufficiency at the limit only.
The government assumption was that - once the population realises they're going to be starved - they will revolt and insist on agreeing terms with Germany in exchange for food. Given what we later saw in Japan (which did starve its civilian population and they did not in fact rise up and force Japan to surrender) perhaps they were too pessimistic, we will never know because the next convoy got through.
Try plastic-wrapped garbage at Co-op and Sainsbury's!
Self sufficiency is advisable for the poorer countries though.
It reminds me of Mao ordering all sparrows be killed because they eat agriculture seeds.
This of course caused a much bigger crisis with insects destroying crops - because everyone knows sparrows also eat lots of insects.
The Roman title of Dictator is different from a modern day dictator, agreed — but if you read carefully no-one argued otherwise. The Roman title of Dictator more aligns with the modern concept of "emergency powers."
If you have bigoted populace, it's dead easy to bait them into voting for some immediate emotional relief. Sri Lankan's wanted to have fun watching Tamils and Muslims get hurt, so it wasn't all that hard for some politician to get the people vote for him. The worse thing is they even put up with his bad decisions for the same reasons. And they did this for years.
The population is entirely responsible for this.
As it turns out they ran out of time, there's always that one point after which everything comes melting down.
As soon as you have a government run for the benefit of a small group, you no longer have a democracy.
Elections don't change this. Not even nominally free and fair ones.
The problem - as always - is that any system of government trends towards capture by Dark Tetrad types. No matter what decisions they appear to make, and no matter whether they're left/right populist/monarchist democratic/authoritarian, the consequences are always disastrous.
Sri Lanka clearly is a democracy, albeit a degenerate one
Sri Lanka is a democracy, in that they have elections, but it is also hilariously corrupt, with extremely authoritarian governance.
Regarding the authoritarian governance, can you please supply the valid examples? Srilanka is just one example. There are many countries like Bhutan, Nepal which seems to be sliding day by day. I hope we won't label them authoritarian when they fail?
Democracy is not immune as people expect. We can't label demagouge who sways people as authoritarian. Democracy is only sucessful if majority of people aren't biased and vote based on merit rather than religion, greed etc.
To the extent they have less mental free space to actually do work.
Even in abridged form... that's a lot. https://campbellmgold.co.uk/archive_definitive/red_book_chai...
I know nothing about P and K though.
Ash is a good source for K if there are no other K-rich fermented dead plants available.
You get a lot of both from coffee grounds so someone might have to drink a lot of coffee.
For Sri Lanka, it was the perfect storm of covid decimating tourism AND overseas demand for their produce.
Without Covid, they might have been able to stay afloat on tourism dollars until the organic farming thing started showing results.
Beyond that, it's easy to get rid of modern fertilizers, but the tradeoff is significantly lower yield. To make up for the loss of yield, you need more space. Sri Lanka is a small island that is densely populated, so space is at a premium. Yielding less crop for the same money might have worked out if not for the pandemic, except for the fact that they domestically consumed most of their domestic staple goods, exporting the surplus. Now they've resorted to importing.
This also affected staple crops like rice which are eaten domestically, effectively forcing the country to start importing food instead of fertilizer.
It's not plausible to move the entire agricultural sector towards luxury exports by government fiat.
.. overnight.
Some countries have managed to pivot towards luxury exports, and indeed this is one of the standard things that the IMF tries to make failing countries do, but it's a multi-decade process.
Perhaps your niches are smaller than mine. Some people regard tea as an indispensable bulk commodity.
"When Sri Lanka's foreign currency shortages became a serious problem in early 2021, the government tried to limit them by banning imports of chemical fertiliser.
It told farmers to use locally sourced organic fertilisers instead."
it is a bit moot point as organic fertilizer can't be practically transported/imported for any significant distance.
I would argue that the current energy crisis was also partly caused by the ESG drive which while laudable in aspiration got ahead of physical practical implementation capacity.
I know it is tempting to pin this one on the environmentalists, but this is on the establishment. Starting with Schröder who realized he could find an easy way to keep German industry competitive and line his pockets and live a comfortable life forever.
This is similar to the Sri Lankan situation. It does not matter how you label it. The lack of fertilizer was clearly not voluntary.
I wonder how many people died in Fukushima vs how many Ukrainians were killed by Russian soldiers this year.
Electricity and natural gas aren't interchangeable commodities, particularly given Germany's infrastructure.
Also Europe produces a lot of electricity with natural gas fuelled turbines.
New nuclear is expensive. Existing nuclear is not.
Wind and solar cannot guarantee production. This means you need storage. The problem with storage is you need to determine how much you want. If you decide on 1 month of storage what happens when you have limited wind and sun for a month and you are running out of stored power?
Nuclear doesn't have that problem. This is why nuclear is a must in the future.
* collectivitzation leading to the Holodomor in Ukraine, mass famine in Kazakhstan, and hunger throughout the USSR, killing millions upon millions through starvation. All the act of a single, paranoid, murderous tyrant.
* Kruschev's love affair with corn, that ended up being a crop failure after a few lucky years in smaller trials. This is actually the more level-headed play than Stalin's, but such a large shift, even with a trial, was a gigantic failure.
Lately I've been completely enamored with the book How Asia Works lately, and in detailing the success and failure of many different Asian nations development in the 20th century, it homes in on agricultural independence as a corner stone for further economic development to industrialization. Without a broad base of independent small farmers, that have small farms that they can directly profit from, a large base of a middle class can never develop. Large industrial farms, favored both by capitalists and Marxists concentrate power into too few hands and are also far less productive in total agricultural output, even if they they are more profitable. It doesn't talk much about Sri Lanka, focusing more on north east Asia, but I would be quite curious about how and if Sri Lanka's land reforms from the 70s were effective.
You can see elements of this in the West as well: agricultural work is often done by precarious non-citizens, and every now and again an entire semi-trailer of these people being imported turn up dead.
Of course there is the human cost of such rapid change, but I wonder if the swiftness was compacting human immiersation into a tighter time frame rather than having it evened out over a long period of time. Perhaps the huge economic disruption led to more overall immiseration? Or did the planners think that rapidness would have resulted in less overall immiseration like a trolley problem? If South Korea was an example, students depised the pro-industrialization military dictators, but later generations have started to appreciated the fruits and sacrifice of pro-industrialization.
Interestingly as a side note, North Korea has a more corn based agriculture out of necessity to adapt to the poorer agricultural conditions of the north versus south, which was traditionally the farmland of Korea.
Anyway, even agricultural output grew in USSR until mid-80ies and, importantly, salaries were at least double of city workers' salaries.
Thanks for the recommendation.
Yes. How did Sri Lanka, in Asia, get it so wrong?
Although the crisis is not nearly as bad as in Sri Lanka. Sri Lanka now needs to import rice, even when they were an exporter before!
It was abundantly transparent to all commentators at the time that this was purely to try and reduce capital outflows.
It's not clear that switching to organic agriculture in any way reduces capital outflows. Do you mean reducing import costs by not having to import chemical fertilizer? If that were the case, I think Sri Lanka would focus on boosting domestic production and finding cheaper suppliers.
It might be more profitable in the long term, but a hard cutover sure isn’t.
Ah, wouldn't that be nice!
I live in the UK, a country that hasn't been able to feed itself using only its own produce for centuries; Napoleon called us a "nation of shopkeepers" because we couldn't survive without trade. Our staple is wheat; but our wheat isn't as good as North American wheat, and anyway we are far from self-sufficient.
We used to export coal, oil and gas; but the North Sea has largely dried up, the coal mines are mostly closed, and anyway coal is sort of un-hip these days.
I wish the NHS would stop putting services out to open tender. Private (overseas) medical companies bid for the business, so that more and more of our health services are provided privately, by US medical companies. We're perfectly capable of looking after the health of our population without overseas help; but apparently our politicians don't think it's a good idea.
From the past few centuries, Britain has been doing just fine colonising bulk of the world and taking their resources.
I guess the past before that wasn't all that glorious.
The issue is that often people come to power based on unfulfillable promises and corruption. So the food supply is one constraint, but so is the fact you promises 1001 bribes and special favours. So now you have to deliver on the latter soon and the former can wait for months. So you do and desperately cling on.
There is fundamentally no difference between this happening in Sri Lanka or here in the UK with Brexit and Boris. The only difference is that the Pound devaluing doesn't cause food shortages etc where as the LKR does. In both cases, corrupt leaders picked by a corrupt electorate that think they can get something for nothing.
https://www.macrotrends.net/2549/pound-dollar-exchange-rate-... : ouch. Hard to believe it was £1.70/$ only eight years ago. The referendum itself slips it from $1.45 to $1.30 and it never really gets back up again.
I wonder how long the government will last with energy bills doubling and diesel hovering around £2/l.
https://web.archive.org/web/20190122012624/https://www.wefor...
That's because it was a desperate response to a currency crisis.
They couldn't pay to import fertilizer, so the government trotted out the absurd idea of using domestically produced fertilizer.
The whole "organic" thing was a red herring to dress up what was a last ditch attempt to compensate for gross mismanagement of the economy.
Unfortunately, a lot of politically motivated folks have bought into this narrative--either deliberately or unwittingly--and are using it to attack sustainability initiatives, not recognizing that they're falling for simple propaganda (see cloutchaser's comment in this thread for a good example of that).
Embarrassingly for your argument, trying to be self-sufficient is exactly what brought on this crisis. Reckless attempts at protectionism and nativism can be just as damaging as reliance on unreliable trade partners.
Economic security is very important of course, but for most countries self-sufficiency is either flat out unattainable or an incredibly expensive luxury. Fortunately there are other ways to achieve economic security, the most important of which is figuring out who you can trust, and hedging the risks of any exposure you have to those you can't.
Chemical NPK fertilizer is something terribly effective for that matter. It would be a huge improvement to regulate how much is allowed and farmers need to be compensated for the additional land usage to be able to do sensible crop rotations and allow the soil to actually build up nutrition. Overall this could easily take a decade or two.
Of course the motivation wasn't ecological, fertilizer got more expensive and there was no money to buy it with. Industrial fertilizer is made from natural gas after all... You could probably also use oil...
> I guess when you are a dictator ish government and you rule the country with an iron first, the institutions of the state stop being anything and simply become rubber stamps.
The precautionary principle. I've noticed this is ever-more fiercely applied to anything involving protection of the environment, but never, ever applied to protection of national ethnicities and culture in Western countries - where the mere mention of latter invites being cancelled.
We are also not doing that here in the West when it comes to pushing almost of our energy inputs into renewables. Also, see the recent Dutch farmers' revolt and the reasons behind them, seems like not that much thought was given there, either.
Maybe this is just a result of things being filtered for newsiness, but a lot of our politicians seem to be not so level headed a lot of the time.
Are you kidding me? The complete religious level consensus on the "save the planet" or "climate change" side of the discussion is everything should go back to being organic and sustainable, and unquestionably right now, with no testing.
Take a look at the greens in germany, who are still getting the last 3 nuclear plants shut down RIGHT NOW. I mean what the fuck.
And this isn't politicians. Politicians just reflect what their voting base want. There is an insane dogma now that anything artificial is basically evil, for many many of the public.
Any level headed person, forget a politician, would want to experiment first, see the results, gauge and then expand selectively. That is common sense.
I guess when you are a dictator ish government and you rule the country with an iron first, the institutions of the state stop being anything and simply become rubber stamps.
This also underlines the importance of self sufficiency in necessities. A country ought to feed its people, provide basic services like power and medical facilities on its own, without depending on imports.