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Although in recent years Sri Lanka has seen a boom in revenues
from tourism and garment manufacturing, like many developing
countries it is still also dependent on agriculture for both
domestic consumption and exports from crops such as rice and
tea.
The ongoing Ukraine-Russia conflict and the impact of Covid-19
before that both demonstrated the fragility and vulnerability of
this small Indian Ocean island, with its dependency on global
shipping and input supply chains, and price shocks leading a
cash-strapped government to replace conventional fertilizer and
pesticide imports with organic farming methods and biofertilizer
imports from China.
There has been much focus on the quality of these biofertilizer
imports, but in fact the seaweed-based products produced by
QingdaoSeawin Biotech used in Sri Lanka conform
to both well-established local and international standards and
regulations. Sri Lanka has a long history of both organic and
biodynamic farming for tea, and spices like cardamom, cinnamon,
cloves, ginger, nutmeg and turmeric, for example.
The main issues were the rapid transition from the predominant
mode of conventional agriculture applied to cash and food crops to
organic agriculture, leading to rapidly falling yields and farm
income in many cases, and resultant food shortages and declining
farm incomes amid a severe economic crisis.
The Sri Lankan government should instead have adopted a
four-year transition programme for the adoption of organic farming
practices, as seen in the UK for example, and certified by the Soil
Association. But it is extremely unlikely that it could have
shifted its entire agricultural base long-term to organics and
maintained existing yields and output.
Instead, the since-deposed Rajapaksa regime blamed the
biofertilizers as a convenient scapegoat for its own policy
failures and then unsuccessfully tried to renege on its agreement
to pay the company for them, due to its own growing and
self-induced economic problems.
There are wider lessons to be learned here, but it remains to be
seen whether Sri Lanka can sufficiently recover its agricultural
production levels and income in the short to medium-term under the
new government, given the continuing civil instability and multiple
crises largely of its own making it now has to resolve, with
regional and international assistance.
Posted 01 August 2022 by Alan Bullion, Director of Special Reports & Projects, Agribusiness, S&P Global Commodity Insights
This article was published by S&P Global Commodity Insights and not by S&P Global Ratings, which is a separately managed division of S&P Global.
