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Sri Lanka is having a textbook currency crisis, triggered by policy mistakes

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Re: Sri Lanka is having a textbook currency crisis, triggered by policy mistakes

#321

Post by raxxorraxor »

SkeuomorphicBee wrote: post #288
pfdietz wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Organic fertilizer requires that the N, P, and K actually came from somewhere. Often, that's from something else that used non-organic fertilizer. So if a country goes all organic not only are yields down on the fields using organic fertilizer, the supply of organic fertilizer itself could dry up.

Nitrogen can come from the air by using nitrogen fixing crops in a rotation, so it can never run out (N2 is the most abundant gas on the atmosphere). The problem is that growing nitrogen fixers take a lot of land time that could otherwise be growing crops. Also not as nitrogen rich as fossil fertilizers (gas N2 is quite stable, difficult to fixers to extract in high quantities). I know nothing about P and K though.

P is mainly manure I believe. It is residual in rocks but I don't know if plants can use that.

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.

Re: Sri Lanka is having a textbook currency crisis, triggered by policy mistakes

#322

Post by weberer »

denton-scratch wrote: post #310
londons_explore wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The mostly-bread diet 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.

The UK produces a surplus of animal shit; I don't understand why it isn't all being used to fertilize the ground. For that matter, I don't understand why human poo is treated as pollution, rather than being composted.

>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://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shigella

Re: Sri Lanka is having a textbook currency crisis, triggered by policy mistakes

#323

Post by spaetzleesser »

denton-scratch wrote: post #310
londons_explore wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The mostly-bread diet 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.

The UK produces a surplus of animal shit; I don't understand why it isn't all being used to fertilize the ground. For that matter, I don't understand why human poo is treated as pollution, rather than being composted.

I would guess mainly because synthetic fertilizers are cheaper

Re: Sri Lanka is having a textbook currency crisis, triggered by policy mistakes

#324

Post by johng4lt »

sam_lowry_ wrote: post #174
epistasis wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been reading a lot of Soviet history lately and it provides a source of a huge number of similar agricultural disasters. Both Russian and Chinese attitudes towards agricultural peasants has been that they are dispensable humans, and it shows in how these countries have had disasters: * collectivitzation leading to the Holodomor in Ukraine, mass famine in Kazakhstan, and hunger throughout the USSR, killing millio…

In the end if 70-ies and beginning of 80-ies agruculture was booming in USSR. Read your book until the end.

Is that why they were importing grain from the US and Canada?

Re: Sri Lanka is having a textbook currency crisis, triggered by policy mistakes

#325

Post by bongobingo1 »

oblio wrote: post #303
mjevans wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Arguably countries are on a logical trajectory to consolidate into economic superblocks, if not in literal than in defacto status. 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 el…

I mean, Gundam 00 is cool and all, but it's from 2007 or so. Nineteen Eighty-Four (from 1949) literally has Oceania, Eurasia, Eastasia :-)

No post body was provided.

Re: Sri Lanka is having a textbook currency crisis, triggered by policy mistakes

#326

Post by denton-scratch »

bergenty wrote: post #17
duxup wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You would hope that someone wanting to switch to organic agriculture would encourage it … rather than just flip a switch…

Organic agriculture is where it belong. Mom and pop farms sold in stores where it costs 3x as much for no particular increase in nutritional value. Fertilizers are tangentially bad for the environment but not directly, only in that it causes algal blooms in water bodies. Pesticides are bad yes but the research should concentrate on finding pesticides that work well with the environment. We got close with glyphosate b…

> only in that it causes algal blooms in water bodies

...which results in water that's so clogged it can't support fish, aquatic arthropods and so on.

Perhaps that doesn't matter, if the river rolling past your window is the Mississippi; but in this country, our longest rivers are only 100 miles or so.

Re: Sri Lanka is having a textbook currency crisis, triggered by policy mistakes

#328

Post by MomoXenosaga »

logicchains wrote: post #272
cinntaile wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Merkel is pro nuclear, the public sentiment forced her hand after Fukushima though.

>the public sentiment forced her hand after Fukushima though I wonder how many people died in Fukushima vs how many Ukrainians were killed by Russian soldiers this year.

I fail to see the correlation. Blaming Germany for everything is becoming a tiresome meme.

Re: Sri Lanka is having a textbook currency crisis, triggered by policy mistakes

#329

Post by incomingpain »

asciiresort wrote: post #8

> Without imports, many Sri Lankans will quickly find themselves hungry, stranded How did these island nations sustain themselves before ? In other words, what has changed that they can’t live off the land anymore? And by that, I mean the sea. Has Sri Lanka’s fish been pillaged? Is it being exported to wealthier nations that command higher prices, even as there is a domestic food crisis? How much of this is because o…

>How did these island nations sustain themselves before ? In other words, what has changed that they can’t live off the land anymore? And by that, I mean the sea.

Well the chemical fertilizer ban means no living off the land. ~85% of the farms are expected to fail or have failed.

>Has Sri Lanka’s fish been pillaged? Is it being exported to wealthier nations that command higher prices, even as there is a domestic food crisis?

No, they have tremendous inflation(54.6%) and therefore fishermen cant afford fuel to go get those fish. Major fuel shortages means no eating food in sri lanka.

https://www.scmp.com/news/asia/south-asia/article/3172540/pl...

>How much of this is because of globalism and developing hard dependencies? I’ve traveled to all 47 of Japan’s prefectures and I still see bountiful agriculture in the countryside. Even as developed and wealthy as Japan is, with many global dependencies in imports/exports, it is still heavily invested in agriculture.

It's not dependencies persay but rather yes globalists are entirely at fault. This is the work of Davos/WEF.

https://www.sundaytimes.lk/180902/news/pm-this-is-how-i-will...

This used to be an article on WEF but they deleted it because obviously WEF is responsible for what is happening in Sri Lanka 100%.

The funny thing about the WEF conspiracies or for that matter the sri lanka politicians didnt see the trap they were falling into. Personally I dont believe WEF has done anything, they just convince stupid politicians to do stupid things.

Sri Lanka believed and even achieved an ESG score of over 95, beating most countries.

Re: Sri Lanka is having a textbook currency crisis, triggered by policy mistakes

#330

Post by oblio »

shp0ngle wrote: post #191
kumarvvr wrote: post #15

The drastic move to organic farming is puzzling. 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 se…

Yeah. Europe is learning this the hard way too. We cannot drastically shift to “green” and then buy everything “not green” from our adversaries! 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!

Europe had a ton of time to convert. The push was not strong enough, especially during the rather long economic boom (circa 2012 - 2019).
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