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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

#341

Post by kamaal »

sumanthvepa wrote: post #112
nostromo wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a common feature of dictatorships: a boneheaded decision from a central government wreaks havoc on the people in the field that would know better. 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.

Sri Lanka is not a dictatorship. They have regular elections. The Rajapakshas might have been authoritarian, even corrupt. But they won the last election in a landslide. Sri Lankans cannot entirely absolve themselves of blame for repeatedly electing a populist regime.

>>Sri Lankans cannot entirely absolve themselves of blame for repeatedly electing a populist regime.

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.

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

#342

Post by CrackerNews »

epistasis wrote: post #53
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…

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…

There was the context for collectivization as rapidly industrializing agriculture, which did lay the foundation for the rapid urban growth afterwards and the prevention of further famines which were regular occurrences up to that point through the new established agricultural infrastructure. The middle class developed from the resulting maturation of industrialization and urbanization instead. So the economy itself underwent a rapid shift from peasant based to factory worker based and beyond to catch up with the developed world.

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.

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

#343

Post by ktaylora »

robbiep wrote: post #101
ktaylora wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a premium that can be exacted from switching to organic agriculture that isn't be discussed in this article. Sri Lanka has a limited land mass available for food production and they mostly export commodities to other countries. We're talking ~25,000 sq-mi. For context, the US state of Kansas is ~82,000 sq-mi. If you cannot physically expand the footprint of agriculture in Sri Lanka to boost revenues, the thin…

Not to be rude but did you bother to think before writing that post? Sri Lanka is a net importer of food. It is not self sufficient. You can’t get a organic premium if you can’t feed your own people, and organic food has a well known yield reduction. It was abundantly transparent to all commentators at the time that this was purely to try and reduce capital outflows.

Uh, yes, my snarky friend. I didn't suggest Sri Lanka is agriculturally self-sufficient. With so little a land area to work with, that would not be possible.

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.

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

#344

Post by gs17 »

denton-scratch wrote: post #316
worik wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends what you are growing.

How's the organic tea market doing? FWIW, I've never seen organic tea in shops, and I don't know anyone that insists on organic tea.

What country are you in? In the US, I've seen organic tea in the vast majority of grocery stores I've been to. Cafes sometimes have it too, but it's less common.

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

#345

Post by ch4s3 »

Melting_Harps wrote: post #280
ch4s3 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since 2014 more than 6 million people have fled Venezuela, bringing the population from 30 million to just under 25 million. That’s 20% of the population. Imagine 1 out of every 5 people you’ve ever known deciding to literally pick up and physically walk out of the country. That sounds like an absolute collapse of civil society.

> That sounds like an absolute collapse of civil society. Venezuela is a unique situation as it had been marred with tons of issues since the sanctions imposed on Chavez (and perhaps even before), because Ukraine has suffered the same thing when you include both internal and external displacement the numbers are actually a lot higher [0] and closer to 25% of the population, and this is not including the casualties of…

Venezuela was melting down prior to sanctions, and was mostly gutted early on by Chavez firing all of the oil technicians and engineers for of all things demanding fair wages.

Ukraine is a terrible comparison, they were literally invaded.

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

#346

Post by usrn »

pjc50 wrote: post #194
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…

(The original article is very good at providing a beginner's explanation of forex crises, and should be bookmarked for every time someone wants to talk about inflation) > 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 se…

Countries that can't feed their people probably shouldn't be taking in massive numbers of immigrants.

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

#347

Post by freshpots »

weberer wrote: post #322
denton-scratch wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

"Because human waste contains shigella bacteria..." we wouldn't put human waste directly on the land. We currently do spread treated human waste that has been digested on land, commonly called biosolids.

https://www.epa.gov/biosolids/basic-information-about-biosol...

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

#348

Post by CrackerNews »

adrianN wrote: post #178
nostromo wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a common feature of dictatorships: a boneheaded decision from a central government wreaks havoc on the people in the field that would know better. 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.

I'm not sure that "people in the field" would have predicted that killing all sparrows will lead to a surge of insects.

Perhaps Mao appealed too heavily to the sentiment of farmers upset with their seeds being eaten, not realizing that killing the sparrows would have had adverse ecological effects.

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

#349

Post by freshpots »

londons_explore wrote: post #337
denton-scratch wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Water treatment plants let quite a lot of biological contamination through... If you use that to water crops that people eat, you get quite a nice disease spreading loop... 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…

The water isn't being put on soil for crops. The digested sludge is what is used. It is being done already and there are processes in place.

https://www.epa.gov/biosolids/basic-information-about-biosol...

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

#350

Post by missedthecue »

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.

The problem for Germany, and Europe more broadly, is that nuclear power stations don't create natural gas.

Electricity and natural gas aren't interchangeable commodities, particularly given Germany's infrastructure.

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