Tucker Carlson Says He Knows Why Sri Lanka Fell. Don't Believe Him.
In mid-July, Sri Lankas government fell, with former president Gotabaya Rajapaksa bolting the country on a pre-dawn flight while protesters frolicked in the pool of his lavish mansion. The island nation of 22 million people, once one of the most prosperous in South Asia, had plunged into a severe economic crisis, characterized by empty grocery shelves, days long lines for gasoline, planned electricity outages lasting up to seven hours, and mass protests against the government. What happened? According to one prominent theory, it was all the result of a fateful decree Rajapaksa made in April 2021 to ban synthetic fertilizers and force the nations farmersprodigious producers of rice and tea, among other cropsto embrace organic agriculture.
Writing in The Wall Street Journal opinion page on July 14, Tunku Varadarajan, a fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute and at Columbia Universitys Center on Capitalism and Society, summarized the case like this: In an uprising that has its roots in Mr. Rajapaksas imperious decision to impose organic farming on the entire countrywhich led to widespread hunger after the agricultural economy collapsedSri Lankas people have wrought the first contra-organic national uprising in history.
Similar takes have emerged from Fox News personality Tucker Carlson, who characterized Rajapaksas push for organic agriculture as a disaster-inducing green new deal, equating it to the stalled, never-implemented proposal by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D.-N.Y.) and Sen. Ed Markey (D.-Mass.) (even though their GND never included a fertilizer ban or an organic mandate); and from members of the ecomodernist movementa crew, centered around the Breakthrough Institute think-tank, that favors technology-centered, nuclear-powered responses to environmental crises. In a July 9 post on his Substack blog, Michael Shellenberger, the Breakthrough Institutes co-founder and former president, opined that the underlying reason for the fall of Sri Lanka is that its leaders fell under the spell of Western green elites peddling organic agriculture.
Back in March, months before Rajapaksas inglorious exit, the prestigious magazine Foreign Policy ran a similar take on Sri Lankas then-already-mounting crisis. Co-authored by BTI executive director Ted Nordhaus and BTI food and farm analyst Saloni Shah, the article suggested that the ill-conceived national experiment in organic agriculture had triggered a range of illseverything from a tumbling currency to rising inflation and poverty rates.
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2022/07/tucker-carlson-says-he-knows-why-sri-lanka-fell-dont-believe-him/
Stupid is as stupid sez.