Agriculture, Regulation & Sri Lanka
I often write about what some people might call organic gardening. I don’t like to use that term. If you run a commercial agriculture operation and attempt to become certified organic, you’ll see why. The rules and regulations are thicker than the Bible.
Instead, I prefer to call it “natural” gardening or “oldfashioned” gardening. In many ways, it’s the gardening practices our great-grandparents used.
I often hear fellow-travelers say things like, “The government needs to ban toxic pesticides.” Or “The government needs to ban chemical fertilizers.” I disagree. That would be a terrible idea. Case in point: Sri Lanka.
In case you haven’t followed the news, Sri Lanka’s civil society is in collapse. The president fled the country. Protesters stormed his place and went swimming in his pool. Citizens battled police in the streets.
How did this start?
A big part of it involved agriculture. Last April, the former President of Sri Lanka, Gotabaya Rajapaksa, announced that the country would immediately switch to organic farming. Rajapaksa said new agricultural laws were meant to ensure everyone in the country would have access to healthy, non-toxic food.
While that’s perhaps a worthy goal, it flies in the face of liberty and the basic tenets of free market economics.
Last year’s harvest of rice, the nation’s most important staple food, failed miserably after the country banned imports of chemical fertilizer. Unsurprisingly, hungry people took to the streets.
The world has become dependent on synthetic chemical fertilizers to feed the nearly eight billion people who live here. Varieties of corn, wheat and rice grown on a large scale today have been bred to be dependent on big doses of chemical fertilizer and pesticides. We cannot simply flip a switch.
Sri Lanka tried using force and coercion to bring about an organic food utopia. This never works.
This never works.
The United States’ experiment with alcohol prohibition provides an excellent example. Leaders decided that alcohol is bad for society, so they outlawed it. Anyone caught selling or producing liquor got thrown in jail.
Suddenly, everyone stopped drinking and all of our problems went away. Yeah, right.
We all know the story. Prohibition was a terrible idea. It led to massive suffering. People in the alcohol business went broke. People who liked to drink started buying booze from unscrupulous criminals who didn’t care if their products harmed or killed people. Prohibition was such a failure that the country gave up on it after 13 miserable years.
The history of the Soviet Union provides a ton of great examples. One of my favorites involves nails. The Soviets rejected free market economics and instead relied on a command economy. Central planners would decide how much and what kind of resources the country needed without any reference to price. They would just decide, on a whim, that the country needed a million tons of nails this quarter, and they would send orders to the factories to produce them. But there was no pricing structure to inform planners how many small nails were needed and how many big nails were needed. The famous economist Paul Craig Roberts once recalled a Soviet political cartoon about this problem:
“(The) cartoon depicted the manager of a nail factory being given the Order of Lenin for exceeding his tonnage. Two giant cranes were pictured holding up one giant nail.”
Of course, the nail was useless.
To bring about positive change in society, we need freedom of choice, not coercion. We need less regulation, not more.
The economist William Anderson once summed it up succinctly: “Regulation is like inflation; both are portrayed as bad things, both are products of the state, yet they persist. And they persist because at least some influential individuals are benefiting from them. Thus, those who gain are going to make sure that these issues are portrayed in the most favorable light.”