Producers, Looters and Parasites

I’m a fan of Ayn Rand’s novels, especially “The Fountainhead.” I disagree with many points of her philosophy, which is known as Objectivism. But one thing that has always stayed with me is her analysis of social class.

Karl Marx argued that capitalists societies force people into two classes: the bourgeoisie and the proletariat – capitalists vs. the working class. This is nonsense, of course. And it led to starvation, suffering, murder and torture on an industrial scale during the 20th century. Rand was born in the Soviet Union and escaped the horrors of Marxism as a young woman.

Keenly, I think, she saw that society is indeed split into two classes (or maybe three). But it’s not capitalists vs. workers. She noticed this herself in the Soviet Union, where there were no capitalists. The true social conflict is between producers vs. looters and parasites.

Producers create wealth by making (or trading) things that people actually want. The looters steal those things. And the parasites make life miserable for everyone in order to get what they want.

Some recent local events have got me thinking a lot about Rand’s social dichotomy. But this is a gardening column. So let’s talk about the recent economic disaster in Sri Lanka.

You’re probably asking, “What does that have to do with gardening?”

Well, in the spring of 2021, right after COVID-19 decimated the country’s tourism industry, Sri Lanka President Gotabaya Rajapaksa made an incredible blunder. He banned imports of synthetic fertilizers and pesticides. The ban was aimed at forcing farmers in the country to adopt organic practices.

In his own words: “The pandemic has exposed weaknesses in global food systems that will only be worsened with climate change. It is therefore essential that all stakeholders work together to transform global food systems to be more sustainable, resilient, and inclusive. Sustainable food systems are part of Sri Lanka’s rich sociocultural and economic heritage. Our more recent past, however, saw increasing use of chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and weedicides that led to adverse health and environmental impacts. My government took the bold step to restrict imports of these harmful substances earlier this year.”

In that same address from September 2021, Rajapaksa noted, “... changing the mindset of farmers long accustomed to using chemical fertilizers has proven challenging. So too has the production of sufficient quantities of organic fertilizer domestically.”

Who could have seen that coming?

The chemical bans caused rice production to plummet 20 percent in six months. The country’s production of tea, its biggest cash crop, fell by 18 percent. The government tried subsidizing the farmers to make up for the drop in production. That could only be accomplished by taxation and printing money. It only exacerbated inflation in the country, which was already out of control.

The magazine “Foreign Policy” published an article in March of 2022 highlighting the country’s agricultural challenges: “But when it comes to agricultural practices and yields, there is no free lunch. Agricultural inputs—chemicals, nutrients, land, labor, and irrigation— bear a critical relationship to agricultural output. From the moment the plan was announced, agronomists in Sri Lanka and around the world warned that agricultural yields would fall substantially. The government claimed it would increase the production of manure and other organic fertilizers in place of imported synthetic fertilizers. But there was no conceivable way the nation could produce enough fertilizer domestically to make up for the shortfall.”

The people of Sri Lanka began to protest the government’s policies. Rajapaksa walked back some of the chemical bans. But by July of 2022, it was too late. Rioters stormed the presidential palace and set fire to the prime minister’s office. Rajapaksa eventually resigned under the pressure.

Sri Lanka still struggles. The agricultural policies were not the only cause of the country’s economic problems. But they played a big role in it.

The lesson here, I think, is that forcing change comes with all sorts of unintended consequences. So does trying to stop change.

Starting in the 1980s, a group of rice breeders in the Philippines developed a genetically modified strain they called “golden rice.” They engineered this new variety to increase the amount of betacarotene, the source of Vitamin A. The grains of this rice have a deep yellow color, hence the name “golden rice.”

Other rice varieties don’t contain much Vitamin A. Millions of people in Asia and Africa who rely on rice as a staple crop traditionally suffer from adverse health effects of this nutrient deficiency.

A single bowl of golden rice provides 60 percent of a child’s daily requirement of Vitamin A.

But then a few years ago, this miracle food became embroiled in the controversy about genetically modified organisms (GMOs). The environmental organization Greenpeace took a strong stand against GMOs, especially golden rice. In India, where the new strain of rice could have potentially alleived much suffering, the government imposed onerous regulations on its development.

Ed Regis, in his book “Golden Rice: The Imperiled Birth of a GMO Super Food,” wrote of the crop’s demise: “Had Golden Rice not faced overly restrictive regulatory conditions, it could have been cultivated by rice farmers and distributed throughout some of the poorest regions of South and Southeast Asia. It would have already saved millions of lives and prevented millions of children from going blind.”

Back in the late 1800s, when the internal combustion engine was poised to revolutionize the world. But some horse-drawn carriage makers were so worried about the development that they lobbied congress to ban automobiles. Congress even set up a commission to investigate the dangers of gasoline. Thankfully, reasonable heads prevailed.

Don’t be a looter or a parasite. Be a producer.