Green dreams: How going organic helped spark Sri Lanka’s crisis (2024)

Watch the documentary 'Sri Lanka's Organic Dream' via SBS On Demand

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Just past Sri Lanka’s capital Colombo, behind the doors of what looks like an abandoned industrial estate, is a fruit and vegetable farm run by a local architect and a businessman.

Medhini Igoor, 29, and Abishek Devaraj, 31, are the co-founders of Us On Earth - an urban farm using sustainable farming methods.

The couple started with no agriculture experience and just a bare piece of land. It was hard for them to know where to begin.

After giving it their best shot by themselves, they decided to enlist the help of the professionals.

“The first farmer that we got – he was asking us for pesticides – and then we realised how much chemicals go into growing vegetables, and I think that's what kind of scared us.”

The couple’s goal? To sustain themselves on the vegetables they grew. Going organic was never part of the plan.

We realised how much chemicals go into growing vegetables, and I think that's what kind of scared us.

Medhini Igoor

What started out as a small home garden has now grown to a farm just shy of a hectare where the excess harvest is able to be sold to the community at an affordable price.

“Organic is definitely a lifestyle thing for us. It sort of taught us to appreciate slow food, living seasonally, eating locally and stuff like that,” Ms Igoor says.

But the pairs’ positive experience with organic agriculture is not common in a country where farmers have long relied on chemicals to help grow food.

Sri Lanka's president Gotabaya Rajapaksa won the election in 2019 – campaigning on a green vision that included turning the country organic within 10 years.

Then in April 2021, he made a bold decision to ban the importation of artificial fertilisers, pesticides, and weedicides. Just like that, the country became 100 per cent organic overnight.

But the response was clear. Outrage.

Going organic was an attempt to save lives, the environment and the economy. So, how could something as harmless as organic food lead to violence and unrest?

Since the 1960s, Sri Lanka has subsidised farmers to use synthetic fertiliser, resulting in the doubling of yields for crops such as the staple, rice.

But by 2020, the total cost of fertiliser imports and subsidies was close to $500 million each year.

With fertiliser costs on the rise and a budget hit badly by the COVID-19 pandemic, it was hoped the ban would help cut expenditure and improve foreign exchange, as well as address concerns about the health effects of using chemicals in growing food.

Within the first six months of Sri Lanka turning organic, domestic rice production fell heavily. The ban also devastated the country’s primary export and source of foreign exchange - tea.

With violent protests, soaring inflation, and the currency collapse, the government finally suspended the policy for several key crops, including tea and coconut, in February. But it came all too late.

The World Bank estimates half a million people have fallen into poverty as Sri Lanka faces its worst financial crisis since independence.

Though the shift to organic isn’t the only reason fuelling the crisis, it’s contributed to it.

A country once self-sufficient in rice production is now reliant on imports from the likes of Myanmar and China and is in the midst of a major food crisis.

Farmers in general are being offered $250 million in compensation by the Sri Lankan government, while rice farmers who faced losses are also being offered $212 million in subsidies.

Those in the farming industry say the ban caused great harm to their health, family and future.

In Polonnaruwa province, north central Sri Lanka, 62-year-old rice farmer Gamini Ariyaratne, who faces a 50 per cent loss this year from his rice yield, is frustrated.

For weeks, Gamini and farmers from across the country protested the decision to turn organic.

We are furious! Angry! Not just me - but all the farmers who cultivated here are angry.

Gamini Ariyaratne

The second-generation farmer says he won’t be encouraging his children to take up farming with the way things are going.

“What is the point if someone cannot make a living out of it… It is synonymous with giving up life itself.”

Dr Senanayake is an ecologist and organic guru, who was one of the first students to formally study organic agriculture at the University of California, Berkeley in the early 1970s.

For 30 years and counting he’s run Belipola – an organic farm in south central Sri Lanka – and says the knowledge of organic farming, something that’s been done for centuries, has been lost.

“Organic agriculture has been practised in Sri Lanka for at least 3000 years,” he says.

“You have to have the humility to understand that this is nothing new.

“Back then organic agriculture was almost synonymous with hippies - there was no market for it.

The expert in organics says the importance of his farm is to demonstrate what can be achieved when given the knowledge.

“Most farmers don’t believe they can have a diverse farm with different crops, all integrated and make it a commercial success.

“Now we have farmers who have their own farms who are coming here and working with us to learn how to develop further their farms to become like this.”

Dr Senanayake believes a transition is possible if farmers are provided the right tools and more importantly - time.

“[The ruling] has done damage, not irreparable because the world is waking up to the fact that you need clean food, so the market for organic is going to grow.