Crisis in Colombo: Sri Lanka’s Financial Collapse
How WEF policies which were supposed to bring prosperity to Sri Lanka, led to its worst crisis in decades.
The citizens of Sri Lanka stormed the residences of both their president and their prime minister as their nation and economy are in the midst of its worst financial crisis in many years. The widespread protests and breach and subsequent occupation of the presidential palace led President Gotabaya Rajapaksa to flee to the Maldives on Wednesday prior to his official resignation. Sri Lanka is bankrupt, and they are not entirely to blame for the rapid destruction of their normal lives. A culmination of bad policies, monetary shortcomings, and a hasty push towards organic farming have led to a political upheaval in the island nation off the coast of Eastern India. Compared to these primetime television show trials being held for “Donald Trump’s insurrection”, the siege of the palaces in Sri Lanka make January 6 look like a dinner party.
The nation of Sri Lanka has had no shortage of factors contributing to their economic collapse, ranging from unpayable Chinese loans, a chemical fertilizer ban, and falling prey to the influence of the World Economic Forum (WEF). No surprise there. The WEF, made up of executives of the largest corporations and politicians/leaders of countries across the globe, has adopted some platforms that are very hypocritical to put it mildly.
Back in 2018, the Prime Minister of Sri Lanka, Ranil Wickremesinghe, authored an article on the World Economic Forum website titled “This is how I will make my country rich by 2025”, which can be read here. In the piece, Wickremesinghe does not actually give a single concrete piece of evidence how he will make Sri Lanka rich. He makes a lot of broad claims about his intention to “engage Asia” and expand partnerships with the West, and even goes on to mention the “many positive gains” of the past three years through “bold policy initiatives and pragmatic strategies”. The only specific policy initiative that is even brought up is Vision 2025, which is a series of reforms sponsored by the World Bank. Sounds to me like Vision 2025 will lead to more Sri Lankan foreign debt than to economic prosperity.
The World Economic Forum actually took down the article by Ranil Wickremesinghe for a couple of days as news and footage of the crisis spread worldwide, with little to no coverage from mainstream media outlets until days later, upon the news of the official resignation of President Gotabaya Rajapaksa. Images of people trying to access the article spread across social media when the link led to nothing. When I accessed the article, it was once again available for viewing, but with an added introduction paragraph explaining how Wickremesinghe is the current acting president upon Rajapaksa’s resignation. The addition reads:
Ranil Wickremesinghe is the current acting president of Sri Lanka. He assumed the position after his predecessor, Gotabaya Rajapaksa, fled the country amid protests over the country’s economic crisis. Wickremesinghe, who is also the prime minister, has held several premierships since the 1990s and has called on parliament to nominate a new prime minister after assuming the role of acting president.
A later article was published on the World Economic Forum website titled “Why Sri Lanka is facing one of its worst economic crises” in which R. Ramakumar cites multiple reasons for the economic crisis. Ramakumar correctly identifies that Sri Lanka has been a repetitive borrower from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), taking out 16 loans over the course of 55 years. He then goes on to blame much of the crisis on the tax cuts implemented by Rajapaksa, including lowering value-added tax rates from 15% to 8%, lowering corporate taxes from 28% to 24%, and the abolishment of other taxes.
This article is very deceptive and was likely written by the World Economic Forum to deflect blame away from the policies they supported and pushed Rajapaksa to implement such as the ban on chemical fertilizers and banning the sale of gasoline and fuel to private vehicles. While possibly irrelevant, I found it interesting that the first name is nowhere to be found for the supposed author of this article, R. Ramakumar. His profile on the WEF website shows this as his first article written for them, and it is curious that even his profile on the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, where he teaches, gives no first name for him.
So to keep things clear, what happened here is that the president implemented policies supported by the WEF, those policies led to economic turmoil and nationwide protests, the president stepped down amidst criticism, and the Prime Minister who is associated with the WEF took over the presidency. I think it might be time to begin questioning whether the World Economic Forum has too much influence in the politics and economies of developing nations around the world. In my research, I found this strange website about a 2016 Sri Lanka/WEF conference in which Ranil Wickremesinghe, George Soros, and others participated together in discussions about bringing economic prosperity to Sri Lanka through “Sustainable and Inclusive Development”. Make of that what you will.
I don’t want to harp on the World Economic Forum for too long in this article, so I highly recommend that you do your own research into many of the policies, initiatives, and platforms supported and pushed by the WEF. Look particularly into the members of the organization and the net worth of many of the individuals funding it.
One such policy which was implemented by Rajapaksa was the transition of Sri Lanka to organic farming. In April 2021, Rajapaksa imposed a nationwide ban on importing chemical fertilizers and pesticides after his 2019 campaign promise of 100% organic agriculture. While organic agriculture is undoubtedly better for both humans and the environment, this policy was a major catalyst for the current crisis. More than 90% of Sri Lanka’s 2 million farmers used chemical fertilizers prior to the ban, and after the ban a remarkable 85% of farmers saw a decrease in crop yield. Rice production fell 20% while the price of rice rose over 50%. A nation that once was self-sufficient in rice production had to import $450 million of rice after this ban. The more than 15 million people dependent on the agriculture industry in Sri Lanka were left floundering as 30% of farms were dormant by the end of 2021.
The ban on fertilizers also brought with it a massive decline in tea production, once the largest export of the island nation. Prior to the pandemic, Sri Lanka’s tea exports were roughly $1.3 billion every year, money that paid for 71% of the nation’s supply of food imports. For the smaller farmers and their families, the rapidly involuntary transition to organic farming brought roughly a 50-60% decrease in crop harvest in many regions, including the Rajanganaya region. An organic farmer in the region named Vimukthi de Silva said of the government “There was no proper plan, no training or education, so it’s clear to the farmers there was an ulterior [motive] here.”
I am actually a big proponent of organic agriculture and I believe that chemical fertilizers are detrimental to human health through the buildup of chemicals such as glyphosate (looking at you Monsanto). However, the solution is to not ban chemical fertilizers out of the blue and leave 90% of your farmers struggling to keep up their normal crop harvest. The ban on chemical fertilizers was an attempt to comply with ESG, or Environmental, Social, and Governance criteria, a scam system peddled by the snake oil salesmen at the WEF and other major corporate interests in the West. Sri Lanka had an ESG score of 98, significantly higher than the ESG scores of Norway (92), the Netherlands (90), and the United States (58). It is also interesting to note that Saudi Arabia has a higher ESG score (83.4) than the US (58.7).
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References:
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/08/this-is-how-we-will-make-sri-lanka-rich-by-2025/
https://michaelshellenberger.substack.com/p/green-dogma-behind-fall-of-sri-lanka
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2022/04/sri-lanka-worst-economic-crisis/
https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/feature/2017/10/17/vision-2025-sri-lankas-path-to-prosperity
https://www.triplepundit.com/story/2022/sri-lanka-organic-farming/749486
Very disturbing situation in Sri Lanka