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01 / 05
Sri Lanka Is a Wake-Up Call for Eco-Utopians

Blog Post | Food & Hunger

Sri Lanka Is a Wake-Up Call for Eco-Utopians

The country's economic collapse is a grim preview of what can result from distorting markets in the name of utopian priorities.

Summary: Sri Lanka’s decision to ban agricultural chemicals and switch to organic farming backfired spectacularly, causing a sharp decline in crop yields and a surge in food prices. The case of Sri Lanka shows the dangers of imposing radical environmental policies without considering the economic and social costs.


Earlier this week, a group of Sri Lankan protestors took a refreshing dip in President Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s pool. It was probably a welcome respite from the steamy eighty-degree day in Colombo, as well from the unprecedented economic crisis currently devastating the country. Over the last year, Sri Lanka has experienced an annual inflation rate of more than 50 percent, with food prices rising 80 percent and transport costs a staggering 128 percent. Faced with fierce protests, the Sri Lankan government declared a state of emergency and deployed troops around the country to maintain order.

On Thursday morning, the New York Times published an episode of The Daily podcast discussing some of the forces behind the collapse. They outlined how years of irresponsible borrowing by the Rajapaksa political dynasty, combined with the damage caused by Covid lockdowns to Sri Lanka’s tourism industry, drained the country’s foreign exchange reserves. Soon, the country was unable to make payments on its debt or import essential goods like food and gasoline. Strangely, the hosts of the podcast, which reaches over 20 million monthly listeners, didn’t mention President Rajapaksa’s infamous fertilizer ban once during the thirty-minute episode.

The fertilizer ban was, in fact, a major factor in the unrest. Agriculture is an essential economic sector in Sri Lanka. Around 10 percent of the population works on farms, and 70 percent of Sri Lankans are directly or indirectly dependent on agriculture. Tea production is especially important, consistently responsible for over ten percent of Sri Lanka’s export revenue. To support that vital industry, the country spent hundreds of millions of dollars a year importing synthetic fertilizers.

During his election campaign in 2019, Rajapaksa promised to wean the country off these fertilizers with a ten-year transition to organic farming. He expedited his plan in April 2021 with a sudden ban on synthetic fertilizers and pesticides. He was so confident in his policies that he declared in a (since stealthily deleted and memory-holed) article for the World Economic Forum in 2018, “This is how I will make my country rich again by 2025.” As the ecomodernist author Michael Shellenberger writes, the results of the experiment with primitive agricultural techniques were “shocking:”

Over 90 percent of Sri Lanka’s farmers had used chemical fertilizers before they were banned. After they were banned, an astonishing 85 percent experienced crop losses. Rice production fell 20 percent and prices skyrocketed 50 percent in just six months. Sri Lanka had to import $450 million worth of rice despite having been self-sufficient just months earlier. The price of carrots and tomatoes rose fivefold. … [Tea exports crashed] 18 percent between November 2021 and February 2022 — reaching their lowest level in more than two decades.

Of course, Rajapaksa’s foolish policy wasn’t revealed to him in a dream. As Shellenberger points out, the ban was inspired by an increasingly Malthusian environmentalism led by figures like the Indian activist Vandana Shiva, who cheered the ban last summer. Foreign investors beholden to the same ideology also praised and rewarded Sri Lanka for “taking up sustainability and ESG (environmental, social and corporate governance) issues on its top priority.” ESG represents a trend (or lasting shift, depending on who you ask) in some investors’ priorities. Put simply, it is an attempt to move capital toward organizations that further a set of amorphous environmental and social justice goals instead of toward the enterprises most likely to succeed and turn a profit.

Proponents of ESG have been pushing for government mandates requiring enterprises to disclose detailed information related to environmentalism and other social goals. That distorts and harms the smooth functioning of the capital markets that keep modern economies running and, in some cases, incentivizes nice-sounding but economically inefficient projects, like a return to primitive agriculture. “The nation of Sri Lanka has an almost perfect ESG rating of 98.1 on a scale of 100,” notes David Blackmon in Forbes, and “the government which had forced the nation to achieve that virtue-signaling target in recent years [has as a result] collapsed.” Sri Lanka, in other words, offers a grim preview of what can result from distorting markets in the name of utopian priorities.

Consider a long-run perspective. Throughout most of human history, farmers produced only organic food—and food was so scarce that, despite the much lower population in the past, malnutrition was widespread. The long-term, global decline in undernourishment is one of humanity’s proudest achievements. Lacking a sense of history and taking abundant food for granted, some environmentalists want to transform the global food system into an organic model. They see modern agriculture as environmentally harmful and would like to see a transition to natural fertilizers that would be familiar to our distant ancestors, such as compost and manure.

However, conventional farming is not only necessary to produce a sufficient amount of food to feed humanity (a point that cannot be emphasized enough—as the writer Alfred Henry Lewis once observed, “There are only nine meals between mankind and anarchy”) but it is in many ways better for the environment. According to a massive meta-analysis by the ecologists Michael Clark and David Tilman, the natural fertilizers used in organic agriculture actually lead to more pollution than conventional synthetic products. Fertilizers and pesticides also allow us to farm land more intensively, leading to ever-higher crop yields, which allow us to grow more food on less land. According to HumanProgress board member Matt Ridley, if we tried to feed the world with the organic yields of 1960, we would have to farm twice as much land as we do today. 

Arable land needed to produce a fixed quantity of crops FAO UN

Global agricultural land use has peaked and is now in decline. So long as crop yields continue to increase, more and more land can be returned to natural ecosystems, which are far more biodiverse than any farm. Smart agriculture allows nature to rebound.

In wealthy countries, conventional farming is becoming ever-more efficient, using fewer inputs to grow more food. In the United States, despite a 44 percent increase in food production since 1981, fertilizer use barely increased, and pesticide use fell by 18 percent. As the esteemed Rockefeller University environmental scientist Jesse Ausubel noted, if farmers everywhere adopted the modern and efficient techniques of U.S. farmers, “an area the size of India or the USA east of the Mississippi could be released globally from agriculture.”

Most importantly, it must be restated, conventional agriculture feeds the world. Since the Green Revolution of the 1950s and 60s, world agricultural production has exploded, causing the global food supply to reach nearly 3000 kcal per day in 2017, up from just over 2,000 in 1961. While hunger is now making a comeback, that is due to war, export restrictions, and the misguided policies of leaders like Rajapaksa, not a lack of the ability to produce enough food.

Global Agricultural Production USDA-PSD

The fertilizer ban was not the only factor behind Sri Lanka’s economic crash. Much of the damage was also caused by the hastiness of the ban and the difficulty of obtaining enough organic alternatives. However, the idea that organic farming can produce enough food for the world is an unreachable fantasy based on the naturalistic fallacy — the baseless notion that anything modern, such as agriculture incorporating non-natural components produced by the ingenuity of man, must be inferior to the all-natural precursor. 

As Ted Nordhaus and Saloni Shah from the Breakthrough Institute point out, “there is literally no example of a major agriculture-producing nation successfully transitioning to fully organic or agroecological production.” We must never take the relative rarity of starvation in modern times as a given nor romanticize and seek to return to farming’s all-organic past. Unfortunately, the delusion seems to be spreading, helped along by the global shift toward ESG. Last Sunday, Narendra Modi, the prime minister of India, praised “natural farming” during a speech in Gujarat, calling it a way to “serve mother earth” and promising that India will “move forward on the path of natural farming.” Let’s hope not.

Our World in Data | Crop Yields

Vegetables Grew Faster than Population over the Last 60 Years

“For almost all of human history, food was scarce for nearly everyone. The reason for this perpetual scarcity was that whenever food production increased, it did not lead to more food per capita but to more people.

Food production did not increase per capita. Population pressure ensured that living standards remained only barely above the subsistence level. Economic historians refer to this mechanism as the Malthusian Trap, and if you’d like to know more, you could read my article about it.

This changed in the last decades. More and more societies around the world broke out of the Malthusian Trap. We see this in the data as increasing food production in per capita terms. The chart shows that farmers have grown many fruits, vegetables, and nuts faster than the world population has increased.”

From Our World in Data.

World Grain | Crop Yields

Origin Agritech Reveals Corn Yield Breakthrough

“Origin Agritech Ltd. said it has utilized ‘precise gene-editing techniques’ to develop a high-yield corn inbred line that significantly surpasses the productivity of traditional corn.  

The Beijing-based company said that during two years of rigorous multilocational field trials, the new gene-edited corn inbred line demonstrated a yield increase of over 50% compared to the original line.”

From World Grain.

Blog Post | Science & Education

Introducing Our Upcoming Book, Heroes of Progress

Over the past two centuries, humanity has become massively more prosperous, better educated, healthier, and more peaceful.

The underlying cause of this progress is innovation. Human innovation―whether it be new ideas, inventions, or systems―is the primary way people create wealth and escape poverty.

Our upcoming book, Heroes of Progress: 65 People Who Changed the World, explores the lives of the most important innovators who have ever lived, from agronomists who saved billions from starvation and intellectuals who changed public policy for the better, to businesspeople whose innovations helped millions rise from poverty.

If it weren’t for the heroes profiled in this book, we’d all be far poorer, sicker, hungrier, and less free―if we were fortunate enough to be alive at all.

Considering their impact on humanity, perhaps it’s time to learn their story?

Heroes of Progress book advertised on Amazon for pre-order

Heroes of Progress Book Forum

On March 21st, the author of Heroes of Progress, Alexander Hammond, will present the book live at the Cato Institute in Washington, D.C. He will be joined by Marian Tupy, the editor of Human Progress, and Clay Routledge, the Archbridge Institute’s Vice President of Research, who will speak on the individual’s role in advancing human progress and the need for a cultural progress movement.

Learn more about the event here.

Praise for Heroes of Progress

Making an inspiring case for progress at this time of skepticism and historical ingratitude is no easy feat. Yet, by relentlessly outlining the extraordinary ability of individuals to shape our world for the better, Alexander Hammond does just that.

Steven Pinker, author of Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

Innovation is a team sport achieved by people working together, using precious freedoms to change the world, so it’s sometimes invidious to single out one person for credit. But once an idea is ripe for plucking, the right person at the right time can seize it and save a million lives or open a million possibilities. Each of these 65 people did that, and their stories are both thrilling and beautiful.

Matt Ridley, author of How Innovation Works: And Why It Flourishes in Freedom

The figures in this book are the overlooked and often unknown figures who have transformed the lives of ordinary people, for the better… This book is a correction to widespread pessimism and is both informative and inspirational.

Dr. Stephen Davies, author of The Wealth Explosion: The Nature and Origins of Modernity

Superman and the Avengers are all very well, of course, but the real superheroes are thinkers, scientists, and innovators of flesh and blood who saved us from a life that used to be poor, nasty, brutish, and short. Alexander Hammond tells their inspiring stories in this magnificent book that will leave you grateful to be living in the world these men and women created.

— Johan Norberg, author of Open: The Story of Human Progress

The 65 innovators honored here made us happier, healthier, and longer-lived. Indeed, it is thanks to some of them that we are here at all. Their story is the story of how the human race acquired powers once attributed to gods and sorcerers―the story of how we overcame hunger, disease, ignorance, and squalor. I defy anyone to read this book and not feel better afterwards.

Lord Daniel Hannan, president of the Institute for Free Trade

The 65 fascinating stories in Heroes of Progress are
testaments to the ingenuity of humankind in delivering a richer,
healthier, and hopefully freer world. Alexander C. R. Hammond
provides an inspirational reminder that when individuals are
free to speak, think, innovate, and engage in open markets, the
heroic potential of humanity knows no bounds.

Lord Syed Kamall, Professor of politics and international relations, St. Mary’s University

In Heroes of Progress, Alexander Hammond reminds us that human minds are the fundamental driver of every discovery, invention, and innovation that has improved our lives. By telling the stories of pioneering men and women who have advanced civilization, this book not only honors past heroes of progress, but also provides inspiration for the next generation to use their uniquely human imaginative and enterprising capacities to build a better future.

— Clay Routledge, Vice President of Research and Director of the Human Flourishing Lab at the Archbridge Institute

Blog Post | Human Development

1,000 Bits of Good News You May Have Missed in 2023

A necessary balance to the torrent of negativity.

Reading the news can leave you depressed and misinformed. It’s partisan, shallow, and, above all, hopelessly negative. As Steven Pinker from Harvard University quipped, “The news is a nonrandom sample of the worst events happening on the planet on a given day.”

So, why does Human Progress feature so many news items? And why did I compile them in this giant list? Here are a few reasons:

  • Negative headlines get more clicks. Promoting positive stories provides a necessary balance to the torrent of negativity.
  • Statistics are vital to a proper understanding of the world, but many find anecdotes more compelling.
  • Many people acknowledge humanity’s progress compared to the past but remain unreasonably pessimistic about the present—not to mention the future. Positive news can help improve their state of mind.
  • We have agency to make the world better. It is appropriate to recognize and be grateful for those who do.

Below is a nonrandom sample (n = ~1000) of positive news we collected this year, separated by topic area. Please scroll, skim, and click. Or—to be even more enlightened—read this blog post and then look through our collection of long-term trends and datasets.

Agriculture

Aquaculture

Farming robots and drones

Food abundance

Genetic modification

Indoor farming

Lab-grown produce

Pollination

Other innovations

Conservation and Biodiversity

Big cats

Birds

Turtles

Whales

Other comebacks

Forests

Reefs

Rivers and lakes

Surveillance and discovery

Rewilding and conservation

De-extinction

Culture and tolerance

Gender equality

General wellbeing

LGBT

Treatment of animals

Energy and natural Resources

Fission

Fusion

Fossil fuels

Other energy

Recycling and resource efficiency

Resource abundance

Environment and pollution

Climate change

Disaster resilience

Air pollution

Water pollution

Growth and development

Education

Economic growth

Housing and urbanization

Labor and employment

Health

Cancer

Disability and assistive technology

Dementia and Alzheimer’s

Diabetes

Heart disease and stroke

Other non-communicable diseases

HIV/AIDS

Malaria

Other communicable diseases

Maternal care

Fertility and birth control

Mental health and addiction

Weight and nutrition

Longevity and mortality 

Surgery and emergency medicine

Measurement and imaging

Health systems

Other innovations

Freedom

    Technology 

    Artificial intelligence

    Communications

    Computing

    Construction and manufacturing

    Drones

    Robotics and automation

    Autonomous vehicles

    Transportation

    Other innovations

    Science

    AI in science

    Biology

    Chemistry and materials

      Physics

      Space

      Violence

      Crime

      War