The Year the Fertiliser Stopped
On 27 April 2021 Sri Lanka banned the import of chemical fertiliser with immediate effect and announced that it would become the world's first fully organic farming nation. Seven months later the policy was in retreat, the main rice harvest had failed, and a country that had fed itself was buying rice.
The policy document that Gotabaya Rajapaksa was elected on in 2019, Vistas of Prosperity and Splendour, promised a ten-year transition to organic agriculture. As a target that is defensible and even overdue. The fertiliser subsidy had been one of the largest single lines in the agriculture budget for decades. Soil organic carbon in the paddy districts had been falling for a generation. The dry zone has an epidemic of chronic kidney disease of unknown cause that some researchers have spent years trying to link to agrochemicals, and while that link is still not established, the concern is not invented. Ten years is enough time to build a compost industry, run trials, and let farmers fail on a few fields rather than on all of them at once.
On 27 April 2021 the government did the whole thing at once. Imports of chemical fertiliser, pesticides and herbicides were banned outright, announced that day and gazetted nine days later as Extraordinary No. 2226/48. Roughly two million farmers, most of them working a hectare or two, were told that the input they had used for their entire working lives was no longer available at any price, in the middle of a growing year. The ten-year plan had been compressed into a single page.
The number that was actually binding
The environmental case was real and it was not what set the timing. Sri Lanka was running out of dollars. Fertiliser is imported, it is paid for in foreign currency, and the state had for decades sold it on to farmers far below what it cost to buy. Reserves had been draining since 2019: deep tax cuts that December removed a large share of government revenue at a stroke, tourism collapsed first after the Easter Sunday bombings of April 2019 and then again under Covid, and the country was still servicing international sovereign bonds it had issued freely through the previous decade. Banning an import is the fastest lever a government has for not spending currency it does not have. Announcing it as an environmental policy is the only way to pull that lever without saying the first sentence out loud.
The substitute that did not exist
An organic transition requires organic inputs, and domestic compost capacity was a small fraction of what two million farmers were about to need. The gap was to be closed by importing organic fertiliser instead, which is its own commentary, and the first large consignment came from a Chinese supplier. Sri Lankan quarantine officers found Erwinia bacteria in the samples and refused the shipment. The vessel left without unloading, the supplier disputed the finding, the plant quarantine service held its position, and the affair ended in arbitration and in the Chinese embassy publicly blacklisting the state bank that had declined to pay. None of this moved the planting calendar. Farmers used what they had, which for most of them was nothing, while a minority bought urea smuggled across from India at several times the old subsidised price.
Compost is not a substitute for urea the way one brand is a substitute for another. It is a different agronomic system, and moving to it costs a farmer three to five years of lower yields before the soil begins giving anything back. Nobody was offered three years.
What came off the land
The 2021/22 Maha season — the main paddy crop, planted with the north-east monsoon — came in far below the previous year. Published estimates of the shortfall vary widely enough that quoting a single figure would be false precision, but no serious account puts it below a fifth, and the dry-zone districts that grow most of the country's rice under tank irrigation, and that had the least capacity to substitute anything, took the worst of it. A country that had been broadly self-sufficient in rice started importing it. Tea, which is the largest agricultural export earner and therefore the crop that actually brings in the dollars the ban was meant to conserve, fell in 2022 to its lowest annual production in more than two decades. That is the moment an agricultural policy became a macroeconomic one: the measure designed to save foreign exchange had damaged the sector that earned it.
By November 2021 the government was licensing chemical fertiliser imports again, starting with tea, and it announced compensation to paddy farmers running to tens of billions of rupees. The formal reversal followed in early 2022. Seven months is a short life for a policy meant to run a decade, and the reversal did nothing for the season already lost — a harvest is not a switch, and the second season had been planted into soil that had not been fed either.
What it did not cause
It is tempting, and wrong, to read the fertiliser ban as the cause of what came next. Sri Lanka suspended payments on its foreign debt in April 2022, the first default in its history. There were power cuts of thirteen hours, fuel queues that lasted days, and by July a protest movement that walked into the presidential residence and drove Rajapaksa out of the country and out of office. The structural causes of that had been in place for years: the tax cuts, the borrowing, and two consecutive shocks to a tourism sector the economy leaned on heavily. What the fertiliser ban did was remove export earnings and add food inflation at the precise moment the country had neither to spare. It was an accelerant thrown on a fire by the same people who had built the fire.
What is left of it
Little that a visitor would notice at first. Fertiliser is back, paddy production recovered within two seasons, the queues are gone, and an IMF programme agreed in March 2023 followed by a bondholder restructuring closed at the end of 2024 have made the currency something a traveller can plan around again. What has not come back is the price level: a bus fare, a plate of rice and curry, a guesthouse room and an estate worker's wage all sit at a multiple of their 2019 rupee value, and the hill-country estates are still short of the labour that left during the crisis and did not return. The durable lesson is narrower than either side wanted. A ten-year transition and a same-day ban are not the same policy in different fonts, and the difference between them was a rice crop, an export season and, in the end, a government.