“I don’t think many people read the game better than he did, and of course he had great character and a way of putting it across. All the intelligence you saw as a player came across in his commentary” – Michael Atherton on Shane Warne; Michael Holding: How Warne changed spin bowling
Sky Sports Cricket’s Michael Atherton gives his reaction to Friday’s shocking news of the passing of Australia great Shane Warne – a long-time adversary on the pitch and colleague in the commentary booth…
Hearing the news, I was totally stunned. I don’t think I’ve ever been more shocked in my life.
A man who had such vitality, full of energy and life and suddenly not to be there.
He’s my age effectively – he’s a year younger than I am – so he’s somebody I played against a lot for a decade in Ashes cricket and I commentated alongside him for a long, long time so I know him pretty well.
I enjoyed his commentary enormously. I think he was at his best when was what we call the colour person, the expert No 2.
I don’t think many people read the game better than he did, and of course he had great character and a way of putting it across.
But all the intelligence you saw as a player – I think he’s the most intelligent bowler I played against – came across in his commentary.
And using the word intelligence, I’m not talking about A-Levels and that kind of thing, but raw cricketing intelligence which he had in spades.
He was a fabulous bowler.
‘He was two bowlers in one’
In fact, leg spin was a dying art when he was picked actually.
With Australia, you think of the land of the wrist spinner, it’s where wrist spin flourished and really developed because of the hot sun and the hard pitches.
But in the 70s it was pace bowling that dominated: Dennis Lillee, Jeff Thomson – and Lillee was Shane Warne’s hero when he was growing up.
So wrist spinners had slightly withered away a little bit and it was almost this forgotten art, and then suddenly Allan Border picked him [Warne] in 1992.
The early Tests were a bit in and out and then obviously that first Ashes Test match at Old Trafford in 1993, we hadn’t seen much of him until that point, and unlike today it wasn’t a time where you had a lot of footage of opposition players.
He came a little bit under the radar, but not after he bowled Mike Gatting. And then for the next 15 years, he was the superstar of the game.
Wrist spin is a tricky art, and what he did was combine the accuracy you normally associated with a finger spinner, with the guile, mystery and aggressive instincts of a wrist spinner. He was two bowlers in one really.
He was a brilliant defensive bowler, because he didn’t bowl any bad balls, but he was also a magnificent attacking bowler because he applied that pressure.
He’s the greatest leg-spinner, I think you can say without dissent, that the game has seen.
Wisden picked him as one of the five cricketers of the 20th century and there wasn’t much dissent there.
You’re talking about a cricketer who stands tall with Don Bradman and Garfield Sobers, and all these absolute giants and greats of the game.
‘Highly competitive, but sociable and with an eye for the opposition’
The 2005 Ashes showed him at his best, because that was the one series Australia lost.
What you saw there was a guy with tremendous competitive spirit, and at a time when the rest of his team-mates were just slowly wilting towards the end of that series, he came to the fore.
I enjoyed playing against him, I have to say. He was highly competitive – all the great players have got that competitive streak in them, that never-say-die attitude, that total belief in their own ability.
But he was also somebody that if you did well, he’d say well played. You could have a drink with him at the end of the game, he was very sociable guy.
I remember when Australia regained the Ashes after they were beaten in 2005 in England.
They regained the Ashes in Perth, and at the Ashes-winning moment – Steve Harmison was the batsman out – all the Australians went into a celebratory huddle, and the one man who went to shake the England players’ hands who were in the middle at the moment of victory was Shane Warne.
And that in a way summed up the cricketer he was. He was highly competitive, but he always had an eye out for the opposition.
They always say Keith Miller and Shane Warne were the greatest captains Australia never had, maybe Rod Marsh as well who also passed away in a dreadful week for Australia cricket, losing two giants like that.
Holding: How Warne changed spin bowling
Michael Holding:
Yes, Shane Warne was a great cricketer, a great commentator, knew the game and was very insightful, but he was also a very kind person who was willing to talk to anyone – from any country – about the game and assist them.
This is such a loss, an extremely sad loss and my heart goes out to his family and close friends. I’m still in shock, believe me.
The way Shane Warne played the game, he didn’t ask for any favours on the cricket field and of course gave none. But once he left the field, he forgot everything that had taken place on the field and just went back to being another human being.
I saw Shane before the international world saw him, as he came to the Caribbean as an U19 cricketer with an Australian U19 team. I was doing a little bit of commentary on that game, so I’d seen Shane Warne from very early days. Initially, the first time I saw him, I just thought he was another leg-spinner, to be honest. Then when he came to the Test arena and again he didn’t have immediate success, but as soon as he hit his straps and started to look like a proper spin bowler, you could see greatness coming.
Obviously from his record, he was great. But not just from his record, but when you get to know the man, seeing the brain power behind Shane Warne and the mind that he has for the game, it was obvious when you meet him that he was going to be a great.
Before Shane Warne came along, a lot of spin bowlers were around and came along and got some wickets, but nobody really looked up at them as great match-winners. This man on his own changed the outlook of people with regards to spin bowlers.
His high skill and his highly-competitive nature meant everybody had to think differently about spin bowlers. I think Shane Warne’s skills really encouraged more captains to look at spin bowlers and look at the role they can play, even in one-day games.
I think a lot of spin bowlers who have got their opportunities in one-day games owe that to Shane Warne, because he showed the world that spin bowlers could operate beautifully in one-day cricket, and very successfully. He definitely changed that. Shane Warne was the man who changed the entire focus of spin bowling. We’ve had a lot of great spin bowlers but he changed the dynamic.
Figures have soared by 1.2m in two years of pandemic as long Covid takes its toll
More than a third of working-age people in the UK now suffer from a long-term illness, with new figures showing a dramatic rise since the pandemic began. Post-Covid conditions, including long Covid, breathing difficulties and mental-health problems, are among the causes, according to disability charities and health campaigners.
An Observer analysis of the Office for National Statistics’ (ONS) labour market status of disabled people figures shows that nearly 14.2 million people in the UK aged 16 to 64 said they had a health condition lasting for at least 12 months in 2021 – a rise of 1.2 million during the two years of the pandemic.
Levels of long-term ill-health had been rising more slowly before the emergence of Covid, at an annual average of about 275,000 cases a year between 2014 and 2018, but the rapid increase over the last two years highlights the health problems facing the UK, says the disability charity Scope.
Dr Susannah Thompson got Covid in April 2020 and now uses a wheelchair as a result.
About 800,000 more people suffered from mental-health problems in 2020-21 than did so in 2018-19, Scope said, and the number of people with chest and breathing problems had grown by about 570,000 over the same period.
James Taylor, Scope’s director of strategy, said: “These figures show the ongoing shock waves of the past two years continue to affect lives today. We’re concerned things will continue to get worse as time goes on.
“ These figures could mean more people living with the extra costs that come with disability. As the cost of living crisis continues to bite, we know that disabled people are twice as likely to live in a cold house and three times as likely to not have been able to afford food. “The government needs to get a grip on the cost of living crisis, and target financial support directly at disabled people.”
Susannah Thompson before she got Covid: ‘I’ve always been active – I was a cold-water sea swimmer.’
Long Covid is another factor. The latest ONS long Covid report estimates that 1.5 million have had Covid symptoms for more than four weeks, and 685,000 people had symptoms that had lasted more than a year.
Further analysis by Long Covid Kids shows that people with pre-existing conditions are more likely to suffer long Covid than those without. Those whose activity is limited are, on average, more than three times as likely to suffer long Covid as those with no pre-existing conditions.
Dr Susannah Thompson was infected in April 2020 while working as a GP in her local hospital’s urgent care centre in north-west England. She made a “slow, gradual recovery” over the next months and was involved in setting up the GP-led vaccination programme until she had a “massive relapse” in January 2021.
“I ended up in hospital, rushed into resus [resuscitation],” she said. “I struggled to even hold a pen to write my name.” She has had constant leg pain, chilblains, brain fog – and even sitting up can send her heart racing to 140 beats per minute. “Since then I haven’t been able to see a patient,” she said. “I’ve always been active – I was a cold-water sea swimmer. I went from being able to throw myself in the sea twice a week to struggling to get in and out of a bath.”
She now uses an electric wheelchair to take her children to school and is on sick leave from her roles as GP and medical director.
“It feels like we’re ignoring long Covid,” Thompson said. “People in the middle of their lives are getting robbed of their livelihoods, at risk of losing their homes. I can’t fathom why we don’t try to prevent it. But we’re not.”
Ondine Sherwood, co-founder of Long Covid SoS, said: “We don’t yet have data on how many infected during the huge Omicron wave will go on to experience prolonged symptoms, so [numbers] will almost certainly grow. Many, if not most of those with long Covid, are of working age and were previously fit and healthy – there is surely going to be a major effect on the workforce.”
She pointed to a study published in Nature last month, which shows that even a mild infection can increase the risk of heart disease for a year after diagnosis. “Given the huge numbers affected, both in the UK and worldwide, there is a real danger that the ‘average’ level of health people enjoy could already be lower and will deteriorate further.”
A nationwide experiment is abandoned after producing only misery.
By Ted Nordhaus, the executive director of the Breakthrough Institute, and Saloni Shah, a food and agriculture analyst at the Breakthrough Institute.
Faced with a deepening economic and humanitarian crisis, Sri Lanka called off an ill-conceived national experiment in organic agriculture this winter. Sri Lankan President Gotabaya Rajapaksa promised in his 2019 election campaign to transition the country’s farmers to organic agriculture over a period of 10 years. Last April, Rajapaksa’s government made good on that promise, imposing a nationwide ban on the importation and use of synthetic fertilizers and pesticides and ordering the country’s 2 million farmers to go organic.
The result was brutal and swift. Against claims that organic methods can produce comparable yields to conventional farming, domestic rice production fell 20 percent in just the first six months. Sri Lanka, long self-sufficient in rice production, has been forced to import $450 million worth of rice even as domestic prices for this staple of the national diet surged by around 50 percent. The ban also devastated the nation’s tea crop, its primary export and source of foreign exchange.
By November 2021, with tea production falling, the government partially lifted its fertilizer ban on key export crops, including tea, rubber, and coconut. Faced with angry protests, soaring inflation, and the collapse of Sri Lanka’s currency, the government finally suspended the policy for several key crops—including tea, rubber, and coconut—last month, although it continues for some others. The government is also offering $200 million to farmers as direct compensation and an additional $149 million in price subsidies to rice farmers who incurred losses. That hardly made up for the damage and suffering the ban produced. Farmers have widely criticized the payments for being massively insufficient and excluding many farmers, most notably tea producers, who offer one of the main sources of employment in rural Sri Lanka. The drop in tea production alone is estimated to result in economic losses of $425 million.
Human costs have been even greater. Prior to the pandemic’s outbreak, the country had proudly achieved upper-middle-income status. Today, half a million people have sunk back into poverty. Soaring inflation and a rapidly depreciating currency have forced Sri Lankans to cut down on food and fuel purchases as prices surge. The country’s economists have called on the government to default on its debt repayments to buy essential supplies for its people.
The farrago of magical thinking, technocratic hubris, ideological delusion, self-dealing, and sheer shortsightedness that produced the crisis in Sri Lanka implicates both the country’s political leadership and advocates of so-called sustainable agriculture: the former for seizing on the organic agriculture pledge as a shortsighted measure to slash fertilizer subsidies and imports and the latter for suggesting that such a transformation of the nation’s agricultural sector could ever possibly succeed.
A worker carries leaves at a tea plantation in Ratnapura, Sri Lanka, on July 31, 2021. ISHARA S. KODIKARA/AFP via Getty Images
Sri Lanka’s journey through the organic looking glass and toward calamity began in 2016, with the formation, at Rajapaksa’s behest, of a new civil society movement called Viyathmaga. On its website, Viyathmaga describes its mission as harnessing the “nascent potential of the professionals, academics and entrepreneurs to effectively influence the moral and material development of Sri Lanka.” Viyathmaga allowed Rajapaksa to rise to prominence as an election candidate and facilitated the creation of his election platform. As he prepared his presidential run, the movement produced the “Vistas of Prosperity and Splendour,” a sprawling agenda for the nation that covered everything from national security to anticorruption to education policy, alongside the promise to transition the nation to fully organic agriculture within a decade.
Despite Viyathmaga’s claims to technocratic expertise, most of Sri Lanka’s leading agricultural experts were kept out of crafting the agricultural section of the platform, which included promises to phase out synthetic fertilizer, develop 2 million organic home gardens to help feed the country’s population, and turn the country’s forests and wetlands over to the production of biofertilizer.
Following his election as president, Rajapaksa appointed a number of Viyathmaga members to his cabinet, including as minister of agriculture. Sri Lanka’s Ministry of Agriculture, in turn, created a series of committees to advise it on the implementation of the policy, again excluding most of the nation’s agronomists and agricultural scientists and instead relying on representatives of the nation’s small organic sector; academic advocates for alternative agriculture; and, notably, the head of a prominent medical association who had long promoted dubious claims about the relationship between agricultural chemicals and chronic kidney disease in the country’s northern agricultural provinces.
Then, just a few months after Rajapaksa’s election, COVID-19 arrived. The pandemic devastated the Sri Lankan tourist sector, which accounted for almost half of the nation’s foreign exchange in 2019. By the early months of 2021, the government’s budget and currency were in crisis, the lack of tourist dollars so depleting foreign reserves that Sri Lanka was unable to pay its debts to Chinese creditors following a binge of infrastructure development over the previous decade.
Enter Rajapaksa’s organic pledge. From the early days of the Green Revolution in the 1960s, Sri Lanka has subsidized farmers to use synthetic fertilizer. The results in Sri Lanka, as across much of South Asia, were startling: Yields for rice and other crops more than doubled. Struck by severe food shortages as recently as the 1970s, the country became food secure while exports of tea and rubber became critical sources of exports and foreign reserves. Rising agricultural productivity allowed widespread urbanization, and much of the nation’s labor force moved into the formal wage economy, culminating in Sri Lanka’s achievement of official upper-middle-income status in 2020.
By 2020, the total cost of fertilizer imports and subsidies was close to $500 million each year. With fertilizer prices rising, the tab was likely to increase further in 2021. Banning synthetic fertilizers seemingly allowed Rajapaksa to kill two birds with one stone: improving the nation’s foreign exchange situation while also cutting a massive expenditure on subsidies from the pandemic-hit public budget.
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.
Having handed its agricultural policy over to organic true believers, many of them involved in businesses that would stand to benefit from the fertilizer ban, the false economy of banning imported fertilizer hurt the Sri Lankan people dearly. The loss of revenue from tea and other export crops dwarfed the reduction in currency outflows from banning imported fertilizer. The bottom line turned even more negative through the increased import of rice and other food stocks. And the budgetary savings from cutting subsidies were ultimately outweighed by the cost of compensating farmers and providing public subsidies for imported food.
Left: Workers are seen at a tea plantation in Ratnapura, Sri Lanka, on July 31, 2021. ISHARA S. KODIKARA/AFP via Getty Images Right: A Sri Lankan farmer carries paddy on his head in a field on the outskirts of Sri Lanka’s capital, Colombo, on Sept. 7, 2018. LAKRUWAN WANNIARACHCHI/AFP via Getty Images
Farming is, at bottom, a fairly straightforward thermodynamic enterprise.
Nutrient and energy output in the form of calories is determined by nutrient and energy input. For most of recorded human history, the primary way humans increased agricultural production was by adding land to the system, which expanded the amount of solar radiation and soil nutrients available for food production. Human populations were relatively small, under 1 billion people in total, and there was no shortage of arable land to expand onto. For this reason, the vast majority of anthropogenic changes in global land use and deforestation has been the result of agricultural extensification—the process of converting forests and prairie to cropland and pasture. Against popular notions that preindustrial agriculture existed in greater harmony with nature, three-quarters of total global deforestation occurred before the industrial revolution.
Even so, feeding ourselves required directing virtually all human labor to food production. As recently as 200 years ago, more than 90 percent of the global population labored in agriculture. The only way to bring additional energy and nutrients into the system to increase production was to let land lie fallow, rotate crops, use cover crops, or add manure from livestock that either shared the land with the crops or grazed nearby. In almost every case, these practices required additional land and put caps on yields.
Starting in the 19th century, the expansion of global trade allowed for the import of guano—mined from ancient deposits on bird-rich islands—and other nutrient-rich fertilizers from far-flung regions onto farms in Europe and the United States. This and a series of technological innovations—better machinery, irrigation, and seeds—allowed for higher yields and labor productivity on some farms, which in turn freed up labor and thereby launched the beginning of large-scale urbanization, one of global modernity’s defining features.
But the truly transformative break came with the invention of the Haber-Bosch process by German scientists in the early 1900s, which uses high temperature, high pressure, and a chemical catalyst to pull nitrogen from the air and produce ammonia, the basis for synthetic fertilizers. Synthetic fertilizer remade global agriculture and, with it, human society. The widespread adoption of synthetic fertilizers in most countries has allowed a rapid increase in yields and allowed human labor to shift from agriculture to sectors that offer higher incomes and a better quality of life.
The widespread application of synthetic fertilizers now allows global agriculture to feed nearly 8 billion people, of whom about 4 billion depend on the increased output that synthetic fertilizers allow for their sustenance. As a result, the modern food systems that have allowed global agriculture to feed Earth’s population are far more energy intensive than past food systems, with synthetic fertilizers accounting for a significant source of the energy for crops.
As synthetic fertilizers became increasingly available globally after World War II and combined with other innovations, such as modern plant breeding and large-scale irrigation projects, a remarkable thing happened: Human populations more than doubled—but thanks to synthetic fertilizers and other modern technologies, agricultural output tripled on only 30 percent more land over the same period.
The benefits of synthetic fertilizers though go far beyond simply feeding people. It’s no exaggeration to say that without synthetic fertilizers and other agricultural innovations, there is no urbanization, no industrialization, no global working or middle class, and no secondary education for most people. This is because fertilizer and other agricultural chemicals have substituted human labor, liberating enormous populations from needing to dedicate most of their lifetime labor to growing food.
A Sri Lankan farmer applies fertilizer at a vegetable farm in Horana South, Sri Lanka, on Oct. 25, 2017. LAKRUWAN WANNIARACHCHI/AFP via Getty Images
Virtually the entirety of organic agriculture production serves two populations at opposite ends of the global income distribution. At one end are the 700 million or so people globally who still live in extreme poverty. Sustainable agriculture proponents fancifully call the agriculture this population practices “agroecology.” But it is mostly just old–fashioned subsistence farming, where the world’s poorest eke out their survival from the soil.
They are the poorest farmers in the world, who dedicate most of their labor to growing enough food to feed themselves. They forego synthetic fertilizers and most other modern agricultural technologies not by choice but because they can’t afford them, caught in a poverty trap where they are unable to produce enough agricultural surplus to make a living selling food to other people; hence, they can’t afford fertilizer and other technologies that would allow them to raise yields and produce surplus.
At the other end of the spectrum are the world’s richest people, mostly in the West, for whom consuming organic food is a lifestyle choice tied up with notions about personal health and environmental benefits as well as romanticized ideas about agriculture and the natural world. Almost none of these consumers of organic foods grow the food themselves. Organic agriculture for these groups is a niche market—albeit, a lucrative one for many producers—accounting for less than 1 percent of global agricultural production.
As a niche within a larger, industrialized, agricultural system, organic farming works reasonably well. Producers typically see lower yields. But they can save money on fertilizer and other chemical inputs while selling to a niche market for privileged consumers willing to pay a premium for products labeled organic. Yields are lower—but not disastrously lower—because there are ample nutrients available to smuggle into the system via manure. As long as organic food remains niche, the relationship between lower yields and increased land use remains manageable.
The ongoing catastrophe in Sri Lanka, though, shows why extending organic agriculture to the vast middle of the global bell curve, attempting to feed large urban populations with entirely organic production, cannot possibly succeed. A sustained shift to organic production nationally in Sri Lanka would, by most estimates, slash yields of every major crop in the country, including drops of 35 percent for rice, 50 percent for tea, 50 percent for corn, and 30 percent for coconut. The economics of such a transition are not just daunting; they are impossible.
Importing fertilizer is expensive, but importing rice is far more costly. Sri Lanka, meanwhile, is the world’s fourth largest tea exporter, with tea accounting for a lion’s share of the country’s agricultural exports, which in turn account for 70 percent of total export earnings.
There is no conceivable way that export sales to the higher value organic market could possibly make up for sharp falls in production. The entire global market for organic tea, for example, accounts for only about 0.5 percent of the global tea market. Sri Lanka’s tea production alone is larger than the entire global organic tea market. Flooding the organic market with most or all of Sri Lanka’s tea production, even after output fell by half due to lack of fertilizer, would almost certainly send global organic tea prices into a spiral.
The notion that Sri Lanka might ever replace synthetic fertilizers with domestically produced organic sources without catastrophic effects on its agricultural sector and environment is more ludicrous still. Five to seven times more animal manure would be necessary to deliver the same amount of nitrogen to Sri Lankan farms as was delivered by synthetic fertilizers in 2019. Even accounting for the overapplication of synthetic fertilizers, which is clearly a problem, and other uncertainties, there is almost certainly not enough land in the small island nation to produce that much organic fertilizer. Any effort to produce that much manure would require a vast expansion of livestock holdings, with all the additional environmental damage that would entail.
Sustaining agriculture in Sri Lanka, for both domestic consumption and high-value export products, was always going to require importing energy and nutrients into the system, whether organic or synthetic. And synthetic fertilizers were always going to be the most economically and environmentally efficient way to do so.
Sri Lankan President Gotabaya Rajapaksa (center) waves to supporters during a rally ahead of the upcoming parliamentary elections, near Sri Lanka’s capital, Colombo, on July 28, 2020.ISHARA S. KODIKARA/AFP via Getty Images
While the proximate cause of Sri Lanka’s humanitarian crisis was a bungled attempt to manage its economic fallout from the global pandemic, at the bottom of the political problem was a math problem and at the bottom of the math problem was an ideological problem—or, more accurately, a global ideological movement that is innumerate and unscientific by design, promoting fuzzy and poorly specified claims about the possibilities of alternative food production methods and systems to obfuscate the relatively simple biophysical relationships that govern what goes in; what comes out; and the economic, social, and political outcomes that any agricultural system can produce, whether on a regional, national, or global scale.
Rajapaksa continues to insist that his policies have not failed. Even as Sri Lanka’s agricultural production was collapsing, he traveled to the U.N. climate change summit in Glasgow, Scotland, late last year, where—when not dodging protests over his human rights record as Sri Lankan defense minister—he touted his nation’s commitment to an agricultural revolution allegedly “in sync with nature.” Not long afterward, he fired two government officials within weeks of each other for publicly criticizing the increasingly dire food situation and fertilizer ban.
As farmers begin their spring harvest, the fertilizer ban has been lifted, but fertilizer subsidies have not been restored. Rajapaksa, meanwhile, has established yet another committee—this one to advise the government on how to increase organic fertilizer production in a further demonstration that he and his agricultural advisors continue to deny the basic biophysical realities that constrain agriculture production.
Much of the global sustainable agriculture movement, unfortunately, has proven no more accountable. As Sri Lankan crop yields have plummeted, exactly as most mainstream agricultural experts predicted they would, the fertilizer ban’s leading advocates have gone silent. Vandana Shiva, an Indian activist and ostensible face of anti-modern agrarianism in the global south, was a booster of the ban but turned mute as the ban’s cruel consequences became clear. Food Tank, an advocacy group funded by the Rockefeller Foundation that promotes a phase-out of chemical fertilizers and subsidies in Sri Lanka, has had nothing to say now that its favored policies have taken a disastrous turn.
Soon enough, advocates will surely argue that the problem was not with the organic practices they touted but with the precipitous move to implement them in the midst of a crisis. But although the immediate ban on fertilizer use was surely ill conceived, there is literally no example of a major agriculture-producing nation successfully transitioning to fully organic or agroecological production. The European Union has, for instance, promised a full-scale transition to sustainable agriculture for decades. But while it has banned genetically modified crops and a variety of pesticides as well as has implemented policies to discourage the overuse of synthetic fertilizers, it still depends heavily on synthetic fertilizers to keep yields high, produce affordable, and food secure. It has also struggled with the disastrous effects of overfertilizing surface and ground water with manure from livestock production.
Boosters of organic agriculture also point to Cuba, which was forced to abandon synthetic fertilizer when its economy imploded following the Soviet Union’s collapse. They fail to mention that the average Cuban lost an estimated 10 to 15 pounds of body weight in the years that followed. In 2011, Bhutan, another darling of the sustainability crowd, promised to go 100 percent organic by 2020. Today, many farmers in the Himalayan kingdom continue to depend on agrochemicals.
In Sri Lanka, as elsewhere, there is no shortage of problems associated with chemical-intensive and large-scale agriculture. But the solutions to these problems—be they innovations that allow farmers to deliver fertilizer more precisely to plants when they need it, bioengineered microbial soil treatments that fix nitrogen in the soil and reduce the need for both fertilizer and soil disruption, or genetically modified crops that require fewer pesticides and herbicides—will be technological, giving farmers new tools instead of removing old ones that have been proven critical to their livelihoods. They will allow countries like Sri Lanka to mitigate the environmental impacts of agriculture without impoverishing farmers or destroying the economy. Proponents of organic agriculture, by contrast, committed to naturalistic fallacies and suspicious of modern agricultural science, can offer no plausible solutions. What they offer, as Sri Lanka’s disaster has laid bare for all to see, is misery.
Veteran Sri Lankan actor and comedian Berty Gunathilake passed away this (06) morning, at the age of 97.
Known for his uncanny performance in the all-time favourite Sri Lanakn hit comedy show ‘Vinoda Samaya,’ Gunathilake was a pioneer in cinema, television and theatre as an actor and a performer.
He was receiving treatment at the Kahawatte Base Hospital at the time of his demise.
It is reported that the US $ 1 billion loan requested from the Indian government will be further delayed. The Sri Lankan government was hoping to get this $ 1 billion loan after borrowing $ 500 million last December.
The Government of India has informed the Government of Sri Lanka of certain conditions that must be met in order to obtain the relevant loan. It called for a roadmap on how to overcome the long-term economic crisis, as well as a list of economic and strategic activities to be implemented in the North and East.
India’s demands include a number of maritime security agreements strengthening India’s strategic interests in the East Trincomalee port. These include the Dornier surveillance aircraft for the Sri Lanka Air Force, a ship repair pool for the Sri Lanka Navy at Trincomalee and the deployment of a Sri Lanka Navy officer to the US Navy’s Intelligence Sharing Office in Bahrain.
It also includes the fight against international terrorism, drug trafficking and ensuring safe sea voyages for commercial vessels in the region.
Another condition of India is to give the opportunity to start a renewable energy project focusing on the Sampur area around Trincomalee.
The Government of India has stated that the loan will not be granted until these requests are met.
Basil Rajapaksa, the Minister of Finance was scheduled to visit India to hold discussions on obtaining the loan, but the visit had to be postponed on two occasions.
A cabinet reshuffle took place last week to defuse tensions within the government and the cabinet. Wimal Weerawansa and Udaya Gammanpila lost their cabinet posts while Dilum Amunugama and SB Dissanayake had the opportunity to sit in the Cabinet.
However, new crises are being created due to the cabinet reshuffle to resolve the crisis.
It is reported that many state ministers and government members are expressing their dissatisfaction regarding the appointment of SB Dissanayake as a cabinet minister. State Minister of Gem and Jewelry Industries Lohan Ratwatte has strongly objected to SB Dissanayake’s appointment as a cabinet minister and is reportedly preparing to take a political decision in the future.
He has told his friends that it is not appropriate to give cabinet ministerial posts to people who held ministries in the previous government. He also says that he never expected that people like SB would be given posts when there were people like him who were committed to bringing the present government to power and who continued to stand for Mahinda Rajapaksa after the defeat in 2015.
Lohan Ratwatte is ready to discuss the matter with Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapaksa.
U.S. payments firms Visa Inc (V.N) and Mastercard Inc on Saturday said they were suspending operations in Russia over the invasion of Ukraine, and that they would work with clients and partners to cease all transactions there.
Within days, all transactions initiated with Visa cards issued in Russia will no longer work outside of the country and any Visa cards issued outside of Russia will no longer work within the country, the company said.
“We are compelled to act following Russia’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine, and the unacceptable events that we have witnessed,” Al Kelly, chief executive officer of Visa, said in a statement.
U.S. President Joe Biden, in a call with Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, welcomed Visa’s and Mastercard’s decisions to suspend their operations in Russia, the White House said. W1N2QI054
“President Biden noted his administration is surging security, humanitarian, and economic assistance to Ukraine and is working closely with Congress to secure additional funding,” a White House readout of the call added.
The move by the payments firms could mean more disruption for Russians who are bracing for an uncertain future of spiraling inflation, economic hardship and an even sharper squeeze on imported goods.
Unprecedented Western sanctions imposed on Russia have frozen much of the country’s central bank’s $640 billion in assets; barred several banks from global payments system SWIFT; and sent the rouble into free-fall, erasing a third of its value this week. read more
On Monday, Ukraine’s central bank chief Kyrylo Shevchenko told Nikkei Asia the central bank and Zelenskiy urged Visa and MasterCard to halt transactions of their credit and debit cards issued by Russian banks to increase pressure on the Russian regime, the paper.
A growing number of financial and technology companies have suspended Russian operations. PayPal Holdings Inc (PYPL.O), announced its decision earlier on Saturday
Today (06) the Public Utilities Commission has given permission for a power cut of 02.30 hours in several areas only.
Accordingly, power cuts will be carried out for Zones A, B and C only between 09.00 am and 04.30 pm for 02.30 hours, said the Chairman of the Commission Janaka Ratnayake.
He further stated that there will be no power cuts in other areas as the demand for electricity is expected to decrease due to today being a Sunday.
Long queues of vehicle users lining up outside petrol sheds has become a frequent sight in capital Colombo and in several other parts of the country.
Acrippling fuel shortage and consequent power cuts across Sri Lanka are threatening to worsen the island nation’s persisting economic crisis, while sparking protests from citizens..
Already in the midst of a severe dollar crunch — with its foreign reserves drying up — Sri Lanka has been further hit by the oil price surge to $100 a barrel in the wake of Russia’s war in Ukraine.
Behavinglike blind hiker in wilderness who cannot see what’s happening in the country , Ceylon Petroleum Corporation Chairman Sumith Wijesinghe says that that there will be no fuel scarcity in the country as adequate fuel was received and countrywide distribution has already begun,
He said the reason for the sudden fuel shortage was the consumers refueling more than the normal limits and stocking fuel in cans and barrels.
However, the government took measures to import sufficient volumes of fuel and began distributing throughout the country, he said. Ships containing fuel have arrived in the country and unloading is in progress now, Wijesinghe said.
Therefore, the CPC chairman requested the consumers not to panic and avoid standing in queues to get fuel. “Ships containing sufficient diesel, petrol, furnace oil, jet fuel and kerosene have reached the country.
Two shiploads of diesel are currently being unloaded, and another two are due on Monday and Tuesday, “the chairman said.
“Sri Lanka’s foreign reserves total just over $ 2 billion since the beginning of this year.
The government must repay foreign debt of $7 billion this year, including a $1 billion repayment due in July.
I n its response to the pandemic, the Rajapaksa government imposed broad import restrictions to save dollars, resulting in frequent shortage of essentials such as milk powder, pulses, spices that were sourced from other countries.
Sri Lanka roughly spends $500 million a month to source diesel and gasoline. Early in February, India and Sri Lanka signed an agreement for a $ 500 million from India to help the island nation with fuel imports.
On February 15, Sri Lanka received a 40,000 MT fuel consignment from the Indian Oil Corporation. Late February, the government struggled to pay $ 35 million for another 40,000-tonne shipment of diesel.
Still scrambling for dollars to import adequate fuel, Sri Lanka on Tuesday announced seven-and-a-half-hour daily power cuts across the country, said to be the longest duration of power cuts in over 25 years.
Apart from impairing activity in homes, the prolonged power cuts have put shops, malls, and restaurants under enormous pressure, especially when authorities are desperately trying to revive tourism.
There will be no fuel scarcity in the country as adequate fuel was received and countrywide distribution has already begun, Ceylon Petroleum Corporation (CPC) Chairman W.W.D. Sumith Wijesinghe said.
He said the reason for the sudden fuel shortage was the consumers refueling more than the normal limits and stocking fuel in cans and barrels.
However, the government took measures to import sufficient volumes of fuel and began distributing throughout the country, he said. Ships containing fuel have arrived in the country and unloading is in progress now, Wijesinghe said.
Therefore, the CPC chairman requested the consumers not to panic and avoid standing in queues to get fuel. “Ships containing sufficient diesel, petrol, furnace oil, jet fuel and kerosene have reached the country.
Two shiploads of diesel are currently being unloaded, and another two are due on Monday and Tuesday, “the chairman said
Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP) General Secretary Dayasiri Jayasekara says that the party has not yet decided to leave the government or contest separate elections from the party.
Q: Has there been a suggestion that SLFP will not contest the elections separately?
“No, but there were different proposals, so the majority of us have different opinions. Therefore, it is to be decided when an election comes. Can’t say now ”
Q: Is the SLFP still with the government in this situation? What is the latest situation?
“We are still with the government, there is no problem with that”
Q: Do not want to leave?
“That decision should be taken after taking a decision of the Central Committee. No such decision has been taken at present. We are still working with the government ”
Q: Your Leader is getting strong criticism from some government ministers and MPs?
“President Maithri has faced more problems than that. It’s normal to blame each other. It is not good to respond to criticism.”
Minister of State Dayasiri Jayasekara stated this addressing the media after a special meeting of the SLFP organizers held in Colombo yesterday (05).
