By Paul Homewood
h/t Joe Public
You may recall this story from July, which I covered at the time (my highlights):
Leaves from the lush green tea estates covering the hills of central Sri Lanka end up in cups across the world.
Tea is the island’s biggest export, normally bringing in more than $1bn a year, but the industry is being hard hit by the unprecedented economic crisis.
Most of Sri Lanka’s tea is grown by smaller farmers, like Rohan Tilak Gurusinghe, who owns two acres of land close to the village of Kadugunnawa.
But he’s still reeling from the impact of a sudden, poorly thought-out government decision to ban chemical fertiliser last year.
"I’m losing money," he tells the BBC despondently. "Without fertiliser or fuel, I can’t even think about the future of my business."
The ban, ordered to try to protect the country’s dwindling foreign reserves, was one of a number of disastrous policy decisions implemented by the now-ousted President Gotabaya Rajapaksa, with agricultural output falling significantly.
As has been well established the claim about “protecting the dwindling foreign reserves” was an outright lie. Instead the ban on chemical fertiliser was brought in to meet climate targets, as Sri Lanka’s President made absolutely clear in his speech at COP26:
Nitrogen is an abundant element that is essential to the sustenance of all living things.
However, reactive nitrogen generated by human activity and released into ecosystems worsens climate change.
Overuse of nitrogen, especially in fertilisers, has adverse impacts on soil, water, air, and human health.
For decades, chronic kidney disease has been a serious issue in Sri Lanka’s agricultural heartland.
The overuse of chemical fertilisers has contributed significantly to this problem.
It is in this context that my Government took firm steps to reduce imports of chemical fertilizer, and strongly encourage organic agriculture.
Joe Public filed a complaint with the BBC, who after the usual fobbing off modified the article to read:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-62221355
This of course is also an outright lie – there was nothing “ostensible” about it, and the only people I know of who “suspect” otherwise are the lying BBC!
Even the President’s own announcement of the ban in April 21 talks about the impact of nitrogen on health, but makes no mention of saving foreign reserves.
Needless to say the correction is not listed in the on the BBC Complaints website, so not a soul will realise they were lied to in the first place.
The BBC are obviously desperate that the public don’t find out about all of the downsides to their Net Zero agenda.
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