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I think the question really is about benefit/trade-offs of the work/costs that goes into the organic. Apart from of course outright fraudulent actors.

Case in point is Sri Lanka's current economic meltdown (1) - which is to a significant extent attributed to the government going all in on organic, banning fertilizers resulting in yields plummeting - less food to go around and no longer self sufficient, exports plumetting so less hard cash to buy oil, medicines no way to provide power, transport etc

(1) https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/03/05/sri-lanka-organic-farmi...




Come on. Converting to all-organic at once having failed by no means suggests that slowly phasing out to get to organic wouldn't work.

Switching suddenly, and by means of a ban -- what could go wrong?

A free-market gradualistic solution would be to cap pesticide and fertilizer imports and auction licenses to buy them.


The question I asked was about cost/benefit trade offs of organic and indeed as the linked article indicates, what are the trade offs with how the math adds up. I am not pre-supposing that a switch to organic is even desirable like this comment above.

For instance, if without inorganic fertilizers, yields plummet 20-30%, does that mean we need more forest land converted to farming tonkeep people fed? Do 20-30% more people have to work in agriculture vs today and stop working in cities? What would that do to urban services? What similarly are the trade offs from using fertilizers for land? What happens over time?

If there are good research papers that explore the total system costs and economic impacts?


From the article linked in the parent comment, the failure was very well predicted by it sounds like basically everyone who knew anything about agriculture. And that prediction was based entirely on basic facts about agriculture rather than any "how to get there" effects like you're saying caused it to not work.


That's a completely different issue to if the label "organic" means something.




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