Sri Lanka: The First Country to Destroy Itself by Going Green?
Its downfall shows that ESG scores are a sham.
by Marc Carnegie
July 19, 2022, 10:40 PM
Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s final action as Sri Lanka president last week was to cling to power just long enough so that he could find a country that would accept him in exile. In the dead of night, a Sri Lankan military transport took him, his wife, and two bodyguards to the Maldives, whence he departed for Singapore — ending the Rajapaksa clan’s decades-long grip on power and offering some slim hope that a new government might steer a way through the sad morass that is the Sri Lankan economy.
No one will doubt Rajapaksa had a tricky course to navigate, a course that exposed his minuscule understanding of basic economics. Already one of the most highly indebted of emerging markets nations, Sri Lanka saw its tourist industry first devastated by a scorched-earth final military campaign against Tamil Tiger rebels that led to credible reports of widespread rape and abuse. Then, within a decade, the emergence of the COVID virus essentially finished off tourism on the island.
Yet the president also was not immune to the baubles that often catch the eyes of autocrats with unchecked power. Using loans from China, Rajapaksa went on a vanity spree, building a seaport, convention center, and performing arts center — all named after himself — and, as the final jewel of his narcissistic crown, Rajapaksa International Airport, the kind of boondoggle for which the word “boondoggle” was invented in the first place.
It was built so deep in the middle of nowhere that it might as well have been situated in the middle of the ocean. It drew so little traffic that budget airlines and eventually flagship carrier Sri Lankan Airlines declined to use it. One government report said the airport had monthly revenues of $125. In May, Sri Lanka defaulted on its foreign debt.
But the final nail in the coffin came when Rajapaksa impetuously decided in April 2021 to ban synthetic fertilizers and pesticides. The country, he declared, would become “organic.” Sri Lanka was going green.
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https://spectator.org/sri-lanka-woke-green/
