In 2021, Sri Lanka was in the grip of a foreign exchange crisis brought on by the global economic damage of the COVID-19 pandemic, falling tourism revenues, and years of fiscal mismanagement. Unable to pay for fertiliser imports, the government of President Gotabaya Rajapaksa did not do what the situation required — which was to acknowledge the shortfall honestly, begin rationing existing stocks, provide emergency bridge support to the most vulnerable farmers, and initiate a carefully sequenced transition toward reduced chemical dependency. Instead, it announced, almost overnight, that Sri Lanka would become the world’s first fully organic nation. All synthetic fertilisers were banned. No preparation had been done. No alternative supply chains existed. No farmers had been trained. No transition support was in place.
The result was predictable to anyone who understood farming. Yields collapsed, in some crops by half or more. Rice, which Sri Lanka had been self-sufficient in, suddenly required imports. Tea, the country’s most important export crop and foreign exchange earner, was devastated. Farmers who had farmed with chemical inputs for two and three generations, whose soil biology had been simplified by decades of synthetic fertiliser use, were suddenly left without the inputs their crops depended on and without the knowledge or resources to substitute them. Hunger spread. The economic crisis deepened. And in the wreckage, organic agriculture — a legitimate, scientifically grounded, and ecologically necessary approach to farming — was catastrophically discredited by its association with the chaos of an incompetent, unplanned, coercive, and dishonest policy announcement.
The Sri Lanka disaster was not a failure of organic agriculture. It was a failure of governance. The distinction matters enormously, because India is now approaching a situation where the lesson must be drawn correctly or it will be drawn disastrously.
The military confrontation involving the United States, Israel, and Iran has disrupted liquefied natural gas (LNG) and petroleum shipments through the Strait of Hormuz. Among the consequences flowing from this disruption is a near-collapse of naphtha and LNG supply to India — two of the principal feedstocks from which nitrogenous fertilisers, particularly urea, are manufactured. Qatar, one of India’s most important LNG suppliers, is directly affected. The gas-based urea plants that produce a significant share of India’s domestic fertiliser output face feedstock uncertainty that cannot be resolved quickly. Import substitution from non-Gulf suppliers is possible in theory but constrained in practice by shipping logistics, contract lead times, and the fact that the same disruption affecting India is affecting every other gas-importing nation simultaneously. Higher diesel and petroleum prices compound this directly: the cost of running irrigation pumps, tractors, and the trucks that carry inputs to farms and produce to markets rises in step with every escalation in the conflict.
But the fertiliser and fuel crisis, serious as it is, does not stand alone. It arrives alongside a second and equally consequential pressure: the growing unreliability of India’s agricultural import supply chains. India imports approximately 60 per cent of its edible oil needs — palm oil principally from Indonesia and Malaysia, soyabean oil from South America — through shipping routes that are now subject to freight cost escalation, insurance surcharges, and route diversions caused by the same regional conflict. Cooking oil, which sits at the centre of the daily food budget of every Indian household, is therefore exposed to a price spiral that no amount of domestic price management can fully contain so long as import logistics remain disrupted.
Pulses present an equally serious vulnerability. India’s domestic pulse production has been structurally insufficient for decades; the gap is filled by imports from Australia, Canada, Myanmar, and East Africa, most of which travel through the Indian Ocean and Red Sea corridors now under stress. Dal — the primary protein source for the majority of India’s population — is thus simultaneously exposed to domestic yield risk from fertiliser and diesel cost inflation, and to import risk from shipping disruption. The household food security of hundreds of millions of people rests on a supply chain that has rarely looked more fragile.
This convergence of pressures — fertiliser shortage, fuel inflation, cooking oil import uncertainty, and pulse supply disruption — is precisely what makes the question of organic agriculture and natural farming urgent in a way it has never quite been before. Not as an ideological preference. Not as a sudden policy announcement. But as a practical, multi-year national strategy whose groundwork must begin within the next two months, before the kharif sowing window opens and before the shortage becomes a crisis with no prepared response. The case for reduced chemical dependency and enhanced domestic food self-sufficiency has never rested on stronger ground — and the cost of inaction has never been higher.
The Sri Lanka experience teaches one lesson above all others: the difference between a managed transition and an unmanaged collapse is not the destination. Both end up in a place of reduced chemical fertiliser use. The difference is entirely in the preparation, the sequencing, the support provided to farmers, and the honesty of the communication about what is happening and why.
A managed transition begins with an honest acknowledgement that fertiliser supply is under structural stress and will remain so for the foreseeable future. It maps which crops and which farming systems are most dependent on synthetic inputs and therefore most vulnerable. It identifies the farmers, regions, and crops where a shift toward natural farming methods is most feasible in the short term — typically dryland crops on degraded soils in rain-fed areas — and distinguishes them clearly from the irrigated, high-yield systems where an abrupt transition would risk serious food security damage. It mobilises the network of natural farming practitioners, Krishi Vigyan Kendras (KVKs), agricultural universities, and state extension systems that already exist but are dramatically underused. And it begins immediately — not because the transition will be complete by kharif 2026, but because the preparation must begin now if the transition is to be orderly rather than chaotic.
An unmanaged collapse, by contrast, begins with either a panicked announcement that mimics Sri Lanka’s error or, perhaps more likely in India’s case, a silence that allows farmers to discover the shortage at the counter of their local input dealer in April, with no alternative prepared and no guidance available. Both are failures of governance. Only one of them is avoidable.
India is not Sri Lanka. It has resources and institutional foundations for a natural farming transition that Sri Lanka in 2021 entirely lacked. Several state governments have run natural and organic farming programmes of varying approaches and scales. Sikkim’s organic certification effort proved that a state-level commitment with adequate lead time is achievable. Numerous agricultural universities, KVKs, and farmer collectives carry practical knowledge of intercropping, green manuring, composting, and biological pest management that has never disappeared from Indian agriculture — it has simply been suppressed by subsidy structures and input supply chains that made chemical farming artificially cheap for decades. That knowledge can be recovered and transmitted quickly where the will and the resources exist.
What is required now is a national framework that brings these scattered resources into a coherent, funded, and honestly communicated whole. The framework should operate on three layers simultaneously. The first is immediate crisis management for the kharif 2026 season: rationalise existing fertiliser stocks toward the crops and regions where a shortfall would do the most damage; issue clear advisories to farmers on reduced-dose and split-application techniques that stretch available supplies; and fast-track the distribution of compost, vermicompost, and biofertilisers through the existing agricultural cooperative and Primary Agricultural Credit Society network. The second layer is the medium-term transition over two to five years: systematic retraining of extension workers in natural input preparation and soil health assessment, revision of the subsidy regime to reward organic inputs alongside chemical ones, and regular soil biology monitoring to track the recovery of microbial fertility as chemical dependency reduces. The third layer is the structural reform that makes the transition permanent: removing the policy distortions that have kept synthetic fertilisers artificially cheap, investing in domestic biofertiliser manufacturing, and embedding natural farming metrics into the national agricultural performance framework.
There is one immediate action that is both more achievable and more consequential than any other in the next two months: the national mobilisation of organic compostable material. India generates enormous volumes of compostable organic matter every day — crop residue, agricultural waste, cattle and livestock dung, market waste, and the organic fraction of municipal solid waste in every city and town in the country. Most of this is either burned, dumped, or allowed to decompose without capture. It is, in effect, a vast natural fertiliser resource being wasted at exactly the moment the country most needs it.
Urban organic waste, in particular, is an underutilised national asset of the first order. Post-segregation — and several Indian cities have demonstrated that source segregation of wet and dry waste is achievable with consistent civic administration and community participation — the organic fraction of municipal waste is a rich feedstock for high-quality compost. Kitchen waste, vegetable market waste, flower market waste, and food processing residues together constitute the raw material for a decentralised composting infrastructure that can be built rapidly, generates employment, reduces landfill pressure, and produces a soil amendment that chemical fertilisers cannot replicate. The microbial diversity, humic acids, and slow-release nutrient profile of well-made compost from diverse organic inputs rebuilds soil biology in a way that urea and DAP, however useful for immediate yield, structurally cannot.
The government should declare a National Organic Compost Mission with immediate effect, with the following operational elements: municipal corporations directed to accelerate wet waste segregation and establish or expand compost processing facilities within their jurisdictions; agricultural departments in every state directed to set up district-level compost collection and distribution hubs linked to farmer cooperative networks; crop residue burning — which destroys billions of rupees worth of natural fertility every year across the Indo-Gangetic plain and the Deccan — to be replaced with in-situ incorporation and composting support; and a price discovery and procurement mechanism so that farmers who produce compost from farm waste receive a fair return for supplying it to neighbours who need it. This is not a slow, long-gestation programme. Compost can be produced from mixed organic inputs within four to eight weeks using accelerated composting techniques. The two-month window before kharif sowing is exactly the right timeframe to begin. What is needed is the national will to treat this as the emergency infrastructure programme it is.
The Sri Lanka government’s greatest failure was not the ban itself. It was the dishonesty that preceded it — the pretence that everything was manageable, followed by an abrupt announcement that proved it was not. Indian farmers are not naive. They know when inputs are scarce. They know when prices are rising. What they need from their government is not reassurance that conceals the truth, but honest information about what is happening, a credible plan for what comes next, and genuine support for the transition they are being asked to make.
This means the government must say, clearly and soon: fertiliser supply is under pressure, it will remain under pressure for some time, and we are preparing a strategy to manage this that will support farmers through the transition. It means putting real money into biofertiliser distribution, compost programmes, and natural farming extension before the shortage becomes acute. It means working with state governments that already have functioning natural farming programmes to scale what exists rather than reinventing from the centre. And it means treating organic and natural farming as what they actually are: not a romantic retreat to a pre-modern past, not a coercive imposition on farmers who have no alternatives, but a scientifically grounded, economically rational, and now geopolitically necessary direction for Indian agriculture. Sri Lanka stumbled into that direction without preparation and paid a terrible price. India can choose to walk into it with its eyes open. The two months before the kharif sowing window closes are the preparation time available. They should not be wasted.
Narasimha Reddy Donthi is a public policy expert and consultant at the Pesticide Action Network India and a visiting faculty (honorary) at Delhi-based Impact and Policy Research Institute.
Views expressed are the author’s own and don’t necessarily reflect those of Down To Earth