A Great Leap Forward

America would like you to try shitting on it

In an interview today with George Stephanopoulos, which you can watch here, USAID administrator Samantha Power had this to say about the threat of famine caused by the war in Ukraine:

Fertilizer shortages are real now because Russia is a big exporter of fertilizer. And even though fertilizer is not sanctioned, less fertilizer is coming out of Russia. As a result, we're working with countries to think about natural solutions like manure and compost. And this may hasten transitions that would have been in the interest of farmers to make eventually anyway.

Stupid modern commercial fertilizer, you wouldn’t have wanted it anyway.

So imagine that there you are, plowing your fields in Tajikistan or Lesotho or Ecuador, and your friendly neighborhood USAID advisor stops by to say that he wants to encourage you to think about transitioning away from tired old commercial fertilizers to a more up-to-date natural solution like manure, a transition that actually turns out to be in your best interest.

What do you think of this discussion? Do you say, “Wait, are you saying that manure can be used in farming!?!?” My goodness, thank the heavens that the United States of America sends social workers to this blighted land. It’s like the tractor factory burns down and a delegation of officials shows up in your fields to tell you that hey, great news for the environment, oxen are more sustainable.

Look upon our benevolence, which comes with pretty good floor mats

Not discussed: the current agricultural crisis in Sri Lanka, which was caused by the government “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.” That linked story describes the resulting implosion of Sri Lankan agriculture as the result of a “farrago of magical thinking, technocratic hubris, ideological delusion, self-dealing, and sheer shortsightedness.” It’s possible that they haven’t cleared these claims with USAID.

Ultramodern agricultural shit has made its appearance before, as the shock workers of the Great Leap Forward “went into battle” to collect nightsoil for the national struggle:

In the nightsoil-collection campaign and the deep-plowing movement, Chinese politicians fixed the nation’s backward agriculture with scientific Marxism to produce far more food. A few years and tens of millions of famine-induced dead later, China threw out the Four Olds to rebuild society and industry on correct ideological principles; replacing stupid old atavistic power plant engineers, for example, with properly aligned political cadre, they ran power plants and other infrastructure with the new, modern ideas. Went great. Whaddya need engineers for, those assholes.

We keep doing this. Politicians keep showing up to offer transitions that “would have been in the interest of farmers to make eventually anyway.” Then we bury the dead and try to regain our footing, and they leave for an academic appointment. We never learn from it.

Or at least they never learn from it.

I suspect that this formulation Power has just trotted out — great news, we don’t have X anymore, now we can use more natural solutions! — will become more familiar. It’s failure and collapse marketed as an advance, loss as a gift. The people who have solved the fertilizer problem are working on even more solutions that will turn out to be in your best interest. So we have that to look forward to.