Sri Lanka is a South Asian island nation with a population of 21 million in 2015. It used to be a British colony, known as Ceylon, from the early nineteenth century until 1948, when it gained independence. Since then, Sri Lanka has been a representative democratic republic with a semi-presidential, multi-party system. Modern Sri Lankan politics have been profoundly shaped by a civil war, lasting from 1983 to 2009, between Sri Lanka’s Tamil minority and its Sinhalese dominated government and the associated development of Sinhalese Buddhist nationalism as the country’s dominant political ideology, including the emergence of political Buddhism, that is, the active engagement of Buddhist monks in politics, most notably through the 2004 founding of the National Heritage Party (Jathika Hela Urumaya, JHU) [15, 19]. While the monks’ nationalist, anti-Western ideology and their advocacy for a military solution to the government’s conflict with the Tamils is well-established [19], it is relevant for our analysis that at least some of them also have strong environmentalist policy preferences (see [15], p. 88). Since the mid-2000s, Sri Lankan politics have been especially dominated by the Rajapaksa family [17]. Mahinda Rajapaksa was president from 2005 to 2015, gaining fame and broad public support for (violently) ending the country’s civil war in 2009, and prime minister from 2019 to 2022, under the presidency of his brother Gotabaya Rajapaksa. Notably, the glyphosate ban that this article focuses on was introduced during the brief non-Rajapaksa interregnum from 2015 to 2019.

Sri Lanka has embraced a market- and export-oriented economic model since the late 1970s. Today, it is a middle-income country at the threshold of upper-middle income status. After a decade of strong growth, it reached a GDP per capita of 4060 USD in 2015. The Sri Lankan economy is currently dominated by international tourism, export-oriented textile and plantation sectors, as well as rice production for the local market. Tea has long been Sri Lanka’s single most important export product, worth 1.3 billion USD or 12% of all exports in 2015 (S13, p. 7). At the same time, the tea sector has also been the largest recipient of glyphosate imports, followed by the corn and rice sectors ([47], p. 249). Alongside conventional agriculture, Sri Lanka has developed a small but growing sector of organic agriculture, “catering mostly to growing niche markets in the West”, including “tea and coconut products, rice, fruits, spices and extracts” (S14). Notably, Sri Lanka allows neither local production nor import of genetically modified (GM) organisms (S15).

The sale and use of pesticides in Sri Lanka is governed by the 1980 Control of Pesticides Act and subsequent regulations. This legislation established a system of “delegated authority”, in which the Pesticides Technical Advisory Committee provides “technical advice and decisions regarding the registration and regulation of pesticides”, while the Registrar of Pesticides, a position in the Department of Agriculture, administers procedures and implements decisions ([59], pp. 65, 58). In the 2000s, on the eve of the glyphosate ban that we are focusing on, pesticide policymaking in Sri Lanka was dominated by a “tightly integrated” “epistemic community” that had “links with industry” but was largely “free from political interference” ([59], pp. 62, 64). One major policy change in this period was the 2008 decision to phase out the use of the herbicide paraquat (banned in the European Union since 2007), due to strong links with a particular public health crisis [59]: in the 1990s, Sri Lanka had one of the highest suicide rates in the world, especially in rural communities, where most suicides were through self-poisoning with highly toxic pesticides, most notably paraquat [28, 59]. While the paraquat ban did help to reduce suicide rates [41], it also further increased farmers’ reliance on other herbicides, especially glyphosate [47].

Despite earlier debates about the risks of pesticides, and glyphosate in particular, the introduction of Sri Lanka’s 2015 glyphosate ban needs to be understood against the backdrop of a “mysterious” kidney disease epidemic [10, 60, 62], which was the main problem the glyphosate ban addressed. Chronic Kidney Disease of Unknown Origin (CKDu) is, as its name suggests, a type of kidney disease that remains poorly understood and cannot be explained by the causes of common chronic kidney disease (such as diabetes and high blood pressure). CKDu disproportionally affects agricultural communities, especially across Central America and South Asia. In Sri Lanka, CKDu emerged in the early 1990s and became especially prevalent among rice farming communities in the districts of Anuradhapura and Polonnaruwa in the country’s North Central Province. In 2010, Sri Lanka’s health ministry launched a research project to investigate, in collaboration with the WHO, the causes of CKDu. The project team later concluded that chronic exposure to cadmium “through the food chain”—via vegetables from phosphate fertilizer and via freshwater fish—might be “a causative factor for CKDu in Sri Lanka” ([34], pp. 1, 10).

The issue of glyphosate regulation rapidly entered the Sri Lankan political agenda when it became coupled with the problem of the CKDu epidemic by a local policy entrepreneur. In February 2014, Channa Jayasumana, then a medical doctor and researcher at Rajarata University (located in the CKDu-affected North Central Province),Footnote 5 published a study that associated the prevalence of CKDu with glyphosate use [36]. More specifically, Jayasumana argued that glyphosate was “Compound-X” ([36], p. 2138) in that it “bonds with toxic heavy metals in the environment such as cadmium and arsenic, forming stable compounds that are consumed in food and water and do not break down until reaching victims’ kidneys” (S16). Jayasumana had previously conducted his dissertation research and published several articles about the potential causes of CKDu, but this 2014 paper was the first to explicitly link CKDu with glyphosate—albeit admittedly as a “hypothesis” with “limited testing” ([36], p. 2140; but see [37]).

It should be noted that Jayasumana’s glyphosate hypothesis emerged from a distinct political ideology and scientific community. Jayasumana has long been closely associated with Sinhala-Buddhist nationalism and the specific ideology of jathika chinthanaya (national consciousness) ([61], p. 13; see [20], esp. p. 51, fn. 14). Both his scientific and later political work has been characterized by an “indigenous discourse […] shaped by a sense of colonial injury and fashioned as an anti-western response to the denigration of ‘local’ knowledge” ([61], p. 3). Jayasumana’s research on CKDu emerged under the mentorship of Nalin de Silva (see [35], p. 72), a controversial academic who had previously linked CKDu with arsenic in water, an insight he claimed to have received from “God Natha”, a local guardian deity ([61], p. 13). Jayasumana’s 2014 paper was co-authored with a member of Hela Suwaya, a Buddhist civil society organization promoting indigenous agriculture and medicine, which is also associated with worship of “God Natha” (S17-18). These ideological associations also had methodological implications, as Jayasumana’s 2014 paper explicitly acknowledged that “according to the prevailing Buddhist philosophical values within the country, no animal models were used in the current study” ([35], p. 2140). None of this, to be clear, disproves Jayasumana’s glyphosate hypothesis, but it shows that it emerged in a distinct, non-Western scientific community, which might even help explain its subsequent political influence.

Jayasumana’s glyphosate hypothesis gained immediate public attention in Sri Lanka.Footnote 6 Industry reacted promptly, reportedly publishing “a full-page paper advertisement in all national newspapers demanding withdrawal of [Jayasumana’s] findings within two weeks if not they will go the court” (S19, p. 9). In March 2014, and with direct reference to the Jayasumana paper published just a few weeks earlier, Mahinda Rajapaksa, Sri Lanka’s President at the time, “ordered the immediate removal of Glyphosate from the local market” (S22). The ban was soon (in April 2014) placed on hold, however, after opposition from the private sector and the governmental Office of the Registrar of Pesticides, who noted that “the ban rests on a theory that has not been proven” (S16).

A policy window for comprehensive glyphosate regulation emerged in November 2014, when President Mahinda Rajapaksa announced early presidential elections for January 2015, seeking an unprecedented third term in the context of worries over increasing authoritarianism.Footnote 7 This led Maithripala Sirisena, Rajapaksa’s health minister, to resign from his posts in Rajapaksa’s government and announce that he would challenge Mahinda Rajapaksa in the elections, quickly becoming the common opposition candidate. Among the groups that defected from Rajapaksa’s coalition to support Sirisena was the Jathika Hela Uramaya (JHU) party and its parliamentary leader Athuraliye Rathana Thero (S24), who later cited Rajapaksa’s failure to implement the glyphosate ban as a major reason for this shift (S25). It is also relevant to note that Sirisena grew up in the CKDu-affected North Central Province and had long represented the Polonnaruwa district in parliament. During his campaign, Sirisena set up a relief fund for CKDu patients (S26), and his election manifesto promised to “immediately prohibit the import and distribution of agro-chemicals that were identified as causing kidney diseases” (S27). Despite these pronouncements, Sirisena’s presidential bid was clearly dominated by his promise to end the ten-year rule of Mahinda Rajapaksa and his family and to reform Sri Lanka’s “authoritarian executive presidential system” (S28).

The policy window for a glyphosate ban firmly opened when Sirisena surprisingly won the presidential election of January 2015 with 51% of the vote. The first months of the Sirisena government were especially reform-oriented, given that Sirisena had promised early parliamentary elections (to renew and strengthen his mandate), which were eventually called in June and held in August 2015 (S29). Addressing the problem of CKDu clearly was one of Sirisena’s priorities. In February 2015, Sirisena launched the extrabudgetary National Kidney Trust Fund that would help finance a monthly cash transfer (allowance) program targeting kidney patients as well as CKDu-related infrastructure investments (S30-33). In March 2015, during a state visit to China, Sirisena successfully requested substantial Chinese development aid for building a large specialized kidney hospital (S34-35), which was subsequently built and recently opened in Polonnaruwa (S16), a center of the CKDu epidemic but also Sirisena’s hometown and electoral district. Sirisena also relaunched the presidential task force on kidney disease prevention (S37-38).

At the same time, pressure on glyphosate continued to grow. The Sri Lankan researcher Channa Jayasumana published another paper in January 2015 that appeared to empirically corroborate his glyphosate hypothesis of CKDu [37]. Meanwhile, IARC’s March 2015 classification of glyphosate as “probably carcinogenic to humans” provided an additional rationale for glyphosate regulation, even though it did not weigh in on the potential link between glyphosate and CKDu (given that CKDu is not a cancer).

Eventually, in May 2015, and with direct reference to Jayasumana’s research, President Sirisena announced that he would “totally ban the import and usage of Glyphosate pesticide” (S39), a decision that was implemented through a ministerial import ban in June 2015 (S40-41). By implementing the ban through an import rather than sale and use ban, the government bypassed Sri Lanka’s established system of delegated, technocratic pesticide regulation (see [59]). This worked because there is no domestic production of glyphosate-based herbicides in Sri Lanka. Foreshadowing subsequent debates over the needs of Sri Lanka’s export-oriented plantation sector, the government acknowledged that “a strong demand has been made that glyphosate was necessary for tea cultivation” but the cabinet still decided “to completely halt the import of Glyphosate” (S41).

The central question that emerges here is why the Sirisena government went through with a glyphosate ban while the previous Rajapaksa government had backpedaled a year earlier. After all, both faced largely the same evidence on the link between glyphosate and CKDu, while IARC’s 2015 decision did not appear to be a significant factor in the Sri Lankan political debate. The available evidence suggests that the Sirisena government’s decision to ban glyphosate was primarily a strategic concession to Rathana Thero and his JHU, who (as environmentalists) had a strong interest in the glyphosate issue and who were perceived as crucial allies by the Sirisena government. As noted above, political Buddhism in Sri Lanka has long-standing connections with conservationism and environmentalism, and Rathana Thero in particular has long been a vocal advocate of organic agriculture. Sirisena reportedly even offered Rathana Thero the post of environment minister in his government, which the latter turned down (S42). Rathana Thero would later cite Rajapaksa’s failure to implement the planned glyphosate ban as a major reason for his party’s 2015 shift in political allegiance from Rajapaksa to Sirisena (S25, S43). The Rajapaksa government had apparently felt comfortably in power in 2014, arguably significantly reducing pressure to make policy concessions to its then-ally JHU. In contrast, the JHU’s stance on glyphosate (and other policy issues) carried much more weight in the Sirisena government, as its alliance with the JHU had played a key role in splitting the Sinhala-Buddhist nationalist vote (S44) and was likely decisive in Sirisena’s slim election victory. In Multiple Streams Framework terms, Rathana Thero and his JHU therefore were the policy entrepreneurs that coupled the policy and the political streams.

An additional issue that needs to be considered to fully explain Sri Lanka’s adoption of a glyphosate ban is that the power of organized business interests was evidently insufficient to prevent the ban. Sri Lanka’s plantation industry had clearly opposed the glyphosate ban and had advocated, at the very least, for an exception for the tea sector. Sri Lanka’s broader agricultural sector, with a focus on rice production, was less organized and vocal, but also was not in favor of the ban. On the one hand, this clearly seems to confirm the theory that business power is lower in times of high issue salience (or “loud politics”) [13]. On the other hand, it also speaks to the somewhat lower (structural) power of pro-glyphosate advocates in Sri Lanka due to the country’s lower dependence on GM crops (see [52]). As discussed above, growth in global glyphosate use has been driven by the emergence of a “technological package” of glyphosate and glyphosate-tolerant genetically modified crops (esp. soy). In countries like Argentina or Brazil, for instance, a glyphosate ban would imply a direct attack on the cultivation of glyphosate-tolerant crops. In Sri Lanka, in contrast, no glyphosate-tolerant GM crops are authorized and the glyphosate-dependence of the country’s agricultural sector was arguably perceived to be lower, at least by policymakers. Whether true or not, it was frequently argued by politicians that large-scale organic agriculture would be feasible.

In the immediate aftermath of the glyphosate ban, its architects pushed for further policy advancement along the same lines. This was aided by the Sirisena government’s clear victory in the (early) parliamentary elections of August 2015, which renewed the government’s mandate (S45). In March 2016, the government unveiled the “Toxin-Free Nation” program, a 3-year plan aiming to “phase out” (all) pesticides and chemical fertilizers and to support a large-scale transition from “agrochemical” to “organic” agriculture (S46, S47, p. 16). The program was developed and managed by the Strategic Enterprise Management Agency, an agency that was directly linked to the Presidential Secretariat (S48) and lead by Asoka Abeygunawardana, a JHU activist and ally of Rathena Thero (S49). During the launch of the program, President Sirisena explicitly credited Rathana Thero as its “founder” (S50). Indeed, Rathana Thero continued to advocate for strict and comprehensive regulation, “seeking to extend the [glyphosate] ban to pesticides and chemical fertilisers” (S51). While the “Toxin-Free Nation” program was introduced after the 2015 glyphosate ban, the circumstances of its introduction clearly corroborate the central role that the policy preferences of Rathana Thero played in shaping the Sirisena government’s pesticide policy. Moreover, the “Toxin-Free Nation” program is arguably also the direct precursor of the more recent and much more consequential agrochemical ban introduced in 2021 by the subsequent Gotabaja Rajapaksa government.

In this section, we have used process tracing and a multiple-streams framework to explain the adoption of Sri Lanka’s 2015 glyphosate ban. We have demonstrated that glyphosate regulation entered the Sri Lankan political agenda as a potential solution to a very specific problem, namely the epidemic of CKDu. The problem stream of this epidemic and the policy stream of glyphosate regulation were coupled by the research of an activist health scientist. Despite high issue salience, an initial attempt at glyphosate regulation in 2014 failed due to limited electoral pressure and substantial business opposition, resulting in reduced political will. But a policy window for glyphosate regulation opened in 2015, after a political realignment brought to power a reformist government and with it, with elevated influence, a small Buddhist party with strong environmentalist policy preferences. The glyphosate ban of June 2015 resulted from the coupling of the policy and politics streams through the (parliamentary) leader of this Buddhist party, who essentially secured the new government’s commitment to (among other things) a glyphosate ban in exchange for his party’s political support. The adoption of Sri Lanka’s 2015 glyphosate ban can therefore be explained well with a multiple streams framework and particular reference to two distinct policy entrepreneurs.

While Sri Lanka was the first country in the world to adopt and implement a full ban on glyphosate, the ban soon displayed a lack of “political sustainability” [57]. On the one hand, enforcement of the ban was insufficient, as evidenced by the continued use of previously imported and stocked glyphosate as well as the development of a significant black market (S52-54). On the other hand, the ban was partially reversed in May 2018, when a three-year permission to use glyphosate was granted to Sri Lanka’s tea and rubber sectors (S55-56). It is relevant to note that this temporary reversal was justified by the government to give the plantation sector more time to adapt, but it clearly also held the potential for a more permanent reversal. In this section we explain this partial reversal of Sri Lanka’s pioneering glyphosate ban by drawing on the concepts of self-undermining policy feedback [33] and problem-solution decoupling [77].

Sri Lanka’s glyphosate ban soon began to generate losses for the country’s agricultural sector, as the ban significantly increased the cost of weed control and thus overall production cost ([47], p. 249). These “emergent losses for organized groups” arguably set in motion “self-undermining feedback effects” ([33], pp. 445, 448). While small-scale rice farmers were likely also affected, it was mostly Sri Lanka’s well-organized and export-oriented plantation sector that engaged in publicizing these losses and advocating for a reversal of the ban. Sri Lanka’s Planters’ Association, the Ministry of Plantation Industries as well as the Tea Board were among the most vocal advocates for a reversal, regularly framing the glyphosate ban as a fundamental threat to the country’s large tea sector (S57-62). While much less visible than the plantation sector, the pesticide industry also supported these advocacy efforts. CropLife, an agrochemical industry group that also represents Monsanto/Bayer, funded a detailed empirical evaluation of the ban, which—unsurprisingly, given the clear conflict of interest—concluded that “banning glyphosate […] has pulled the food crop sector in to a catastrophe” (S63, pp. i, 35). CropLife also prepared a “one-pager” that concisely summarized their study’s main findings (S64).

A second factor that arguably also contributed to the postenactment contestation and eventual reversal of the ban, although in a less publicly discussed and therefore less visible manner, was the failure of the scientific community to convincingly corroborate the hypothesized link between glyphosate and CKDu, which had initially motivated Sri Lanka’s glyphosate ban in 2014. After the sudden coupling of CKDu and glyphosate in 2014 and the resulting glyphosate ban in 2015, the World Health Organization in Sri Lanka felt under pressure to justify its noncommittal, skeptical stance with regard to glyphosate’s relationship with CKDu [34].Footnote 8 In April 2016, together with the Presidential Task Force on CKDu, the WHO therefore convened an international expert consultation on CKDu in Colombo (S65, p. 7; see [43]). Major conclusions of the consultation included calls for a uniform case definition of CKDu, better surveillance systems and more long-term research on risk factors (S65 p. 30). With regard to the hypothesized link between glyphosate and CKDu, the final report explicitly noted that the “evidence of causality of this association was considered inconclusive due to lack of consistency of the findings, lack of temporality where association was observed and limitations in the methods used for measuring exposures” (S65, p. 16). The WHO’s expert consultation therefore implicitly questioned the government’s own rationale for its glyphosate ban. President Sirisena must have been aware of these findings, given that his Presidential Task Force co-hosted the workshop and that its report was later presented to him personally (S66). While Channa Jayasumana, the policy entrepreneur who originally linked glyphosate with CKDu, still claimed in 2018 that “it has been proven beyond doubt, glyphosate is linked to chronic kidney disease epidemic in Sri Lanka” (S55), this view was not shared by CKDu experts or the WHO, thus somewhat “decoupling” ([77], p. 77) CKDu as a problem from glyphosate regulation as a solution.

A first focusing event that contributed toward the government’s decision to relax the glyphosate ban was the defeat of the governing coalition, and President Sirisena’s party in particular, in Sri Lanka’s local elections of February 2018. Nationwide, Sirisena’s party received only 12% of the vote, while the newly formed party of former president Mahinda Rajapaksa clearly won the election with 40%. Sirisena’s party even narrowly lost the district of Polonnaruwa, Sirisena’s own electoral district in the heartland of the CKDu epidemic. This crushing defeat put the government “in soul-searching mode, struggling to […] make changes in time to make sure Mr. Rajapaksa’s party does not ride discontent with the government to victory in the presidential election in 2019” (S67). Indeed, soon after the elections, in March 2018, President Sirisena appointed a special committee to study the “glyphosate issue” (S68) and to consider in particular plantation minister Navin Dissanayake’s proposal “to lift the ban on glyphosate for the plantation industry” (S69). While Rathana Thero and Sri Lanka’s health minister, Rajitha Senaratne, continued to strictly oppose any potential relaxation of the ban (S70), and were explicitly invited by Sirisena to be heard by the committee (S71), the establishment of this committee clearly signaled that President Sirisena was open to reconsider his strict stance on glyphosate.

The second focusing event that appears to have contributed toward the government’s decision to relax the glyphosate ban were extensive reports about potential Japanese restrictions on Sri Lankan tea imports, which helped to make economic concerns about the tea sector more salient. This issue, which was first reported in the Sri Lankan media in January 2018 (S72), was about the rejection of several shipments of Sri Lankan tea by Japanese authorities for exceeding the permitted Maximum Residue Levels of the herbicide MCPA, on which Sri Lankan tea planters had purportedly increasingly relied following the glyphosate ban. It is unclear to what extent the government’s glyphosate ban as such (rather than, for instance, poorly planned adaptation by tea planters) was actually responsible for this incidence and how much of an economic problem it really was, given that Japan, in early 2015, was only the ninth largest importer of Sri Lankan tea (S73). But such considerations were not taken into account in most media reports, with one suggesting that “the short sighted decision made by the authorities in banning Glyphosate weedicide in Sri Lanka will result in the loss of another major market for Ceylon Tea in Japan” (S74). The same narrative was supported by the plantation sector and the associated ministry.

Under the impression of the crushing election defeat as well as continued reports about the potential economic repercussions of the glyphosate ban, and in an apparent need to balance the demands of the pro- and anti-glyphosate factions within his government, President Sirisena eventually sought a “compromised approach” (S75). In May 2018, Sirisena’s cabinet decided to lift the glyphosate ban for Sri Lanka’s tea and rubber plantations (S76-77), which essentially followed the recommendation of plantation minister Dissanayake (S55, S78), but only under the relatively strict conditions developed by the above-mentioned special committee. The sectoral exception was to be introduced for “only” 36 months and its implementation was conditional on the development of a “monitoring mechanism” to “prevent misuse and leakage to water sources” (S75, S79). Details of this mechanism were clarified in September 2018 (S80) and controlled importation of glyphosate eventually began in December 2018 (S81).

The Sirisena government made clear, however, that it did not see this decision as a fundamental reversal of its glyphosate ban but rather as a—belatedly introduced—decision to implement it more gradually. According to health minister Rajitha Seneratne, the government still planned to “phase out the use of glyphosate by 2022, emulating similar measures taken by the European Union” (S82). At the same time, more state support for the development of an organic alternative to glyphosate was announced (S83). As of late 2018, where our systematic empirical analysis ends, glyphosate therefore remained banned outside of the tea and rubber sectors and, barring any further changes, Sri Lanka remained on track to (again) become the only country in the world with a complete glyphosate ban.

Sri Lanka’s broader political context has changed dramatically since 2018 [17, 18]. As a result, glyphosate regulation has become deeply enmeshed in broader crisis politics. Following a constitutional crisis in late 2018 and a series of Islamist terror bombings on Easter Sunday 2019, the Sirisena government was severely weakened ahead of upcoming presidential elections [17]. In November 2019, Gotabaya Rajapaksa was elected president, appointing his older brother Mahinda Rajapaksa—himself president from 2005 to 2015—as his prime minister. Ever since 2019, Sri Lanka has been in a deep economic crisis, driven, among other factors, by a series of November 2019 tax cuts and by the tourism-halting Covid-19 pandemic, both of which slashed government revenues (S84).

From the beginning of his presidency, Gotabaya Rajapaksa made clear that he supported strict agrochemical regulation. In his first address to parliament, in January 2020, he announced “plans to encourage Sri Lanka’s entire agriculture sector to shift to using only organic fertilizer within the next decade” (S85). On 27 April 2021, Rajapaksa’s cabinet passed a ban on the importation of all chemical fertilizers and pesticides. But rather than implementing it gradually, this blanket ban became effective almost immediately, on 6 May 2021 (S86-88).

Some observers have claimed that this radical policy shift toward organic agriculture was influenced by the Indian environmental activist Vandana Shiva ([53], S89). While we have not analyzed this policy episode in full detail, it appears that two other factors have contributed more significantly to motivating Sri Lanka’s 2021 agrochemical ban. First and most immediately, the Rajapaksa government apparently saw this large-scale import ban as an opportunity to alleviate foreign-exchange shortage (S90). Second, the Rajapaksa government was advised by the same policy entrepreneurs who had previously pushed for the 2015 glyphosate ban. In particular, Rathana Thero aligned himself with Gotabaya Rajapaksa during the latter's presidential campaign and vowed to “assist the President in achieving his vision” (S91-92). Channa Jayasumana was a member of the presidential task force that advised Rajapaksa on the implementation of the agrochemical ban and would later become a minister in his government (S93-94). This suggests that the 2021 agrochemical ban was driven by similar political forces as the 2015 glyphosate ban, albeit in a markedly different context.

Whatever its political causes were, the abrupt agrochemical ban of 2021 worsened the country’s ongoing economic crisis by impeding local food production and further driving up food prices [46]. The ban was eventually revoked after just 6 months, in November 2021, but the separate glyphosate ban remained in place (S95-96). The economic crisis continued to deepen and Sri Lanka defaulted on its sovereign debt in May 2022 ([18], p. 94). Severe food and fuel shortages triggered mass protests against the government until Gotabaya Rajapaksa was forced to resign and flee the country in July 2022. The government of his parliament-appointed successor, Ranil Wickremesinghe, has since passed a series of reforms focused on economic recovery and food security. These reforms have also included a full reversal of Sri Lanka’s 2015 glyphosate ban in August 2022 (S97-98). For the time being, this marks the end of Sri Lanka’s experiment with highly restrictive glyphosate regulation.