By Robert Willmann
Sri Lanka has become a laboratory of what happens when a country is loaded with debt, and starts running short of fuel and food. Demonstrations have been ongoing for a few months, and since the economic situation did not improve, the protests increased in size and activity. Finally, on Saturday, 9 July 2022, protesters drove the president out of his house and took a tour of it themselves–
Price inflation has been rising fast: 54.6 percent over the last 12 months while food prices are up 80.1 percent–
As if on cue, in comes the International Monetary Fund, also known as the International Monkey Business Fund (IMF), rubbing its hands together with glee. An IMF staff was in Sri Lanka from 20-30 June 2022, and its press release contained the usual gobbledegook and euphemisms, but did make one thing clear: “Because public debt is assessed as unsustainable, Executive Board approval would require adequate financing assurances from Sri Lanka’s creditors that debt sustainability will be restored”–
http://www.imf.org/en/News/Articles/2022/06/30/pr22242-imf-staff-concludes-visit-to-sri-lanka
According to the IMF’s country report, number 22/91, released in March 2022, the public debt of Sri Lanka at the end of 2019 totalled $77,343,000,000 US dollars (14,048,000,000,000 Rupees), and at the end of 2020 it was $88,364,000,000 US dollars (16,472,000,000,000 Rupees). Sri Lanka is bankrupt.
According to the U.S. Treasury Department, the total outstanding public debt of the United States as of 7 July 2022 is $30,506,236,341,875.02. That is in dollars, not rupees.
Politicians and bureaucrats in the U.S. and in the awful European Union have been making domestically destructive edicts for the last two years. They should take note of Sri Lanka. People will tolerate being jerked around by political entities to a surprising degree. But when they have difficulty being able to eat and move around, things change.
I might suggest that Sri Lanka provides an object lesson in what happens when a corrupt crime family takes over a country and runs it for their personal benefit.
100%!
100%
Plus a corrupt press!
I was just watching a video with narration of Sri Lankans storming government buildings. It pointed out that the Netherlands might be next with their farmers blocking streets in protest. The late chef Julia Child once stated years ago that starvation would come from this kind of farming mandate.
Our ruling class in Europe want 1 in 3 of us dead and a return to feudalism.
joe90
Absolutely right and not just in Europe. The sooner the general population wises up to this fact the better. With a bit of luck it will end with the widespread recognition that phrases like “Stakeholder Capitalism” and “Build Back Better” are just fancy terms for the reintroduction of feudalism – and with 1 in 3 of the ruling class dead. That should slow them down a bit.
The American government might very well want about a third of us dead, depending on who happens to be governing, to determine which third can be disposed of. Until then, to show the displeasure of the current regime against so many of us, our southern border has been thrown wide open.
Sri Lanka has run out of hard currency to purchase fuel, food and other imports. There are many reasons why including the endemic political corruption (no different from all other countries including US), the covid global shutdown that killed tourism which represented a big chunk of hard currency receipts, and the growth in hard currency borrowing and refinancing of existing foreign debt as rates kept being pushed down by central bankers to fuel financial asset speculation.
They’ve also been slowly giving up sovereignty. They borrowed from the Chinese under BRI to construct a major container port. The corruption both internally and with the Chinese construction contractors caused the cost to go well beyond originally budgeted. Then the projected revenues didn’t materialize and they defaulted on the Chinese loans and gave up sovereignty of the port to the Chinese.
So there’s many factors that have brought Sri Lanka to where it is now. The key lesson to be learned for us is to examine what do we actually manufacture in the US. Take a look at the shelves at Target, Walmart, Home Depot? What about medicines? What about other critical materials like steel, semiconductors, etc? We have run massive and growing trade deficits for decades. Our Congress and State legislatures think money is something that can be conjured up at will and have put it all on the back of future generations. They have to grapple with the mounting debt and unfunded liabilities in pensions, healthcare and other obligations. People in other countries, mostly in Asia are willing for now to take our paper for real goods and services. What happens when they don’t?
This is not only an issue for us but for every country. Look what’s happening in Holland, where their government wants to kill the production volume of the second largest food producer in the world, putting farmers who have been at it for generations out of business. In the west at least a significant cause of our difficult predicament are own goals as we have focused on culture wars rather than the bread & butter basics of governance & policy.
Coming to a theater near you: “Georgia Guidestones Now Completely Demolished Just Hours After Explosion”
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/georgia-guidestones-now-completely-demolished-just-hours-after-explosion
Welcome to the NW… LW…Great Reset…
The elephant in the room is the financial system couldn’t function, without the government borrowing up trillions in essentially surplus investment money. The secret sauce of capitalism is public debt backing private wealth.
Econ 101 says money is both medium of exchange and store of value, but one is dynamic and the other is static. Blood is a medium, fat is a store. Roads are a medium, parking lots are a store.
The problem is that nature is cyclical, circular, reciprocal and feedback generated, while people are linear and goal oriented, so while markets need money to circulate, people see it as signal to extract and store. Requiring ever more to be added and ever more metastatic methods of storing what has been extracted.
Since it functions as a contract, where the asset is backed by the debt, storing the asset requires generating sufficient debt.
The functionality of money is its fungibility, so we own it like we own the section of road we are on, or the air and water flowing through our bodies. It is a public utility, like roads. It’s not our picture on it, we don’t hold the copyrights and are not responsible for its value, like a personal check.
Consider that back in the day, people would raise their children and be taken care of in old age. Now we have retirement accounts and the kids have piles of debt. The fact is, there isn’t enough investment potential for everyone to save individually, but we do save for many of the same reasons, so the public commons would be a logical solution.
The problem is that a healthy society is built on responsibility, with rights as reward, but our culture views rights as universal, while responsibilities are extremely optional.
Consequently our current global Tragedy of the Commons.
Self government relies on self discipline and delayed gratification.
Not exactly traits promoted by our culture.
Though it might be more a balance between gratification and judgement. Heart and head.
Sri Lanka’s economic culminating point has been reached. No IMF/WB/NGO head or other bureaucrat has lost their jobs because their advice and guidance brought this nation to its current circumstances.
Whoever takes over in Sri Lanka should invite the IMF and WB heads to Colombo to discuss payments. Then arrest the lot of them. Then repudiate the debt.
The western oligarchy is playing with war, pestilence and famine to make more money. From Elon Musk and Bill Gates to Janet Yellen and Jay Powell, they are frolicking with atomic fires.
Sri Lanka is what happens when debt cannot be paid. Unnoticed, the coronavirus pandemic has plateaued at approximately 330 deaths a day from COVID in the USA with a new variant surge possible due to the failure of the public health system (the for-profit mRNA vaccines do not prevent transmission). Shortages of natural gas, diesel, workers, and goods (i.e. baby formula) has triggered inflation that cannot be controlled by raising interest rates. The industrial death and destruction of the artillery trench warfare between NATO’s proxy Ukraine and Russia will only end in an armistice or a nuclear holocaust.
It should not be forgotten that the reasons Sri Lanker is low on food, is due to their government going green, outlawing the use of fertiliser and insisting on “sustainable” farming. Yeah, well that can work if you are willing to kill 30% of your population by starvation. Which is what is happening.
joe90,
For once we’re in near 100% agreement. The Sri Lankan government banned the importation of synthetic fertilizer with catastrophic results. Agricultural yields dropped precipitously. The use of manure and cover crops were no substitute for the synthetic fertilizer. There’s an excellent article on this by Ted Nordhaus and the Breakthrough Institute.
https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/03/05/sri-lanka-organic-farming-crisis/
The Sri Lankan government weren’t looking for sustainable farming. They were looking for the same output in both agricultural exports and food production as with synthetic fertilizer. It’s not going to happen unless crop types and farming methods are matched to the environmental conditions. If such a scheme ever worked, there would be no cash crops for world trade and the population may be reduced to subsistence farming. The NWO cannot survive in a world like that.
TTG,
Is it the “green” agenda or the lack of hard currency that forced them to limit fertilizer imports?
Sam,
This was a green agenda move that was implemented 10 years ago. It was dropped in 2019 allowing synthetic fertilizer to be imported, but no subsidies were offered. Their defaulting on loans from China had more to do with the present crisis. The organic gardening experiment surely didn’t help.
Got that wrong. The green agenda was started in 2019. The ban on synthetic fertilizer was lifted in November 2021. Sri Lanka managed to destroy her agricultural sector in only a few short years. The ban on synthetic fertilizer saved around 500 million dollars a year, but ended up costing much more.
TTG,
“Green Agenda” aka Climate change is real! This is the result. The Sri Lankan’s now own nothing and are not happy. If only Sri Lanka had created the digital currency earlier they could have locked the population down, too. The rich buy @ BlackRock knows what the social good is, and people will be getting it good and hard if he gets his way. “There is no need for hard currency” …”Focus on the social need of why we need digital currency”
https://twitter.com/backtolife_2023/status/1546100435089592320
“organic gardening”
Why do you insist on such propaganda? That wasn’t an organic garden idea but the entire agricultural industry in the country.
Fred,
Organic gardening was a big part of this failed Sri Lankan plan. Viyathmaga’s plan called for the development of two million organic home gardens to supplement the local food supply. That worked in a number of East European countries when they were forced into collectivization. The small plots tended by collective workers/farmers in their spare time kept communities alive while the collectives failed.
TTG,
What a crock. Sri Lanka’s SJW guided paradise has led to a revolution. God help those who might wind up starving. But please tell me more about how small organic farms that saved Eastern Europe after collectivization failed (please leave out all the dead kulaks), and how that is going to save Sri Lanka’s poor from Big Ag and GMO seeds and all the rest. It will make great bedside reading when I need a refreshing fantasy adventure story to give me sweet dreams of a green future.
Fred,
Organic is what farming was before Big Ag took over. Big Ag ended up sterilizing the soil of Sri Lanka and replace heritage crop seed with GMO seed. If Sri Lanka wanted to go organic agriculture, it would have taken a generational program to first repair the Big Ag damage. If they wanted millions of family gardens, it would have taken an educational program starting in first grade. You can’t take a bunch of office workers, give them a few packets of seeds and expect them to successfully till, plant and tend victory gardens. The peasantry of Eastern Europe never lost those skills. They successfully grew food and raised animals on small plots around their houses or on plots around their villages separate from the collectives. I did my masters thesis on this.
TTG,
Thanks for leaving out the kulaks. I’m glad you did your masters on growing food with manure. What population level does that support, a couple billion less that what earth has now?
“You can’t take a bunch of office workers, give them a few packets of seeds and expect them to successfully till, plant and tend victory gardens. ”
Did FDR wait a dozen years for the training to take effect to get results from victory gardens?
Sri Lanka’s government listened to people with academic training just like yours, it hasn’t turned out well for them; though I suspect a bunch of thier politicians with foreign assets will wind up here, just like Ilhan Omar’s father did after working for that man that ran Somolia into the ground.
It was the green agenda, they spent less importing fertilizer and growing their own food than importing the food they could not grow, due to lack of imported fertilizer.
Could they have not built their own fertilizer industry and saved more, sure but that was against the green agenda. Now they are paying the price for an evil/stupid ideology. They wont be the last, Europe will pay this winter. It is easy to believe lies, not so easy to feed yourself on lies. People will learn or people will die, such is the way of things.
Hard to grasp that concept for an old fart like me. As a boy in the 1950s it was my job to tow the manure spreader up and down the south and west forty. But that was just a small New England farm so did not need a huge yield. The only cash crops were raising a few calves for sale in the veal market, and some occasional timber sledded out in the winter. Even grandma’s kitchen garden did not use store bought fertilizer, just kitchen scraps IIRC. Although I suspect she may have cheated by using a touch of bone meal on her tiger lilies, which seemed were always ‘best of show’.
And in 1960/61 in Japan I recall the Honey Bucket trucks collecting human waste from benjo ditches to fertilize rice fields. Vietnamese farmers also used human waste in their rice fields when I was there in the mid and late 1960s. But they applied it directly so they had a huge tapeworm problem, unlike the Japanese who let it ferment a while before application on the fields.
Times are changing. Sometimes for the better, sometimes not.
The Chines and Europeans called it night soil. My grandfather had a farm, as I do but different type, we had some milk cows and used the waste on the land but there is only so much an animal produces. Wheat and rice requires a lot of energy that must come from somewhere, the land can only produce a set amount, so you make a choice, add energy or have a small crop. No way around that.
Organic farming is low intensity farming, no way around that. I do some organic farming myself, it works for me at home. If everyone did that food prices would be 3-5 times higher. Organic is a time sink luxury. It also uses much more land, so if you care about wildlife you should be against it. But most people like being ignorant, it´s easier than learning.
Oh just to add, your granny almost certainly did buy in stuff, just called food, not fertiliser. Bone meal is worth paying for.
Making your own compost is not viable for most people, I do it since I have the land but it is not viable for an average family, I´m getting 750kg delivered this month. I doubt I could create that in 10 years. The only way to create a lot of compost is to waste a lot of food, it all needs to be grown first.
joe90,
Another vital element destroyed by agrochemicals, both synthetic fertilizer and pesticides, is the natural biofertilizer of microbes. Good soil is alive, but you probably know that. Big Ag and the green revolution kills the soil with its agrochemicals. Sure the green revolution increased yields tremendously but at the expense of making farmers beholden to Big Ag for GMO seed and agrochemicals. Its as much a part of the NWO as the rest of the international banking and trade schemes.
leith,
I remember our neighbor’s McCormick manure spreader well. Good old cow shit is what kept things growing on the Petrauskas farm. He’d let us have a few wheel barrows full of it for our gardens in exchange for my help in his fields and wood lot. We’s supplement that with water from our cesspool. I’m sure that will send many to their fainting couches.
Neither the Petrauskas farm nor our home gardens used chemical pesticides either. We’d hoe the weeds and pick the bugs.
I remember the honey wagons used in Germany spreading what I referred to as fermented bull piss. That was pungent. During one Flintlock exercise, my team stole the aggressor battalion commander’s jeep. We let one of the farmers we befriended use it to spread some of that fermented bull piss before we gave the jeep back. The LTC couldn’t say much because he also left his CEOI in the jeep.
TTG
We clearly disagree on some thing´s;
” We’s supplement that with water from our cesspool. I’m sure that will send many to their fainting couches.”
LMAO, yeah. Remember when I was a child we went on a school outing to a farm and everyone went “eewh, this smells bad”, I was there thinking “oh it smells like fresh eaten grass, nice”
“Another vital element destroyed by agrochemicals, both synthetic fertilizer and pesticides, is the natural biofertilizer of microbes. ”
100% agree, you burn everything out there, that lives there then you become dependent. Land laws need to be changed. We live in a fallen world. Run by clowns.
Such a lush, beautiful island. Hard to believe with such soil, sunshine and rain it cannot continue to be a very fertile country. Perhaps tea should not be its main crop; but food stuffs instead. At least for their own people. But when has Sri Lanka not teetered on the brink of civil breakdown for decades for one reason or another? First it was the British, then the Tamil separatists. Now China bankrupting them with economic terrorism? There is no road map for good government.
Deap,
Without the application of 500 million dollars worth of synthetic fertilizer every year, the Sri Lankan countryside is obviously not that fertile. Or the crops they are growing are not suited for that soil.
They like most of the global south were encourages to produce export crops and import (from US/Europe) food crops, nice system of control. SR is one of the few countries who hasn´t learnt, you need to grow your own food if you wont to feed yourself.
Better to spend 10% more and not starve. This is the real reason the Japanese still insist on growing their own rice. You die quickly without food.
Deap –
I agree. Sri Lanka (or forever known to me as Ceylon) had been growing rice successfully for three millennia before they started using synthetic fertilizers. You can blame the current problems on their adaptation of high yield varieties, many of them gene-modified, that require heavy doses of chemical fertilizer. The local historical varieties survived and thrived without synthetics and they also did not need pesticides. You are also right on point about tea. But many other cash crops were promoted by the idiots in their government, ergo reducing agricultural acreage for rice and other staples.
And whatever happened to the $1.5 billion loan Xi Jinping promised to Sri Lanka? Maybe he no longer needs the huge port he built there for his belt-and-road or so called string-of-pearls in the Indian Ocean.
Leith,
The Sri Lankan’s didn’t listen to ‘idiots’, they listened to Nobel Prize winning Economists like Joseph Stiglizt. Here’s his advice from 2016:
https://www8.gsb.columbia.edu/faculty/jstiglitz/sites/jstiglitz/files/Sri%20Lanka’s%20Rebirth.pdf
“Twenty-first century development strategies need to be different. They should be based on learning… Given its education levels, Sri Lanka may be able to move directly into more technologically advanced sectors, high‐productivity organic farming, and higher‐end tourism.”
“Sri Lanka, beautiful and ideally located in the Indian Ocean, is in a position to become an economic hub for the entire region …. But this won’t happen by relying excessively on markets….”
I’m sure that whoever takes power in Sri Lanka has “learned” never to trust the IMF, the World Bank and a lot of NGOs and their lefty backers.
Fred –
Perhaps you are right. But that is just part of the story. Fifty or sixty years ago Sri Lanka also listened to bad advice from another Nobel Prize winner. Agronomist Norman Borlaug, and his acolytes, were the ones promoting the so-called Green Revolution. That was supposed to save the world from starvation. Instead it destroyed traditional rice and wheat varieties – heritage plants that had adapted to local climate and soil conditions over thousands of years were wiped out. The new varieties in Sri Lanka and here and elsewhere require massive amounts of synthetic fertilizer, herbicide, and pesticide.
That set the stage for economists like your Stiglitz and the IMF and World Bank to demand changes, which ultimately decimated Sri Lankan agriculture. Plus it destroyed American family farms and instead gave us corporate agriculture, Monsanto, ethanol, high fructose corn syrup, mad cow disease, pink slime, and synthetic growth hormones, in beef, pork, & poultry.
By the way, starvation never went away despite Borlaug, Stiglitz, and the IMF.
leith,
” Borlaug helped to develop the high-yield, low-pesticide dwarf wheat upon which a substantial portion of the world’s population now depends for sustenance. And though Borlaug’s achievements are arguably the greatest that Ford or Rockefeller has ever funded, both foundations have retreated from the last effort of Borlaug’s long life: the attempt to bring high-yield agriculture to Africa.”
How dare that guy save all those lives that would have died via famine without his work! He, okay maybe the ‘Green Revolution’, wiped out all those heritage seeds! (Seed genocide?). I’ll take your word for it. What population level did that support? The one with famines every few years?
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1997/01/forgotten-benefactor-of-humanity/306101/
“…it destroyed American family farms and instead gave us corporate agriculture, Monsanto, ethanol, high fructose corn syrup, mad cow disease, pink slime, and synthetic growth hormones, in beef, pork, & poultry.”
If only we had elected representatives who enacted laws and set regulatory policy. I’m sure Joe Biden will save us once the Democrats retain power in the November elections.
Fred –
I thought that figure of a million (or was it a billion) lives saved by Borlaug was from Greg Easterbrook’s article in the Atlantic? Well known lefties – both the man and the magazine. When did you start listening to radicals?
Seed genocide? Hardly. It’ll end up being a Sri Lankan human genocide, which never would have happened if they were still planting more traditional crops for that area.
Borlaug’s hi-yield dwarf no-pesticide wheat for Mexico didn’t work out well. They import much of the flour for their tortillas and gorditas from Kansas. What little they do raise they have to put four or five more pounds of fertilizer per acre than they do in Kansas or SD. BTW it needs pesticide no matter what Borlaug claimed.
leith,
“heritage plants that had adapted to local climate and soil conditions over thousands of years were wiped out. ”
That’s where I got inspired to say “seed genocide”.
“Borlaug’s hi-yield dwarf no-pesticide wheat for Mexico didn’t work out well. They import much of the flour for their tortillas and gorditas from Kansas. ”
NAFTA is what destroyed the Mexican farmers. It sure didn’t hurt any of their, or our, politicians or bankers.
” higher‐end tourism”
LMAO, anyone who say tourism is the way forward is an idiot or a liar, you can only increase you standard of living by increasing what you make.
What you are saying is you should be servants to the rich, what next ? prostitution?
It was an IMF/WB policy for the third world to produce cash crops and buy food crops from the west. That was their advice for 50 years. Stupid and evil, but there you go. Most of the world has worked out the con, Sri Lanker for what ever reasons didn´t. People who do stupid thing will be punished by reality. Shame but reality has no emotion.
Tamils were supported by the British, as for China, could you prove what you say!
Joe 90 –
IMF/WB dictating third world agricultural policy is as bad or probably worse than the Soviet central planning that starved millions.
As for China/Sri Lanka, Deap is correct. The Chinese banks are just as bad as the IMF. There have been plenty of reports of China building development in third world countries which ended up putting those countries into a form of debt slavery at the national level. And Xi’s promised-but-never-given loan has been in the news. Why should I prove it? Just look it up. I’m sure you can find the proof, unless you believe it is all a grand worldwide conspiracy perpetrated by the western press against China.
My Gramps was just a farmer. If you called him an ‘organic farmer’, he might have taken it as an insult since he probably would not have come across the word organic previously. I don’t think I heard the term myself until I was about 40 years old, I’ll turn 80 this year. But then I’ve never been a farmer. I just worked on farms, that one and others when I was young.
And yes, Granny did buy flour, sugar, canning supplies, some dried salted beef and cod, and other staples. Plus her brother up in Aroostook County raised potatoes and always dropped off a hundred pound sack to her and another sack to each of her three daughters. I never meant to imply that farm was completely self sufficient. BTW, what makes bone meal so worthwhile as a fertilizer?
leith,
Bonemeal is an organic fertilizer that’s a staple when planting flower bulbs. That’s when I use it. It’s a slow release source of phosphorus, nitrogen and calcium and also increases the biome load in the soil. Around here you need to use lime to keep the pH down for the bonemeal to work at its best.
TTG –
I’ll try some on SWMBO’s gladiolas.
Leith,
Precisely. A significant portion of my youth was spent on a farm, and every farmer who has paid the bill for petroleum based fertilizers has seriously contemplated alternatives. No grand conspiracy theory is required to account for that.
“Why should I prove it?”
Really, well so you can prove that you understand what you are saying. Prove to yourself you are not deluded and speaking nonsense. Is that a reasonable reason?
SR debt to China is 10% it´s debt to Japan is 11%, it´s debt to western banks is 45%, who is doing the debt trap? See facts or if you like proof is useful!
“And Xi’s promised-but-never-given loan”
That would be the loan that would have got SR into a debt trap, so bad China for not doing that!
“My Gramps was just a farmer.”
Yes most people at that time were but unlike me, you are not. I worked in MacDonald’s but I don´t assume I can run a chain restaurant just because I learnt to flip burgers.
Bone meal is simply a dense fertilize, a compact nutrition/energy source that the plant can take out easily. Fish heads would be just as good but it takes longer to release the nutrients/energy.
If you make your own compost it take 6-9 months to get anything worth while and honestly, best spend a year. Yeah there are a lot of if and but´s but bone mean is ready done. I have bought fresh hoarse manure and give it 5 years to break down and compact (I have the land and time, 3 years it´s good 5 is great). Bone meal is ready to go. Someone else has done all the work for you.
Bone meal is like going to a good restaurant, you could learn to do it yourself but sometimes you just want it done by someone else.
Politicians and bureaucrats in the US and The West may well have read this estimate by this fellow working for the UN on the utility of hunger to improve productivity, since the whole energy, food and financial crisis in The West is totally self inflicted by these elites….
https://web.archive.org/web/20220706041616/https://www.un.org/en/chronicle/article/benefits-world-hunger
But, as the illustrative case of Sri Lanka shows, politicians and bureaucrats in the Us and The West, along these theorists from the UN, forget the Spartacus factor and that the masses faced with nothing to lose and a life in slavery and even slavery + hunger more than productivity at wotk increase as well productivity in ousting and highly likely terminating those at the top inflicting such situation on them out of necessity….
The farmers in most of the EU have already reached the obvious conclusion that there is no planet worth to conservate without them in it, just the same conclusion Putin reached abput Russia.
The farmers in the EU, and sooner than later other peoples at other occupations too, will get that no climate chnage is due their economic activity, that if such a climate chnage would be ongoing no elite element would own a seaside villa, and thus will take measures to asure their own survival…
The current elite in the EU, as in Sri Lanka will not be an obstacle to that…
Sri Lanka was offered by his former government as playground for accelerating ecofascist policies which implied the starving of the peoples on beahlf of the extracting elite of the West…It showed the results that are to expect…
I can not wait for the moment when Ursula Von der Leyen, Macron, Dragui or Trudeau run through the tarmac losing in the way cases full of dollars and euros as foremr president Ghani in Afghanistan….
I guess they will stop laughing at the masses at that point as they have done during at least the past two years….Wondering which of them will be able to get into the jet to scape and which will be caught by the hungry and dirty ( since they obligue the citizenry to not have showers so that to refuse cheap Russia gas…) masses…