[dredmorbius]

As the Vox article you link notes:

According to one estimate, the president’s agrochemical ban was poised to save Sri Lanka the $400 million it was spending yearly on synthetic fertilizer, money it could use toward increasing imports of other goods. But Rajapaksa also argued that chemical fertilizers and pesticides were leading to “adverse health and environmental impacts” and that such industrial farming methods went against the country’s heritage of “sustainable food systems.”

And:

“Sri Lanka started subsidizing fertilizers in the 1960s and we saw that rice yields tripled,” says Saloni Shah, a food and agriculture analyst at the Breakthrough Institute, a US-based environmental nonprofit that advocates for technological solutions.

https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2022/7/15/23218969/sri-la...

The goal was cost savings. It proved misled.

But again, the snowballing economic and fiscal crisis prompted the ban, rather than the other way around.