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This week, Thusitha Hadaragama stood in a corner store near his home in Sri Lanka’s Minuwangoda town, surveying groceries to buy for his family of five, including two school-age children, who live on his basic salary of 50,000 rupees ($181.82). “Prices have risen once more. I’ll buy a small amount “said the 43-year-old driver, who works in Colombo, Sri Lanka’s commercial capital, 40 kilometers away. “We’ll have to eat half of what we were eating before.” Families across Sri Lanka, including Hadaragama’s, are feeling the growing pain of the country’s worst financial downturn in years, which has driven up prices for necessities and caused shortages of everything from food to fuel. Historically poor government finances, poorly timed tax cuts, and the COVID-19 pandemic, which devastated the tourism industry and foreign remittances, have all wreaked havoc on the economy.
As of February, the country had only about $2.31 billion in foreign reserves, despite the fact that it faces debt payments of about $4 billion for the rest of the year. “The reason for the shortages is not a scarcity of any commodity, but a scarcity of dollars,” said Dhananath Fernando, chief operating officer of the Colombo think tank Advocate Institute. After months of defiance, Sri Lanka’s government announced last week that it would begin talks with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to find a solution to the crisis. India and China have also offered assistance to the 22 million-person country. However, for ordinary Sri Lankans, daily chores have become a nightmare. Hadaragama now has to stand in long lines and pay more than double for a liter of petrol than he did three months ago.
At home, his wife, Varuni, has reduced the amount of food she cooks for her family of two teenage boys and a daughter.
“I cooked three potatoes earlier,” she explained. “Now I only make two.”
