Cost-of-living crunch threatens to sink millions already facing hard choices — Global Issues

Long before the country defaulted on its international debt for the first time in May 2022 and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which increased the country’s problems, Nagamma tea workers cut their meals, when global trade froze in time Coronavirus pandemic.

Blood, sweat and leeches

Her precarious situation in the central highlands of Sri Lanka has not changed, but not for the sake of trying.

“We work even when it rains and while the leeches suck our blood,” she said, looking out from her workers’ bungalow at the 100-acre plantation where she began her work. at the age of 14. “We can’t afford chicken, fish or any other meat. We only eat vegetables and leaves. It is very difficult for us to send our children to school and even provide them with proper meals. We are going through a very difficult time.”

Dressed in a tattered plastic wrap around her tiny waist, barista style, and an oversized coat more like a sponge than a rain shield, the 38-year-old mother of four heads into the plantation to catch the beginning of her eight-hour shift.

Bring a family

At best, Nagamma can hope to earn $3 a day as a tea picker, assuming she meets her daily quota of 16 to 20 kilograms of leaves – the equivalent of two bags. full load. But rising prices mean she can buy less than half of the rice and flour she used to buymaking it more difficult than ever to feed her 10 relatives in her cramped cottage.

“Nutritional foods like vegetables, fruits, high protein diets are simply simply out of reach. We need to act now to ensure that this situation does not get worse,” said Rushini Perrera, Head of Resilience, Preparedness, Response and Social Protection at Chapter UN World Food Program (WFP).

“The latest surveys indicate that this is continuing to escalate, with households not consuming enough of the diet across the country.”

Health check

In addition to the lack of regular nutritious food, fuel and medicine continue to be supply shortage worrying.

In June, UN agencies and partners responded to the Government’s request for international assistance with a call to help the humanitarian community reach more than one million of Sri Lanka’s most vulnerable people. cash, food, school meals, medicine, protection and livelihood support, and aims to raise a total of $149.7 million to reach 3.4 million people in need.

As Sri Lankans turned on the news on TV to watch President Ranil Wickremesinghe publicly pledge that “no one should starve to death” during the food security crisis looming next year, aid groups also expressed deeply concerned about the direct impact of food, fuel and medicine shortages on the next generation of Sri Lankans.

“We have 215,000 women will give birth from June to December 2022. This is a large part of women who need support with medication and care,” explains Kunle Adeniyi, UN Population Fund (UNFPA).UNFPA) Country Representative in Sri Lanka.

Reserve medicine

Pointing to “serious difficulties” in maintaining vital mother and baby outreach activities to remote communities because of the fuel crisis earlier this year, Mr Adeniyi warned that many the drug ran out “since the challenges began” in March 2022.

Also worrisome are the signs that family is “losing” health because they can’t go to medical facilities either, or because fuel costs are high, or because they’re working to make ends meet.

“(Vulnerable Sri Lankans) need to be able to access health facilities to ensure that we don’t reverse the great gains we have made in terms of health,” Adeniyi said. Maternal health in Sri Lanka. “Women’s lives don’t stop there.”

Fuel disappointment

That need for urgent action also became a reality in the capital Colombo, where months of electricity and fuel shortages have led to mass protests and deadly fuel riots, prompting President Gotabaya Rajapaksa to had to leave the country on July 13 and resign. He returned to the island in early September.

Today, many Sri Lankans share their frustration at the scale of the country’s problems and their impact on everyday life – not least the country’s tricycle taxi owners. The government has just doubled the weekly petrol quota for taxi drivers from 5 liters to 10 liters; For drivers like Kumar in Colombo, it’s a positive development that can’t come too soon.

“The economy has collapsed a lot, before pointing to the lack of Western tourists, which many are linked to the terrorist attacks on Easter Sunday in 2019,” he explained. like back in the day, people don’t hire us, price has increased so they can’t afford to go with us anymore. We also cannot reduce the price, the price of gasoline is extremely high, and we have our own children to look after them, and we have to buy books and furniture for them.”

Back at the tea farm in Ramboda, occasionally a group of Western tourists visit the factory and learn about how the beverage is made.

Original recipe

The seven-stage production process – a noisy and fragrant combination of drying, coating, rolling, grinding and grading – has changed little in the 100 years since the factory opened. The large volume of hot air required to dry the leaves bursts from the wood-burning furnace; it was one of several decades old wrought-metal machines operated according to a secret passed down from father to son.

Snapshots and travel reports of the lush rainforest surrounding the old factory abound on visitors’ social media accounts. But everyday reality is far from idyllic for Nagamma and the hundreds of thousands of tea plantation workers in the hills like hers, many of them descended from migrant workers who arrived from India between 1837 and 1939, to work on the fields. Sri Lanka’s coffee, tea and rubber plantations.

Repetitive stress

Seeing Nagamma hard at work – barefoot on a steep hillside – any preconceptions that tea picking is a gentle activity quickly dissipated.

With one swift and powerful movement of her arm, she wrung out the fresh shoots from the waist-high tea bushes, before shoving them into the large sack on her back. Weeds and broken branches must be identified and removed, and workers must be careful when they negotiate the narrow aisles of the property on their flip flops, especially when they turn to mud during storms. rain earlier this year.

Nagamma explains that one of the problems with working in wet weather is the sharp leaves that often suck blood on fingers that are softened by rain and repeated plucking.

Dismissal

There is no shortage of challenges for Nagamma’s owner, who owns privately owned Blue Field tea, has been force it to drastically reduce its workforcedown to 150.

In the better days, it employed 250 workers, but that was before a nationwide ban on chemical fertilizers, pesticides and other agricultural essentials took effect in March 2021, making production more difficult. volume and profits dropped dramatically.

Despite the government ban, damage has been done and Sri Lanka’s agricultural sector has struggled to fully recover. That is in large part due to hyperinflation that has pushed the prices of fertilizers and seeds out of reach for many, which in turn leads to less harvests, but also the chronic lack of investment in modern machinery. .

Farmers get prices

At the height of the crisis, vegetable growers like Soita had to find 45,000 rupees for a 50-kilogram bag of fertilizer, he recalls. Today, the price has dropped back to Rs 25,0000, but that figure is still about 17 times higher than in better times, said the barefoot farmer, as he mixed the precious roses into the heavy soil at the plot. yourself, with the help of a simple pickaxe.

Customer relations officer Abdull Bary Mursheed said: “September was a particularly difficult month for the 100-year-old tea factory. disastrous level of productions – from 2.5 tonnes to just one ton per day – to chronic fuel shortages, fertilizer shortages and prolonged power cuts.

“It is a huge difference,” said Mr. Abdull Bary, worried for the future of the factory, as the younger generation knows they can earn twice as much outside the Nuwara Eliya area, including on the public construction school.

“Most of the employees… are looking for work outside. And the future, I do not know; the problem is, we can’t find staff here. ”