Sri Lanka has less than $50 million in usable foreign currency reserves left, Finance Minister Ali Sabry told the nation’s parliament on Wednesday. Less than 50 million dollars with which to import medicines, foods, fuel, and cooking gas, already in acute scarcity, for 22 million Sri Lankans. This, he said, is the worst economic crisis we have faced since gaining independence from the British in 1948.
Children will die. Having no funds, the government has cut the budget for free school meals by two-thirds, enough for only one school term, at most. According to Save the Children, one million children—one in four students in the country—rely on free school meals to eat. And increasingly so, as the cost of such basic food items as rice and oil have skyrocketed by 195% over the past month alone, forcing many schools to already stop serving meals, at the same time.
