Explainer: What Happened to Sri Lanka's Economy?

VOA looks at the collapse of the Sri Lankan economy.

There is always a long line waiting to enter at the dozens of community kitchens that have been set up in Sri Lanka by nonprofits and charities in recent months.

“Even today we had to turn back some people after serving over 300 meals,” Moses Akash, national director at the Voice for Voiceless Foundation in Colombo, which opened 12 community kitchens in June as runaway inflation made food unaffordable for millions, told VOA.

“People are desperate. For example, one family pushes their mother in a wheelchair for 5 kilometers to come. Some are surviving with only one meal,” he said.

These sorts of initiatives are lessening hardship for many as Sri Lanka grapples with a devastating economic meltdown. Akash said their kitchens feed about 1,800 people daily.

Those efforts, though, can barely meet a fraction of the massive needs in a country where over a quarter of its 22 million people do not have access to adequate food, according to the World Food Program.

“Around 6.3 million people in Sri Lanka are food insecure. That means they are not able to access nutritious diet on a regular basis, out of which around 5.3 million people are either reducing meals or skipping meals,” Abdur Rahim Siddiqui, WFP’s Sri Lanka country director, said in an interview with VOA.

www.voanews.com/a/nearly-one-quarter-of-sri-lanka-grapples-with-food-shortages/6688227.html

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