Here is an excerpt from an interview given to Channel News Asia radio.
Can you give us an overview of the economic difficulties faced by women?
Projections are for Sri Lanka’s economy to shrink by 10% of GDP this year, resulting in a negative growth rate. Economic experts from the University of Peradeniya have established that the poverty rate is now at 42%. That’s almost half the population. This is what we are dealing with, this is the reality across the country.
I think it is women who are paying the heaviest price for the economic crisis, but more importantly for what we are dealing with here, I think it is still women who will suffer the most from the measures proposed in response to the crisis , in particular austerity measures.
How about we take a step back? In fact, you say that in the east of the country, it’s not just about what’s happening now, but that it’s also about the cumulative effect of previous events, including the war and the past crises. Are we facing the worst possible scenario for women in recent decades?
In cumulative terms, yes. As you said, to give an example, many women and men are now disabled due to war, injuries, etc., so we support women living with disabilities. They are marginalized in society, and receive very little assistance from the state, and now, with the economic crisis, they are deprived of basic services.
People do not have access to basic transport services because the cost of transport has increased by more than 150%. They cannot access healthcare centers or pursue the small economic activities they used to carry out. The cumulative impact is visible: large-scale hunger and malnutrition of women and girls because people are unable to eat nutritious food.
The general secretary of the Ceylon Teachers’ Union, Joseph Stalin, explains: "People can barely eat three meals a day, and this Government has done nothing to help them except is to impose increasingly heavy taxes on them. We need solutions, and we will continue to fight for them.” Have you had the opportunity to discuss it with your sisters in the collective and think about solutions?
Yes, we have strong demands, including that of a universal public food distribution system. Neither monetary aid, nor targeted aid, because that makes no sense in the midst of rampant inflation – we say that all schools should serve children a meal in the middle of the day.
One in seven children has dropped out of school because the children are hungry, so this is our first demand. In our collective, we also think about women setting up collective agricultural production processes. This is a huge challenge because agriculture in Sri Lanka has relied on the use of chemical fertilizers for over 40 years, and it is not something that can be changed overnight.
Even if you want to have collective production, there are a lot of obstacles at the outset, but that’s what women’s groups in rural economies do: they help each other, they produce together and they share the food. It’s far from easy, but that’s the strategy they follow.
Can you tell us about the main economic activities of women in rural areas?
Most women in Sri Lanka work in the informal sector and have no labor rights; there is also a high percentage of women involved in the agricultural economy. Where I live, in the east of the country, women work mainly in agriculture, lagoon fishing and fishing-related activities.
Furthermore, due to our economic policies, many women have emigrated to work in the Middle East. Moreover, in accordance with the economic policies applied after the war by successive governments, women also went to work in garment factories. New factories were set up as part of the post-war recovery strategy. All of these industries exploit the labor force of women, and this has been driving the Sri Lankan economy for a while, even before the onset of the current economic crisis.
The exploitation of women’s labor is also what will support the recovery process, given that the remittances come from female migrant workers and textile workers, and that sending workers to the Middle East is at the heart of the current government’s strategy. They are relaxing different labor regulations to allow more and more people to leave, so the rural economy is being siphoned off from a healthy workforce that is being sent overseas to work in very precarious conditions, as you know, to be able to send money back to the country which is used to repay the government’s debt.
We are repaying the debt. What I mean is that it is the rural economy that pays off the debt. We can even go so far as to call it economic crimes of total irresponsibility and shifting the burden of debt to poor rural communities.
To top it off, in the budget, the tax they increased is value added tax (VAT). You have no income, you are struggling to feed yourself, and in addition, the VAT has increased by 15%. You pay this tax to repay a debt that is not yours. These are some of the consequences that the economic crisis and the measures proposed to combat it have on rural women.
I know you run an organization and a charity that deals with women in eastern Sri Lanka, but you have also partnered with other organizations in the country to form the Feminist Collective for Economic Justice. What do you hope to accomplish?
Several of us who had worked together before came together in February, having realized that there was not enough talk about bringing our analyzes and our demands to where policies and decisions were made and where debates were taking place. .
We have joined forces simply to think together, to carry out our analyzes together and to put forward our recommendations in the public spaces to which we have access, whatever they may be. We do research and are in close contact with several rural community groups; that’s where our knowledge comes from. We meet, we analyze, debate, discuss and then we try to create content for social networks, to be published in newspapers, etc. to make our voice heard in the debate.
What are your immediate goals? Do you want your work to translate into action or is the goal to be present in as many public spaces as possible to get your message across?
We are a small group. We have little power of influence. Despite everything, I believe that minority voices and small groups matter and we will continue to advance our opinions. We focus on mobilizing women on the ground, because that’s how change happens.
We will continue to do popular education with groups of rural communities to explain to them what is happening from an economic point of view and the demands we should make, so as to amplify the movement so that we can continue the analysis of what takes place at all levels of the State, to ask questions and to question the proposals of the State, based on the real experience of women and their embodied experience. This is where our energy lies.
What does this say about the connection between political leaders and women in Sri Lanka? Aren’t enough women making their voices heard?
These are indeed long-standing structural problems. For me, what is happening in Sri Lanka is a shame. Women are very poorly represented at all levels of governance.
Representation is better in local councils since there is a 25% quota, but it took 30 years to get it. This is the only level where there are 25% women. At all other levels, they are less than 5%. These are older fights that have consequences in times like today, when there is an economic crisis. Women’s voices are not heard, women’s lived reality is not heard.
These issues will never be a priority, as for example in the budget that will be presented next week. It’s a huge problem. We are working on it and will continue to work on it for as long as it takes. I may not see it in my lifetime, but these are patriarchal obstacles that many women face all over the world, not just in Sri Lanka.
You are particularly exasperated by the fact that decision-makers do not have to bear the consequences of their actions. You say this is an aggravating factor for women. Can you tell us why?
Economic policy-making is based on the assumption that women will weather the economic crisis, the pandemic, and now recovery policies as well, bearing the brunt of it. The care work done by women, the reproduction of the workforce, all that invisible work, and taken for granted, is not taken into account and is not supported.
In times of economic crisis, the burden of managing the home, maintaining the workforce and caring for the sick and children increases exponentially. This burden has been transferred to households very easily and economic recovery strategies also rely on women’s work.
Today, more and more women are migrating to be employed as domestic workers. The men also leave. Workers in the garment industry and on plantations are currently under increased pressure and their earlier demands for an increase in their daily pay will not see the light of day in the proposed relief model.
What do you think about the $2.9 billion loan that Sri Lanka wants to obtain from the International Monetary Fund (IMF)? Will he take the female population by the throat?
I take up the cause of feminist criticism of the IMF at the global level. A report has just been published which explains that the IMF uses front feminism (pinkwashing) to legitimize austerity measures and this is evident in Sri Lanka. Basically, as I have explained, all proposed austerity measures rest directly (and not just by trickle down effect) on the basic assumption that women will bear this debt and pay it back.
There are absurd strategies that consist of proposing targeted social safety nets that no longer make sense when energy is no longer subsidized. Giving cash grants makes no sense when people can’t pay for the bus, can’t buy kerosene or gasoline, or when they don’t have electricity. That’s why we say it’s nonsense and we’re not the only ones saying it.
The IMF’s austerity measures are criticized globally, as they represent a pinkwashing of gender issues, women’s rights and human dignity.
Sarala Emmanuel
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