Sri Lanka’s misery should be warning to us all on global food, fuel and finance crisis: UNDP

Countries already under pressure from the economic fall-out of the COVID-19 pandemic, risk seeing the same economic turmoil and human misery as Sri Lanka, with the war in Ukraine dragging on, unless the international community agrees to radical financial measures to help countries saddled with debt, the UN said.

“We’re witnessing a tragic series of events that are unfolding in Sri Lanka right now that should be a warning to anyone who thinks that, you know, it is up to countries themselves to figure out how to deal with this crisis,” said Achim Steiner, Administrator of the UN Development Programme (UNDP), in reference to the South Asian nation’s debt default last month – the first in its history.

“That default essentially means the country is no longer able to pay - or not only service - its debt, but actually to import fundamental parts of what keeps an economy alive, whether it is petrol or it is diesel, whether it is fuel, whether it is medicines,” Mr. Steiner added.

The warning came as new data from the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) indicated that the number of people affected by hunger globally rose to 828 million in 2021, an increase of about 46 million since 2020, and 150 million since the outbreak of coronavirus.

Speaking at a virtual briefing at UN Geneva to flag a series of policy recommendations that countries could follow to withstand the global food, fuel and finance crisis, UNDP Senior Economist George Gray Molina noted that many countries had faced 36 months of “shock after shock after shock”: first COVID-19, then Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on 24 February, the latter in particular shaking global food and energy supplies and sparking an inflationary surge.

“With COVID, what we saw is effects that worked through labour markets, lockdowns, and income, that was slowly cumulative but had a strong impact over time,” said Mr Molina. “Official estimates are about 125 million people falling into poverty over about 18 months…what we found right now is that three months of inflation have drawn about 71 million people into poverty.”

Failure to take decisive and radical action by governments risked sparking widespread unrest, UNDP chief Steiner suggested.