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View all search resultsHunger pains in Colombo’s Slave Island as Sri Lanka’s food prices rocket
Food inflation in Sri Lanka reached 80.1 percent in the year to June, according to official figures.
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H
is hair is neatly combed but his cheeks are sunken and veins visible on his gaunt frame: like many Sri Lankans, Milton Pereira and his family cannot afford to buy enough food.
During the country's worst-ever economic crisis, which has driven rampant inflation and spurred protests that last week brought down the president, Sri Lankans are buying less, eating less and working less.
"It's very difficult to live, even a loaf of bread is expensive," Pereira told AFP outside his modest home in Slave Island, a poor enclave of the capital Colombo.
"If we take one meal, we skip another."
With six children in the family, the 74-year-old said the best they had been able to afford in recent weeks was the occasional fish, cut into small pieces for everyone.
"Because we don't have much money, sometimes we give the fish to the children," he said. The adults, he added, "only eat the gravy".
Triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic, the country's financial woes were exacerbated by government mismanagement, critics say.
