Updated June 5, 2026 at 6:56 AM CDT
DAMBAGULLA, Sri Lanka — Chooti the parrot isn't happy.
"Chooti didn't eat rice!" it shrieks on the balcony of a farmhouse in the central Sri Lankan village of Dambagulla. Chooti's owner, Nita Kumari sympathizes: She's a 44-year-old single mother, a farmer, and her life has been a struggle for years. Since the Mideast war began, it's been even tougher. "I'm under pressure," she sighs.
On a recent day, Kumari gestured to a tiny strip of land that she planted herself with mung beans. "I have land, but there's no one to cultivate it," she sighs. This season, she's only planted a quarter of her fields, just over two acres, because, "I can't afford to hire laborers."
Sri Lanka is thousands of miles from the Middle East, but the island of some 22 million people is deeply vulnerable to the impacts of the war that Israel and the U.S. launched on Iran on Feb. 28, because it imports two-thirds of its energy.
But Iran and the U.S. are blockading the Strait of Hormuz, the transit route for about a fifth of the world's oil supplies. So that's pushed up the price of fuel in Sri Lanka — and that's pushed up the price of everything else, including food and transport.
And that's created a crisis for Kumari, here, on the outskirts of Dambagulla, because farmhands are now demanding more money: $10 for a day, half that for a woman, plus lunch.
Kumari's 23-year-old daughter used to help out with the $90 a month she made as a baker at a hotel catering to foreign tourists. But she lost her job: the Mideast war has also pushed up jet fuel prices, so tourists, a key foreign currency earner, have thinned out, according to the deputy tourism minister, Ruwan Ranasinghe, who spoke to the media in March.
For millions like Kumari, this is just the latest punch.
The island was engulfed in a civil war from 1983 to 2009, and only a decade later, on Easter Sunday, 2019, coordinated bombings in churches and hotels claimed by ISIS killed more than 260 people. Tourists emptied out.
Then the pandemic hit, and paralyzed most international travel.
Just as the island attempted to stabilize, global shocks disrupted it again. "What really pushed us over the cliff was in 2022 when Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine started," says Ahilan Kadirgamar, a political economist at the University of Jaffna. It pushed up the prices of gas, and key items like wheat and vegetable oil. It came amid a debt crisis and diminishing foreign exchange reserves, and that partly caused Sri Lanka to default on its debts, triggering a serious economic crisis, "from which, I would say, we haven't even recovered," Kadirgamar says, because the country is still restrained in how it can spend money by an International Monetary Fund bailout.
Then in November last year, "we had the worst natural disaster the country has probably seen," a cyclone which washed away homes, farms and killed more than 600 people. Now, he says, "the war on Iran."
"We've lost a generation," Kadirgamar says.
"There's just a huge amount of volatility," says Philip Ward, country director of the World Food Programme, and there's "a particularly vulnerable Sri Lanka in the midst of it."
Ward says already, about a fifth of all families were going hungry, and eating less nutritious food to get by.
They include the 57 children in a public school in the central Sri Lankan town of Sigriya. There, Nilanthi Kumari's been up since 3 a.m. preparing rice, dhaal and an okra curry for the children's lunch. Kumari — no relation to the farmer — is contracted by the government, which runs a program of free meals for some 1.5 million kids. By dawn, Kumari and her husband are shelling 57 boiled eggs, one for each child.
At the primary school, boys and girls in tidy uniforms stand before a statue of the Buddha in the yard, chanting prayers. Kumari and her husband briskly move from desk to desk, ladling food into the empty lunchboxes that children have left on their desks.
With the food all served, teachers order the children back into their class – a neat row of three rooms – where they tuck into their mid-morning meal. Kumari mops her brow. "Feeding the kids brings me happiness, and it's a good deed too."
But she's not a charity. Kumari says the government pays her the equivalent of 35 cents per meal, but the latest war has pushed up the price of food and fuel. Kumari says she's tried to save money: she's also a farmer, and she uses her own rice and vegetables for the meals. The World Food Program helped her with equipment to raise chickens, so she can even supply her own eggs to the children. She's shifted from cooking on natural gas to using a wood fired-hearth. Yet, she says she's barely breaking even. But she knows, if she walks away — these boys and girls will go hungry. "I know," she says, "I'm doing a service beyond making a profit."
In the capital Colombo, the deputy finance minister, Anil Jayantha Fernando, acknowledges some children are attending school just to eat. "That is the reality," he says. "They are starving." Fernando says the government wants to spend money to help people get by. But it also needs to spend its limited money to buy oil, to keep industries afloat, so the economy doesn't tank through this latest crisis. Fernando says he knows he can't ask Sri Lankans to be patient, but says, improving the economy and people's lives, well, "it takes time."
Sri Lankans are trying to muddle through.
In a fishing harbor in the southern town of Galle, Dhanushka sits on the dock. He gets by on tips for chopping up fish, and he's just got a customer clutching a fresh-caught tuna. He sharpens his machete, then gets to work slicing off the fins and tail, then wiping the gore away.
Dhanushka says there's not much work: "How can people buy fish without money?" He says even the tips are stingier — instead of $3, folks are more likely to hand over 30 cents. Somehow, he says, he has to feed his three children off that loose change.
He points to a source of his own troubles: the handle has fallen off his other machete, so he's working with just one knife, and it keeps blunting. But the last time Dhanushka purchased a new machete, it was $4.50. Now, it's $18.
"I can't afford that," he says. So he'll wait, he says, until things get better.
Copyright 2026 NPR
