Pri's blog

  User manual accessible here Had the opportunity yesterday to remotely address the Opening Ceremony of the Global Partnership for Effective Development Summit.   The result of a rather last-minute invitation from the Swiss Agency for Development Cooperation, IWRAW APs core funder, we would have rather had our community partners do the talking, but it was too short a window to mobilise grassroots voices, and too short a time slot to show a video, even if we had one that was appropriate. The concept note for the session describes it as The 2030 Agenda at Half-time  (FIFA World Cup terminology???) and the phrase used repeatedly was that “we are not on track for achieving the Sustainable Development Goals”.   The line-up on the podium was heavy with Presidents and VIPs. -   Ignazio Cassis, the President of the Swiss Federation, Paul Kagame, President of Uganda, Maia Sandu, President of Moldova, Amina J Mohamed Deputy Secretary General of the UN and Vitalice Heja the Executive Director o

harvesting in the Jaffna Peninsular, photo by Priyanthi Fernando Colombo’s Mayor, Rosy Senanayake, has cautioned that Colombo might run out of food by September.  The Prime Minister has warned that we Sri Lankans will not be able to eat three meals a day for too long. Meanwhile Colombo clubs continue their invites for Special Mongolian dinner nights, traditional yellow rice Sunday lunches and weekend starter breakfasts and  a leading local cosmetic firm launches a skin care product for all women in Sri Lanka using our heirloom rice as their main ingredient!     Thinking about these contradictions, the impending food shortages, attendant malnutrition and starvation possibly for the first time in Sri Lanka, I am struck by a global news item that says that Africa could also be facing the spectre of famine, not because of droughts, or failed harvests or conflicts or bad national policy decisions within the continent, but because of the Russia-Ukraine war.   The threat is so real that the h

photo from: https://lankacgossip.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/Beira-vehicles.jpg There has been a lot of violence and also a lot of talk about violence in this last month.   It shouldn’t come as a surprise because violence has underlined our Sri Lankan existence at least throughout my life time.   From the time our band-playing triforces were transformed into killing machines in 1971,   guns   military technology, poles, molotov cocktails and bombs   have been used by the forces, the vigilantes and the so called ‘terrorist groups’   to wage destruction   on the LTTE,   on the JVP and against many local, minority groups, the most recent being the Easter Sunday massacre of innocent civilians.   We have assassinated a cohort of leaders, starting with the much maligned SWRD Bandaranaike in 1956,   and more recently Lalith Athulathmudali, Gamini Dissanayake, Vijaya Kumaranatunga, Ranasinghe Premadasa, Neelan Thiruchelvam, Nadaraja Raviraj, Lakshman Kadirigama, to name a few of the others.

  Photo: protesters at Independence Square. From the internet Had the decision been thought out and strategic like that of Mahathir in Malaysia during the Asian Financial crisis, I would have backed the Sri Lanka government’s lack of interest in going to the IMF for bridging finance.  After all, the Fund’s reputation has not always been positive when it comes to helping governments protect the economic and social rights of citizens, and achieving environmental justice or addressing climate change.  Many would agree that staying away from the IMF’s conditionalities is not in itself a bad thing. We know for instance that early this year Pakistan introduced a controversial set of fiscal reforms so that they could revive the IMF’s Extended Fund Facility that had been approved in 2019.  The reforms included a regime of new taxes on solar panels, wind turbines, electric vehicles that are likely to derail the country’s energy transition. [1]   We also know that the extreme vulnerability of c