Rajapaksa heartland is even broken in Sri Lanka

The road to Hambantota may be paved with Chinese money, but its value is up for debate — now more than ever.
Set among the soft, green rice paddies and coconut palms of Sri Lanka’s deep south, Hambantota is best known as the stronghold of the nation’s Rajapaksa clan, who have spent years using borrowed money to build monuments to themselves. The little-used Mattala Rajapaksa International Airport, the often overgrown Mahinda Rajapaksa Stadium, and a memorial to the Rajapaksa elders that was burned and destroyed by a furious crowd of protesters on May 9, are testament to that terrible waste.
A statue commemorating DA Rakapaksa — a former member of parliament and father of President Gotabaya Rajapaksa and the recently resigned prime minister, Mahinda — was also targeted. It now lies on the ground, covered in a tattered piece of orange tarpaulin — another symbol of citizens’ anger against the family. The clocktower in the centre of their home town of Weeraketiya has been vandalised, “Gota Go Home” spray-painted on its sides. Until now, it would have been unimaginable to see this sentiment expressed in the Rajapaksa heartland. While some locals say the infrastructure projects have created jobs, others vow they will no longer stand for what they see as such obvious misuse of public funds.
Less than 10 kilometres (6.2 miles) away, local farmers and traders are preparing for the worst. The president’s decision to flick the switch to organic farming overnight by banning chemical fertiliser imports in May last year caught everyone by surprise, and irrevocably harmed those in the agriculture sector in the family bastion. The ban was lifted six months later, but by then, the damage was done — yields were decimated and the country had plunged into a food and foreign reserve crisis that ended with its default on May 19.
“He destroyed his own village with that decision,” says cinnamon farmer and local opposition politician, Anura Vidana Arichi, gesturing to the rice paddies just beyond his house. “These fields have been cultivated for decades — yields have fallen more than 50% this season and we have abandoned the farming for now. Next season only 10% will be planted, and even then we don’t know what will grow without fertiliser.”
As inflation neared 40% last week, the government urged farmers to start planting rice. No matter. This attempt to stave off a an ever deeper food crisis will likely have little effect — there is no money to import fertiliser and without it, the crops just won’t produce anything close to what’s needed to feed the island’s 22 million people. Wickremesinghe has warned of an acute food shortage by September, while the president has asked officials to start stockpiling essentials in preparation.
The South Asian nation needs as much as $4 billion to see it through its worst economic crisis since it gained independence from Britain in 1948. Negotiations with the International Monetary Fund and key bilateral creditors, China, Japan and India, are ongoing. But it is going to take a lot to unpick its tens of billions in foreign debt and the tangled web of capital market borrowings and Chinese loans for those unprofitable infrastructure projects.

—Bloomberg