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Famine is a policy choice 

08 Jun 2022

  • IMF talks, disaster capitalism and cultures of fear
BY Darini Rajasingham Senanayake Wearing masks, a group of “aragalaya” (struggle) protestors rooted for Elon Musk to buy strategic and scenic Sri Lanka, at the centre of the Indian Ocean, for just $ 50 billion last weekend. They were marking 50 days at Colombo’s Galle Face Green marine front amid real and staged food, fuel, fertiliser, and medical supply shortages across the country.  Could Musk save Sri Lanka from debt bondage to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and US-based international sovereign bond (ISB) traders, whose law firms are lined up to asset-strip the strategic island nation?  Among the richest men in the world, Musk had recently offered to buy Twitter for $ 44 billion, but this beautiful Indian Ocean island that sits on major global sea lanes of communication, at a spaghetti junction of undersea data cables routes, would be a far better asset at $ 50 billion, some of the protestors reckoned: Especially for a big data whiz-kid, who relishes challenge in an era of Cold War 2.0 and global cyberwars, Sri Lanka is perpetually in the crosshairs of big power rivalry.  The estimated cost of Sri Lanka’s debt is $ 50 billion. However, debt, like Covid-19, is a numbers game in many global South countries – where data is provisional, and expertise and transparency is scarce, data security non-existent, and statistics easily gamed by external actors though “datafication”, digital colonialism, and data hacking. For instance, in 2020, mysterious data wipes happened at the National Medicines Regulatory Authority (NMRA) during the World Health Organisation (WHO)-promoted Covid-19 “panic-demic”, lockdowns, and militarised mass-injection of the population in 2020 when huge sums of money were spent on “vaccines”. Although the data on which Sri Lanka’s debt calculation is based on are contested, as the Government cloud and other databases have been hacked in the past, and now debt bondage to the Washington Consensus (World Bank [WB] and International Monetary Fund [IMF]), and Paris Club looms large over the strategic island after it defaulted on payments to US-based ISB traders in April. So too, what Canadian author, Naomi Klein has termed “disaster capitalism” in her book The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, is increasingly a lived reality in Sri Lanka at this time of co-ordinated food, fuel, fertiliser, and medicines shortages with miles of queues as IMF shock treatment unfolds with promises of “worse to come”. The spectre of starvation, famine, and food riots looms, as Sri Lanka is primed for asset-stripping in the months to come, since the IMF and Paris Club do not differentiate between “illiquidity” and “insolvency”, and has been raised by various talking heads, including new Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe, Washington DC’s “Manchurian candidate” for the job. Nobel Prize winning economist Amartya Sen long ago showed that famine is a political and policy choice rather than the result of a food production shortage. In his book Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation (1982), Sen showed that although adequate food was harvested during periods of famine, inadequate distribution and inequality in access to food were the proximate causes of famines in world history.  Sen’s historical studies of famine in Bengal and other Asian contexts challenged the assumption that the total food availability decline, was the main cause of starvation and famine and showed how political and governance-related factors affected access to food. Indeed, a slight imbalance in food production can lead to large increases or declines in price, while government policies can also cause entitlement-related failures. Sen also argued that the availability of food can change for a number of reasons besides production shortfalls – for example, changes in the prices of goods and services, new rationing rules, transport related blockages, infestations of farmers’ crops by pests, or the disruption of food distribution channels by war. To this list of causes of food insecurity may be added speculation by traders in commodities futures, globally and locally, the weaponisation of food through sanctions and trade wars, and systematic and co-ordinated (cyber) disruption of transport, supply chains, and food security databases. Former United Nations (UN) Assistant Secretary General for Economic Development Jomo Sundaram recently wrote that the US-led sanctions on Russia and the war in Ukraine are now the main drivers of increased food insecurity globally. In short, famine is a political and policy choice in a world where free markets are mythical, especially in the current era of food and fuel supply chain disruption due to trade and cyber war attacks, datafication, and digital colonialism. Conversely, at this time of hyped shortages, global oil companies have never made more profits. So too have big pharmaceutical companies like Pfizer made huge profits during Covid-19 lockdowns, with hyped injection shortages. Indeed, the current threat narrative of starvation, food riots, and famine that are being liberally promoted to stoke fear and anxiety, rendering “food riots” in Sri Lanka a more or less self-fulfilling prophecy, appear to relate directly to what Klein termed “disaster capitalism”. The term “disaster capitalism” was coined by Klein in 2007 to critique neo-liberalism and its policy paradigm, which she defined by three landmark demands: Privatisation, government deregulation, and deep cuts to social spending.  Klein argued that global capitalism instrumentalises man-made or natural disasters like Covid-19, military coups, terrorist incidents, economic crises, wars, earthquakes, tsunamis, and hurricanes, for the sake of advancing its own agenda of renewal, reconstruction, and profit. Such disorienting disasters and shocks enable the production of debilitating cultures of fear, help to suspend public debate, and suppress democratic practices. This allows capitalists to exploit the window of opportunity opened by traumatic shocks.  Famine talks: A Manchurian candidate and cultures of fear  During two weeks of talks between the Central Bank of Sri Lanka (CBSL) and the IMF from 9-24 May, the strategic island’s long-suffering citizens were hit by unprecedented and clearly co-ordinated food, fuel, energy, fertiliser, and medicine shortages – purportedly due to an absence of exorbitantly privileged and increasingly weaponised US dollars. This had led the strategic island at the centre of the Indian Ocean to default on its debt payments to US-based ISB traders for the first time in its history. While everyone was distracted queuing up for food or fuel, with protests spiralling into violent confrontations as IMF talks commenced, Washington’s Manchurian candidate for Prime Minister of Sri Lanka, Ranil Wickremesinghe, was sworn in on 12 May during an islandwide curfew with the military on the streets.  Premier Wickremesinghe made many remarkable statements during his first week in office. He threatened that “worse was to come” with likely starvation and famine in the island – before things got better. The “next couple of months will be the most difficult ones of our lives”, he warned, with an IMF “firesale” of strategic national assets pending to appease the ISB holders. The country faced its worst economic crisis in more than 70 years, and was down to its last day of petrol on that coming Monday, he claimed.  The newly appointed Wickremesinghe however used contested data and numbers to justify his debt calculations. He also misled the citizens by claiming that there would be 15 hours of electricity outages, although the hydropower reservoirs had ample rain to keep hydropower generation and the electricity supply going. He painted a grim picture that seemed like a veiled threat. Would fear enable rule by fiat, never mind that he had lost his seat in the last General Election and lacked legitimacy? A chorus of worse to come amid promises of starvation and food riots clearly intended to stoke fear, anxiety, and anger reached a crescendo when talks between the CBSL and the IMF ended on 24 May. With the outcome of the talks far from transparent, it was as if the IMF’s infamous shock treatment which include austerity measures, the sale of State-owned enterprises (SOEs), for debt restructuring, etc., were already upon Sri Lanka’s hapless citizens, to simultaneously distract from and ease the proposed “firesale” of strategic assets like SriLankan Airlines. But would not such a course of action inevitably deepen the national economic and security crisis – as has been the case in debt-trapped Greece and Argentina, and numerous other countries. Wither national food and energy security? While the shortages were blamed on an absence of petrodollars, there appeared to be systematic disruption and the deliberate hacking of domestic supply chains and internal trade networks, as non-dollar denominated domestic food, fuel, energy, and medicine supply and trade were also disrupted. The fuel shortages translated into increased bus fares and train fares, and public transport, and most of all, the disabling of transport of farm produce to cities and stores from wholesale markets, contributing to food shortages. Fishermen too were unable to go to sea due to fuel shortages to operate their boats, and fish prices hit the roof in this island, which imports canned fish despite having extensive fisheries resources that are looted by fishermen from distant States. A host of reasons to explain internal food and fuel shortages – such as a private fuel bowser company’s tanker drivers being on strike, other labour disputes, bad weather preventing the unloading of fuel in the Colombo Port, fuel trains derailing, the Vesak holidays, and transport glitches – all seemed to have aligned to manufacture a perfectly co-ordinated storm of a crisis of food, fuel, energy, medicine, fertiliser, cooking gas, etc. The end result was that famers were unable to get their produce to wholesale and retail markets, and watched their harvest perish, as had happened during the previous two years of infamous Covid-19 “panic-demic” lockdowns. Staged food shortages left shops in cities with empty shelves. Yet, Wickremesinghe asked Government officials to stay at home rather than report to work to urgently sort out the transport, supply chain, trade, and agriculture and fisheries sector extension services disruptions. Rather than prioritising the restoring of essential supply chains that were preventing food from reaching wholesale and retail markets, and restoring Government extension services in the agriculture and fisheries sectors to ensure food supply, he asked Government officials to stay home, citing transport difficulties. Thus, as farmer produce rotted in the countryside, shops in cities had empty shelves. Was this a dry run for the famine and food riots yet to be staged? To be continued. (The writer is a social, medical, and economic anthropologist)  The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the writer, and do not necessarily reflect those of this publication.


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