 You know, from the time President Rajapaksa was elected, and you know, and even though the pandemic hit three, four months later, the regime had only one interest in mind. That was political consolidation, consolidating more and more power. So they were only focused on the parliamentary elections that followed. And soon after that, they passed the 20th Amendment to the Constitution, where they heaped huge amounts of power, centralized powers in the President. It was all about consolidation, and it neglected, as I mentioned, giving in relief to the people during the pandemic. And it has been a very authoritarian, militarized two years after the President came to power. You know, I find the Nobel Prize winner, Prof. Amritya, since research to be relevant here. You know, he is research on famines, and he says that famines are not caused by shortages. Famines are caused by the lack of democracy. Protesters have been camped outside President Gota Bayar Rajapaksa's house for nearly a week, demanding his resignation. Sri Lankans consider the Rajapaksa-led government responsible for the current economic crisis the country is witnessing. They are also calling for his brother, Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapaksa, to step down, along with other family members who have been given post in the government. The crisis is being called the worst since the country's independence in 1948. It has led to severe shortages of food, fuel, medicines, and even water. The inflation rate in March was a record 17.8%. Fuel shortage has resulted in long queues at gas stations where the military was deployed following protests and deaths of citizens. The lack of fuel has not only created an electricity shortage but has severely affected every sector from hospitals to the printing press. What has led to this crisis? I see this as a much more long drawn-out crisis in the meeting. I would go back to 1977-1978 when Sri Lanka was the first country in South and Southeast Asia to liberalize its economy. This crisis has been in the making, I would argue, for a number of decades. But it was disrupted in a major way by the civil war, the long civil war of 26 years. It is after the end of the war in 2009 when actually Sri Lanka went into another IMF agreement. Sri Lanka has gone through 16 IMF agreements in post-colonial history, a significant one was of post-structural adjustment in 1977-78 when we liberalized the economy. In 2009 again, we went into an IMF agreement and we got the kind of positive report card from the IMF to be able to go borrow extensively in the global capital markets. There was a huge amount of capital that came into Sri Lanka because Sri Lanka was not only seen as a post-war economy, there was also a trend of after the global financial crisis of 2008 funds flowing into what we call the emerging market. So Sri Lanka was seen as an emerging market and a post-conflict economy. So a stock market in those 18 months after the war quadrupled. But this was a sort of a bubble that was created by speculative finance coming in. In 2016, as the economy continued to collapse, despite the goodwill of various actors, India, the West and so on, they had to go for another IMF agreement. Through this IMF agreement in 2016, again, we went and borrowed in the capital markets, sovereign bonds, where 40% of our external debt is sovereign bonds. So this accumulated debt, a form of debt trap, I would say, is what has culminated in this crisis. Of course, the disruption that came with the Easter attacks, the tax cuts and the pandemic have sort of pushed us over the cliff. But this has been a long crisis in the making. And it's important to recognize that because getting out of this crisis is also going to be long and arduous. The government announced on April 12th that it will hold foreign debt repayments for now because of the growing crisis. Sri Lanka's external debt is worth around 51 billion US dollars. The government has started dialogue with the IMF in the hopes of securing another loan. In face of criticisms, the president has dropped his brother Basil Rajapaksa from the post of finance minister and shuffled the cabinet. However, this has not been enough to quell protests and outrage. The police have been using tear gas shells and water cannons at protest sites to disperse the gatherings. The opposition has begun gathering signatures for a no-confidence vote against the government. Anger over years of mismanagement of the economy by the Rajapaksa government, from tax cuts to mishandling the pandemic and to the recent ban of fertilizers in the country, is continuing to fuel the protests. Sri Lanka had become considerably dependent in terms of foreign earnings. You know, there are three sectors, the kind of agriculture exports, maybe on tea, rubber and coconut. But the other two sectors, tourism, is what Sri Lanka was counting on. So all this investment that I mentioned, the beautification of Colombo, was all about trying to get the returns through tourism. The pandemic put a full stop to that and so it completely crippled the tourism sector. The other sector from which, in fact, we actually get more foreign earnings in reality, migrant workers going and working in the Middle East and Southeast Asia, you know, initially it was mainly women and now more tilted towards men. And those foreign remittances were also disrupted. So these disruptions meant that the government had to give out much larger relief. But that is where Sri Lanka, Sri Lanka had the lowest amount of relief, even in South Asia, with the pandemic. Part of it was the tax cuts that I mentioned just before the pandemic, soon after the election of President Gottabai Rajapaksa in November 2019, he carried out those tax cuts in December, by March the pandemic had hit us. So then we were already in a sort of austerity mode where we didn't even provide relief. Any relief that was given was mostly to businesses and the tourism sector. And given our sort of small holding, small producers in the various agriculture sectors whether it's fisheries, dairy, livestock, agriculture, it's very hard for us to compete in the global market with agricultural produce. So when they liberalized trade and they reduced state investment in agriculture, there's been a long decline and a dependency on in-course. We really neglected our food system along with liberalization. So when the pandemic hit, people actually on their own turned to agriculture. People from the urban areas went back to the rural areas. So the fellow lands were being cultivated and because at least through subsistence, they realized that they had to address the pandemic. And that is where last year when the government came out with a fertilizer ban, that crushed the hopes of the existing farming community and anybody who tried to work around this food crisis that was emerging. What President Gottabai Rajapaksa did last year is political suicide in the sense that he banned the fertilizer subsidy after the Green Revolution, after channeling all our farmers towards agriculture production with chemical fertilizers. And from being almost 100% self-sufficient in rice and our production costs are not something that we can export rice, suddenly the yields with the monsoon season has been probably dropped by 40%. If there was democratic consultation, if there was that democratic space, if the farmers would have not allowed this to happen.