If food sovereignty means having local control over food systems, how can we do that if we're all in debt?" The question hung over the hills above Kandy in September 2025, as 700 delegates from six continents gathered for the 3rd Nyéléni Global Forum on Food Sovereignty. Nyéléni is convened every decade by a wide range of organizations and social movements through the International Planning Committee for Food Sovereignty (IPC) comprised mainly of food producers around the world. Recently the People’s Health Movement and RIPESS were recruited in. In the vanguard is La Via Campesina, the international peasant movement with 200 million members. Farmers from the Philippines, fisherfolk from Senegal, migrant workers from Central America, and Indigenous people and allies from around the world had all traveled to Sri Lanka to share strategies on how to confront a brutal paradox: everyone wants change, but chains of debt maintain the status quo.
That Sri Lanka should host this gathering carried particular bite. After citizens had stormed the presidential palace in 2022 and a left-leaning government finally took power in 2024, many expected change. But the new administration arrived with its hands already cuffed. The same parliament that had orchestrated the crisis under deposed President Rajapaksa had, in 2023, submitted to an IMF package that required Sri Lanka to bail out its creditors. Democracy, it turned out, was no match for the shackles of debt.
Three years after citizens had gone for a dip in the president's pool, the island’s credit rating had been rebaptised by the International Monetary Fund. The IMF's rituals were standard: suppress inflation, balance the budget, hold down wages. Each objective was achieved through the time-honoured method of taking money from those who have little and protecting those who have much. Value Added Tax, which falls disproportionately onto the shoulders of the poor, jumped from 8 to 15 percent in twelve months. The poor paid; the rich were spared.
The technocrats were pleased with their handiwork: GDP growth of 5 percent in 2024, inflation beaten into submission, foreign reserves fattened to six billion dollars. One in four Sri Lankans now lives in poverty. Although the patient is dying, the operation has been hugely successful. A loaf of bread may no longer cost twice as much from one week to the next, but it remains permanently unaffordable. This new normal is what is unsaid when the Fund says ‘price stability.’ The deflation of 2025 had simply locked in the food price explosion of 2022, when basic goods nearly doubled in cost.
When wages collapse and food becomes unaffordable, borrowing ceases to be a choice and becomes a necessity for survival. By 2023, more than half of Sri Lankan households were in debt. Loans intended for small enterprises now bought rice and medicine. Families borrowed from one shark to pay another, caught in the familiar spiral of compound interest.
The microfinance sector stepped in. True, it’s better to have loans from an organization that will merely take your land if you can’t repay, as opposed to a local money lender who’ll break your legs and then take your land. But while the central bank recognizes four licensed lenders, dozens operate without oversight. Interest rates have climbed from 17 percent a decade ago to effective rates over 220 percent today.
Women represent 84 percent of borrowers—2.4 million of them trapped in this system. The consequences go beyond financial distress. Women face harassment and intimidation; some are pressured for sexual favors. More than 200 suicides between 2019 and 2022 have been directly linked to microfinance debt.
The cruelest irony lies in recent legal reforms. The colonial-era Land Development Ordinance historically favored male inheritance, often dispossessing women who had worked the land. While the 2022 amendments promoted gender equality, allowing women fairer inheritance rights, the same reforms also streamlined land sales. Women could now inherit their family plots just in time to lose them to creditors. What appeared as progress became another mechanism for dispossession. Legislative equality arrived hand-in-hand with economic dispossession.
This captures perfectly the contradictions of development policy: microfinance was supposed to empower women, but has become the main obstacle to sustainable farming practices that might offer real security.
The targeting is not accidental. Women make more reliable debtors—more likely to sacrifice for their families, less likely to default or disappear. This strategy echoes a much older method of controlling women's economic power, one perfected in these very hills four centuries ago.
When Kusumāsana Devi ruled the Kingdom of Kandy as queen regnant in 1581, she possessed something her male rivals coveted: absolute sovereignty over one of the island's most prosperous territories. But 16th-century political custom made a direct military assault on a reigning queen diplomatically complicated. Her enemies found a more elegant solution. They orchestrated a series of forced marriages, each designed to transfer her royal authority to a husband who would then conveniently die or disappear, leaving power in male hands. Through intimate relationships weaponized for political control, they systematically stripped her of sovereignty without ever raising a sword.
Today's microfinance industry has perfected the same logic with ruthless efficiency. Unable to seize women's labor directly, lenders trap them in financial relationships that achieve identical results. The 2.4 million Sri Lankan women caught in this system cannot simply be robbed—that would be theft. Instead, they are bound by contracts that make their dispossession appear voluntary, even virtuous. The debt collectors, like Kusumāsana Devi's suitors, understand that the most effective chains are those that masquerade as intimate care.
Yet the women have begun to organize. The Collective of Women Affected by Microfinance stages protests and hunger strikes. Their demand is refreshingly simple: cancel the debt.
Debt operates at the national level with the same ruthless logic. After defaulting on $46 billion in 2022, Sri Lanka must earn hard currency at any cost. The IMF insists on foreign-exchange generation, which locks the country into the same plantation model the British imposed 150 years ago. Agricultural exports became the economic lifeline; tea alone is worth $1.3 billion annually, but rubber and coconut still have a market.
Sri Lanka’s economy is, in other words, structured almost exactly the same as when the country was called Ceylon and under British colonial rule.
When you run an economy like this over centuries, there’s only so long you can punt costs onto future generations. Today, the bill for industrial export agriculture has come due. Since the 1990s, Sri Lanka's agricultural heartland has been afflicted by an epidemic of Chronic Kidney Disease of Unknown Etiology—CKDu. The disease has affected an estimated 400,000 people and killed approximately 20,000, particularly in the rice-paddy farming regions of the North Central Province.
The “unknown etiology” designation is particularly telling. This is not conventional kidney failure linked to diabetes or hypertension. It strikes otherwise healthy farmers in their prime, pointing conclusively to an environmental or occupational toxin. The forces arguing for pesticide use in the name of science fall conspicuously silent when it comes to funding investigations into what agrotoxins have wrought. A robust body of research, including a landmark 2014 study, has suggested the likely culprit: the "Glyphosate-Metal Complex". But acknowledging this would require admitting that families are literally dying to service foreign debt and chemical company profits.
The 2021 ban on agrochemical imports offered a brief glimpse of this system's absurdity. Marketed as ecological reform, it was actually a desperate attempt to save $300 million in foreign exchange. Implemented overnight without consultation, it was a disaster: tea output fell by a third, rice yields dropped 30 percent, and emergency imports cost more than the savings on fertilizer. Even environmentalists opposed it—not because they favored chemicals, but because real ecological transition requires planning, not panic.
The government's arithmetic revealed a particular kind of bureaucratic blindness. While scrambling to save $300 million on fertilizer imports, officials somehow failed to account for the domestic healthcare costs of treating the diseases those very chemicals had caused. An estimated 8,000 Sri Lankans now undergo dialysis for late-stage CKDu, with the annual cost ranging from $5,869 to $8,804 per patient—in a country where per capita income is just $2,029. Private dialysis sessions cost $65 for four hours, while an estimated 4 percent of the entire public health budget went to renal disease. The overall economic burden, including lost productivity from farmers dying in their prime working years, dwarfs any foreign exchange savings from chemical bans. Such costs, however, don't appear on IMF spreadsheets measuring export efficiency.
When crops and textiles cannot generate enough dollars, Sri Lanka exports people. One in ten workers now labors abroad, sending remittances home. The government recently signed deals with Israel to replace Palestinian workers with Sri Lankans, opening an embassy in Haifa in 2024. Debt has reduced the country to a supplier of commodities and bodies for the global market.
The Nyéléni delegates refused to accept this as inevitable. They recognized their shared condition across continents—from Zambian farmers facing austerity to Ecuadorian protesters confronting IMF fuel hikes, from Filipino peasants resisting land grabs to Senegalese fisherfolk competing with industrial fleets. This also explains why agroecology has become a necessity. It reduces import dependence, rebuilds soil, improves nutrition, and eliminates the toxins causing epidemics. But it requires lifting both sovereign and household debt. Debt justice and ecological farming are inseparable.
At Nyéléni, delegates found their answer in the mutual recognition forged through shared struggle. They witnessed how debt—perhaps the most isolating of human experiences—could become the basis for international organizing. In tea plantations and fishing villages, in women's cooperatives and peasant assemblies, the mathematics of extraction were being challenged by new equations of mutual aid. The next step will involve practical experiments, whether a dialogue between the US Debt Collective and the Sri Lankan Coalition of Women Affected by Microcredit, or the Australian Food Sovereignty Alliance’s farmers taking inspiration from these same women to help build a global debt resistance campaign whose seed took root at Nyéléni. "Instead of accepting the debilitating isolation of household debt common to most of the world's countries, the social movements have made it their rallying call to collective action," AFSA's Tammi Jonas and Mirella Mani told me.
The call that emerged from Kandy's hills was unequivocal: Systems Change Now or Never. And perhaps there is reason for optimism in the choice of venue. These same mountains had once been the site of one of the most spectacular military humiliations in British colonial history. In 1803, a British expedition attempting to capture the Kingdom of Kandy was utterly annihilated. The retreating British army was then defeated on the banks of the flooding Mahaveli river, leaving a handful of survivors. For four centuries, the people of these mountains had successfully resisted European armies through a combination of guerrilla warfare and sheer bloody-minded refusal to submit.
If these hills could break the military might of empires, perhaps they can break the financial chains that bind them now. The conquest achieved with interest rates and loan terms may prove no more permanent than the one attempted with muskets and cannon. Because in the end, debt may keep economies in their assigned place, but it can also fuel movements powerful enough to tear apart the very structures that created those shackles. The descendants of those fierce defenders have not forgotten how to fight.
Photo: La Via Campesina
