About 3 in 10 households of Sri Lanka (6.26 million people) are food insecure while 65,600 of them are severely food insecure, according to World Food Program ‘s latest food security assessment says. The WFP sfurther says that the population continues to feel the brunt of the economic and food crises.
The report further states that Food inflation of Sri Lanka is alarmingly high at 57.4 percent in June 2022. Steeply increasing food prices have crippled the population’s ability to put sufficient and nutritious food on the table.
The majority of assessed households (61 percent) are regularly employing food-based coping strategies such as eating less preferred and less nutritious food, and reducing the amount of food they eat. Two in five households are not consuming adequate diets.
The food security situation is worst among people living in the estate sector, where more than half of households are food insecure. In all measures of food insecurity and coping strategies, these households have consistently poorer outcomes than urban and rural populations. While urban households are depleting savings to cope for now, estate populations are already turning to credit to purchase food and other necessities.
An estimated 200,000 households are using emergency livelihood coping strategies that are likely to severely impact their medium- to long-term capacity for income-generating activities. WFP anticipates that even more people will turn to these coping strategies as the crisis deepens.
