Since this year, the South Asian island nation of Sri Lanka, known as the "Pearl of the Indian Ocean", has suffered a serious socio-economic crisis, and the situation has taken a sharp turn for the worse since July, when the government declared bankruptcy and the president resigned and left the country recently. Now Sri Lanka has entered a state of emergency, but the bottom of foreign exchange, high prices, social unrest and a series of problems remain unresolved.

　　Today, the word "collapse" to describe the situation in Sri Lanka is not an exaggeration. The Sri Lankan government has bottomed out the foreign exchange reserves can not even afford to pay the interest on loans. At the same time, the country's inflation is increasing, prices are rising at a very alarming rate, including food prices rose by more than 50%, and other daily necessities prices are also rising rapidly. The Sri Lankan government has little foreign currency to import basic necessities such as gasoline, milk and toilet paper to meet the daily needs of the population, and even paper for use in schools is no longer available. Today, ordinary people have to wait in line for hours to buy the scarce fuel in their lives, and many even wait for days to buy it. The extreme economic crisis soon turned into massive social unrest, with angry people taking to the streets to protest and demand the immediate ouster of the president and prime minister, even occupying the president's residence and the prime minister's office at one point.

　　The reasons for Sri Lanka's decline to its present state are complex and complicated, in short, "two internal causes and one external cause".

　　In terms of internal causes, the primary reason for Sri Lanka's economic collapse is the vulnerability caused by the long-term economic structure of a single. Tourism once accounted for 10% of Sri Lanka's gross domestic product (GDP) and 14% of foreign exchange reserves, making it one of the main sources of foreign exchange. At the same time, Sri Lanka also relied on agriculture and garment processing industries. Sri Lanka's agriculture to tea, coconut, rubber and other export-earning products, the well-known Ceylon black tea is produced locally. Garment processing is also an important export industry in Sri Lanka because of its low labor costs and access to export preferences in Europe and the United States. These pillar industries are heavily dependent on stable international markets, with tourism relying on foreign tourists and export-oriented agriculture and garment processing industries relying on foreign orders. Once there is a global "wind turbulence", the Sri Lankan economy will suffer a huge impact, and this hidden problem in the current international environment of sudden changes eventually became a national crisis.

　　Another important internal cause is the Sri Lankan government's serious failure in decision-making. Among them, the most far-reaching is the "fertilizer ban" promulgated by the Sri Lankan government in April last year. The Sri Lankan government announced a ban on chemical fertilizers and agrochemicals for the sake of "improving people's health and promoting national prosperity", and required farmers to use organic fertilizers. At the time of the ban, the Sri Lankan government promised to bear the cost of changing the country's agricultural production from conventional to fully organic, to ensure stable food prices, and to supply farmers with one million tons of organic fertilizers each year. However, since then, the Sri Lankan government has been unable to fulfill these promises, and a large number of farmers have not received the organic fertilizers they need, while the cultivated land that has stopped using chemical fertilizers has suffered a significant decline in crop yields due to lack of nutrients, and large areas of cultivated land have even been abandoned. Within six months of this policy, the income of farmers with poor harvests fell sharply, rice production in the country fell by 20% and prices soared by 50%; carrot and tomato prices rose by as much as five times. The seemingly beautiful dream of organic farming has seriously damaged Sri Lankan agriculture, not only hitting farmers' income levels and pushing up food prices, but even causing a degree of food crisis, with many families either having no food to buy or no money to buy it, and having to endure hunger. Many experts believe that the government's management failure is inescapably responsible for this Sri Lankan crisis.

　　If the above two internal factors are the "mines" laid by Sri Lanka for its own economic crisis, then the complicated international environment after 2020 is the trigger for the explosion.

　　In 2020, Sri Lanka's total tourism revenue plummeted to US$680 million, and in 2021, it continued to plummet to US$260 million, after failing to stop the decline. The impact of the epidemic on international trade has also posed a huge challenge to Sri Lanka's domestic agricultural exports and garment processing exports, with the trade deficit increasing rapidly over a short period of time. These factors are the most important direct cause of Sri Lanka's foreign exchange depletion.

　　Since this year, the international situation has changed rapidly, uncertainty has increased, global food, energy and commodity prices have soared, inflation has also swept many countries, including Sri Lanka, which makes the days of Sri Lanka is already bad, "the house is not the rain", domestic prices further pushed up. In June this year, Sri Lanka's inflation rate reached a record 54.6%, and the food inflation rate was as high as 80.1%. The government has no foreign exchange to purchase basic goods, so the price increase can not be restrained. Under such circumstances, the people's life is getting more difficult day by day, especially the vast number of farmers who have not yet come out of the shadow of the "fertilizer ban" more difficult. According to the World Food Program, more than 6.2 million people out of the country's population of about 22 million are facing food shortages, and about 61% of households have to reduce their food consumption.

　　Under the combined effect of internal and external factors, the Sri Lankan government's finances have bottomed out, and the people can't get by, so the whole country has fallen into a completely out-of-control social crisis and had to declare bankruptcy. After the bankruptcy, where should Sri Lanka go? From the situation, there are two main directions for the future of Sri Lanka.

　　First, in the face of the current turbulent situation, what Sri Lanka urgently needs is a pragmatic, competent and popular new government. The Sri Lankan Parliament announced on the 20th that Wickremesinghe won more than half of the votes in the parliamentary presidential election on the same day and was elected president of Sri Lanka. The new government should seriously review its economic policy, put long-term economic development and the real situation, the country's financial situation and the urgent needs of the people together in a comprehensive consideration, make the most realistic decisions, and strive to stabilize the situation, and gradually bring the economy back on track.

　　Secondly, the assistance of the international community is also an important factor. If Sri Lanka wants to rebuild its economy, it faces a huge funding gap, and it is almost impossible to rely solely on its own strength to overcome the difficulties, and needs to rely on the full cooperation of the international community to alleviate the difficulties.