Feminist responses to decades of dispossession and global shocks Ahilan Kadirgamar

If these exports are priced out of the US market with the 44% tariff on Sri Lanka, then a major short fall in foreign earnings can even undermine the import of essential goods.

The Trump trade shock announced last week has unnerved the world. Sri Lanka can have a severe impact with about US$ 3 billion in exports to the US. If these exports are priced out of the US market with the 44% tariff on Sri Lanka, then a major shortfall in foreign earnings can even undermine the import of essential goods. Furthermore, the bulk of these exports to the US are from the garment sector, which directly employs close to three hundred thousand women and hundreds of thousands more who are indirectly dependent on it for employment and livelihoods.

What will be the future of this mass of exploited women workers who have faced one shock after another, from the Covid pandemic five years ago to the economic disruption three years ago?

The spectre of such a disruption overshadowed the Feminist Economics Conference organised by the International Development Economics Associates (IDEAs) and the Law and Society Trust (LST) on April 5, 2025, in Colombo, titled ‘Women, Development and Social Transformation’. However, these global shocks also descend on an international economic system that has for decades become more and more precarious, particularly for women. The last five decades in particular have seen both repeated and deepening capitalist crises, but also capitalist accumulation that extends and deepens the exploitation of working people, particularly women, over this long period.

Feminist Analysis

The conference presenters coming from Asia, Africa and Latin America, along with Sri Lankan scholars and activists, delved into a range of issues particularly relating to women’s labour and the burdens they carry. The global and macroeconomic context is one of increasing inequality, declining social welfare and financialised accumulation through dispossession. Senior economists and scholars, including Jayati Ghosh, C. P. Chandrasekhar, Sumangala Damodaran, Farzana Haniffa and Sakuntala Kadirgamar, framed the challenges facing contemporary economies.

The dominant social and economic processes have intensified exploitation, including deteriorating conditions and abuse in the workplace. Such conditions prevail amidst unimplemented laws and regulations, and even moves to reform labour laws to favour employers to the detriment of workers.

Anthropologists Farzana Haniffa and Nida Kirmani presented research on the societal norms and institutional processes that make women workers in both the garment sector and retail sector precarious and subject to abuse.

Trade unionist Swasthika Arulingam highlighted how union-bashing is prevalent, and how women’s protections in factories are infringed in order to increase the profits of companies.

Natalia Flores Garrido presented her research in Brazil and other parts of South America to frame the problem of women’s unpaid care work. From theoretical questions about what can be considered “care,” she put forward some important advances in progressive policies and programmes for care work and care workers in South America that can be adopted in other parts of the world.

Next the crippling extraction by microfinance institutions and possible alternatives were discussed with examples from Kerala and Sri Lanka. Researcher Amali Wedagedara articulated the history of commercialisation of microfinance in Sri Lanka and the existential problems caused by indebtedness to women. Planning official Mini Sukumar presented the innovative Kudumbashree model in Kerala that sought to strengthen women’s livelihoods and access to credit through community organisations with the support of the state government.

Researcher Mayada Hassanain discussed the livelihoods of migrant women tea sellers prevalent in Sudan, who had formed co-operatives to protect themselves. However, those women and their organisations faced co-option by donors and came under attack by the state. The role of NGOs and the state in relation to women’s livelihoods and credit services was a subject of debate in the conference.

Political engagement in light of the analysis of the economic crises put forward by C. P. Chandrasekhar framed the concluding discussion. Parliamentarian Lakmali Hemachandra and academic Sumathy Sivamohan articulated the challenges and contentions before the Government in Sri Lanka and other similar countries.

What is to be done?

I have listed above some of the discussions at the conference, knowing quite well that I have not done justice to the depth of analysis and ideas articulated by the presenters, as well as active engagement from the floor by the participants.

The stimulating discussions certainly registered the importance of Feminist Economics as a field for engaged research.

The question, however, is what is to be done? I hope the discussions that were initiated at the conference will reach different forums to begin thinking about alternatives, along with a different worldview about the economy.

Some of the concrete discussions towards change included working conditions in the garment industry to be strengthened by policy, public institutional support for care workers, new avenues of credit for women, and the importance of credible domestic development banks. Questions arose about the funding of such initiatives and the obstacles posed by institutions such as the IMF and powerful geopolitical actors that kept countries like Sri Lanka in a vulnerable state.

Returning to the global trade shock, the regime of accumulation that had dominated is now unravelling, and that should indeed push us to rethink our political and economic engagement. One idea that came out of the conference is the need to work towards a different social consciousness of solidarity, which should necessarily be created outside the capitalist system through engagement with alternatives. Furthermore, a new global system should address the tremendous inequalities and the dispossession along lines of gender, class and caste.

Another idea that came was to draw on the legacy of Bandung and the Non-Aligned Movement, and to push our government to dialogue with progressive governments in other parts of the world, towards creating alternative international structures and institutional mechanisms to address the crisis affecting the global South. In this context, South–South trade and the importance of policies of self-sufficiency in food and other essentials are necessary responses to the disintegrating global trade system that, in any event, was unfair to begin with.

These times of crises require big ideas, new models and creative initiatives to bring about social transformation at the local and global levels. In our pessimistic moment, feminist economics provides inspiration for much-needed critical rethinking.

(This article was originally published in Daily Mirror on April 8, 2025)