In Sri Lanka, many women in agriculture are left increasingly economically vulnerable.
Soon after Ravindra Lamosia started working as a tenant farmer more than a decade ago, he learned the hard way that climate extremes could swiftly destroy his family’s livelihood. The first year, his farm, located near the Sri Lankan town of Talawa, flooded. The second year, a drought destroyed the entire rice paddy, along with any hope of an income that season.
After the drought, his family “fell into money troubles,” Lamosia said in January last year, sitting in his brother’s house in Gangasiripura, a village near Talawa. They could not pay back the loans that they had taken out to farm. The family’s debt was a major factor in why his wife, Ishara, decided to move to Lebanon to find a job as a domestic worker.
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In the agricultural heartlands of Sri Lanka’s North Central Province, many farming families have been torn apart as women like Ishara migrate to the Middle East in search of work. Sri Lanka is one of the countries most vulnerable to climate impacts—in 2023 it faced both deadly flooding and a drought that devastated farmlands, while in 2024 there were major floods throughout the year. As erratic weather events become more frequent in the country, farming has become an increasingly precarious livelihood.
So far, the Sri Lankan government has done little to support these farmers. Although past administrations set ambitious climate targets, they did not fully recognize the severity of the threat that climate change poses to everyday Sri Lankans or implement comprehensive policies to support farming communities.
In September, Sri Lanka elected its first leftist president, Anura Kumara Dissanayake of the socialist National People’s Power party. His party’s manifesto features a section dedicated to building a “sustainable” world, which includes ensuring “environmental justice” and emphasizes the need for gender equality. But it is too soon to tell how his ambitious plans will be implemented, especially since his government has yet to make progress on many of its promises, and few analysts expect the trend in the climate-driven out-migration of women workers to abate anytime soon.
WOMEN HAVE MIGRATED from Sri Lanka to the Middle East to find work—particularly to Kuwait, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates—for decades, but recent years have seen an uptick in this trend.
From the 1990s to 2000s, female domestic workers made up around 60 percent of Sri Lankan migrant workers in the Middle East, according to research conducted by Anoji Ekanayake, a Sri Lanka- and Qatar-based migration researcher, and her colleagues. (The other 40 percent comprised men and women working in other industries.)
The proportion of female domestic workers among Sri Lankan laborers in the Middle East fell to around 28 percent after the government implemented policies in the late 2000s and early 2010s to control labor migration. According to Ekanayake, some of these policies promoted male migration by creating more opportunities in male-dominated occupations, while others directly sought to decrease the out-migration of female domestic workers.
But in 2022, that figure rose again. That year, 124,091 Sri Lankan women migrated for semi-skilled and low-skilled jobs—nearly all to the Middle East, where they made up around 37 percent of the country’s migrants to that region. Remittances from the Middle East totaled $1.94 billion—more than half of all foreign remittances entering Sri Lanka in 2022.
Economic pressures contributed to this trend. Sri Lanka faces a debilitating debt crisis, and after its historic debt default in 2022, the government imposed austerity measures, including tax hikes, as part of an economic reform program with the International Monetary Fund. There have also been fewer jobs for less-skilled workers.
“When [female farmers] face financial pressure, they turn to migration to the Middle East as they consider it as a way of accumulating considerable savings within a short span of time,” Ekanayake said.
Climate change has had an outsized impact on migration as well, said Vimukthi de Silva, the North Central provincial coordinator for the Movement for National Land and Agricultural Reform, a collective of organizations for small-scale farmers and marginalized communities in Sri Lanka.
According to Sri Lanka’s 2023 national policy on climate change, in the previous decade, climate-induced hazards had become 22 times greater than in the period between 1973 and 1983. This has severely disrupted Sri Lanka’s agricultural sector, de Silva said, which employs around 27 percent of Sri Lankans over the age of 15.
Traditionally, Sri Lanka has two monsoon-dependent seasons for farming, and rain cycles dictate the timeline of the harvesting process for rice, the country’s staple crop, as well as finger millet, legumes, and vegetables. Now, rather than intermittent rains, farmers face long dry spells and prolonged periods of rain—both of which can devastate crop production.
Climate-driven outmigration of Sri Lanka’s agricultural workers remains poorly studied. But when SLYCAN Trust, a Sri Lanka-based think tank, interviewed 57 Sri Lankan migrant workers in Kuwait—where an estimated 130,000 Sri Lankans live—from 2020-21, 63 percent said that climate-related impacts contributed to their decision to work abroad. A quarter of the migrants surveyed formerly worked in “small-scale agriculture.”
Women are integral to Sri Lanka’s agricultural economy. Only 31.3 percent of Sri Lankan women participate in the formal labor force, as traditional gender roles push them toward unpaid work at home, including in farming. Farmers often work collectively as families; in general, women clean the farms, plant seeds, and harvest, while men are involved in land preparation, fertilizer application, and other tasks that require machinery. But women also work as tenant farmers and laborers under other farmers. As of 2021, they comprised around 36 percent of the country’s workforce in the agricultural sector.
Female agricultural workers are particularly vulnerable to the effects of climate change, which “exacerbates” existing gender inequalities in Sri Lanka, said Vositha Wijenayake, the executive director of SLYCAN Trust. Since many of these women do not own land, they do not have access to credit or government subsidies. Crop losses also contribute to malnutrition and, consequently, can lead to worse maternal and child health. And financial struggles in the home often worsen existing gender-based violence in rural Sri Lanka.
In the face of these risks, more women from farming families now want to go abroad, de Silva said.
Women migrating for work comes with challenges at home, including disruptions to care for older family members and children, as migrants noted in SLYCAN Trust’s survey. When mothers go abroad for work, “children live in different houses, families are separated,” de Silva said. “It’s a tragedy.”
Ravindra Lamosia’s family faced many of these problems. When his wife first went abroad, their older son was just 2 years old. In 2022, she left again due to the family’s financial troubles, migrating to Saudi Arabia and leaving behind her two young children. Both times, Lamosia’s mother, Mallika, took over child care, despite ongoing chest pain. “I am sick these days—the doctor asked me to stay at the hospital—but I can’t leave the children behind,” Mallika said.
Seeking work abroad can also be dangerous for women, and some even become victims of human trafficking. Recruiters (known locally as “agents”) exploit rural women’s desperation and limited knowledge on the migration process, promising easy informal routes to domestic work abroad. “People do not know what the agency is,” de Silva said. “They cannot even read the documents sometimes.” Once they arrive at the destination, many of these women find that the salaries are much lower than promised or are never paid. In some cases, the job does not even exist, and the women are left stranded in an unfamiliar country without adequate resources.
Still, migration has provided a much-needed financial cushion to families like Lamosia’s. In the 2010s, his family was able to pay off its loans with the money that his wife sent home, and build parts of their house, though it remains unfinished.
Saman Padmalatha, a farmer from Gangasiripura, worked in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait on and off for around 25 years until 2019. She said that her family built a house with the money she sent, and also expanded their farm, but a drought around 20 years ago wrecked their crops. “[We] planted corn in 2.5 acres of land, the plants grew tall, but we could only harvest four corn cobs,” she said. “After that, I went abroad again to repay the loans taken to plant corn.”
Today, Padmalatha’s family continues to plant paddy rice and vegetables. The farm hardly brings in any money, but they keep a portion of the harvest, which ensures that they can at least put food on the table.
CLIMATE MIGRATION WILL ONLY WORSEN in the coming years. In 2021, the World Bank predicted that Sri Lanka will see a significant increase in extreme heat under all potential emissions pathways. Carbon Brief, meanwhile, has projected that the country will face 1 to 3.6 degrees Celsius of warming by 2100. These trends will “create problems with relation to agriculture,” said Buddhi Marambe, a senior professor in crop science at Sri Lanka’s University of Peradeniya.
Rising temperatures prevent crop fertilization, he said, and unexpected periods of rain can also crush incomes at certain times, such as when farmworkers are drying harvested paddy. In addition, one 2015 study projected that there will be a 14 to 26 percent decrease in net returns per farm in Sri Lanka due to climate change by 2040-2069 compared with 2012-2013.
Meanwhile, Sri Lanka’s farmers will remain at the mercy of changing weather patterns. In Talawa, Padmalatha lamented the challenge of trying to predict the weather. Because of drought, her family switched to planting soya. “But now it’s raining, and rains are not good for soya,” Padmalatha said, sitting under a tree beside the fields after weeding for hours under the hot sun. “Nothing is certain until the harvest is taken inside.”
