"Massive public works projects could have been started to employ people in growing food and running community kitchens to feed the starving poor."

That gives me a vision of trucks and buses driven by soldiers going around Sri Lanka loading healthy poor men and women on board to spend ten hours a day hauling buckets full of dirt or water out in the hot sun. Will this be voluntary, as in the poor will be trading brutal physical work for enough food to live on, or will there be whips? We live in a time when skilled people using machines do the kind of work you are thinking of, not untrained coolies or peons with hand tools. It's safer and more efficient. But if you are thinking of the poor as some kind domestic animal that has to be kept busy and tired so they don't get into trouble, I gotcha.