The Hon. Namal Karunaratne
Hon. Namal Karunaratne said the Government faces practical constraints in purchasing paddy at threshing floors, including a shortage of suitable vehicles and the lack of provisions to accept wet paddy. He stated that paddy must be dried to about 14 percent moisture and that proposals have been called to provide the necessary equipment, with paddy dryers expected to be installed by the next season. He added that Ampara, which produces over 20 percent of national paddy output, would be prioritized based on local conditions.
Verbatim record (translated)
Machine-translated from Sinhala / Tamil / English¶ 01 Hon. Member, a key issue we currently face is the lack of capacity to purchase paddy directly from farmers at the threshing floor due to the unavailability of suitable vehicles. A bigger problem is that the Government has no provisions to accept wet paddy. We need to accept paddy with moisture reduced to around 14 percent. To bring paddy to that level, the necessary technical equipment and infrastructure must be provided. We have already called for proposals through a newspaper notice. Especially by the next season, we expect to install paddy dryers at several locations and take this process forward.
¶ 02 In particular, Ampara produces more than 20 percent of Sri Lanka’s total paddy. It is the main district that provides rice to the nation, and we are proud of that. Taking all this into account, we intend to proceed in the Ampara District as you propose, based on prevailing conditions.
Provenance
- Source
- Hansard, Wednesday, 22 October 2025 ·No. 22638 ·English daily/uncorrected Hansard
- Page · column
- not yet extracted — page/column anchors are not in the current dataset; the source PDF is the citable location.
- Permalink
/lk/speeches/12317
Cite as: The Hon. Namal Karunaratne. 10th Parliament, Parliament of Sri Lanka. Hansard, 22 October 2025. No. 22638. Politick, https://staging.politick.io/lk/speeches/12317