10th Parliament· 154 sittings on record · 30,475 speeches · latest 10 June 2026

The Hon. Ravi Karunanayake

New Democratic Front· National List· 20 June 2025 ·Oral question: Oral Question: Paddy Marketing Board - Purchase of Paddy (Q.310/2024)

Agriculture
AI summary generated by gpt-5.5

Ravi Karunanayake argued that Sri Lanka’s high rice prices are driven not only by harvesting, selling, and milling issues, but also by comparatively low paddy yields. He noted that countries such as Cambodia and Thailand achieve around 7,000 kg per hectare while Sri Lanka obtains about 4,500 kg, and asked why farmers cannot be provided with higher-yielding seed paddy.

Verbatim record (translated)

Machine-translated from Sinhala / Tamil / English

¶ 01 Hon. Speaker, my second supplementary is this.

¶ 02 Harvesting, selling and milling into rice is one part. The larger problem in our country is the low yield. While countries like Cambodia and Thailand obtain around 7,000 kg per hectare, we get about 4,500 kg. That is the main driver of higher prices. Why cannot we provide farmers with higher-yielding seed paddy?

Provenance

Source
Hansard, Friday, 20 June 2025 ·No. 1751600792021434 ·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/1845

Cite as: The Hon. Ravi Karunanayake. 10th Parliament, Parliament of Sri Lanka. Hansard, 20 June 2025. No. 1751600792021434. Politick, https://staging.politick.io/lk/speeches/1845