The Hon. Chamara Sampath Dasanayake
Hon. Chamara Sampath Dasanayake discussed ethanol pricing and the trade-off between importing cheaper ethanol from South Africa and protecting local ethanol factories. He noted that even when ethanol was supplied at Rs. 1,200 per litre under the previous government, liquor prices remained high, and questioned why bottle prices are now around Rs. 3,600 if ethanol costs do not justify such increases.
Verbatim record (translated)
Machine-translated from Sinhala / Tamil / English¶ 01 Hon. Minister, in South Africa you can bring ethanol at Rs. 70 per litre. But the issue is not getting it at Rs. 70 from South Africa. Either we allow people to drink cheaply or we must develop our local industry. There are two points. If you bring ethanol from South Africa, you can sell a bottle at Rs. 1,500–2,000. That would be good for drinkers. But we cannot close our factories for that. During our government, we gave ethanol at Rs. 1,200 per litre, yet the bottle sold at Rs. 2,800. What you say holds truth—today a bottle is Rs. 3,600. Even if ethanol is sold at Rs. 1,200, there is no reason for a higher bottle price. Therefore, I—
Provenance
- Source
- Hansard, Friday, 6 June 2025 ·No. 1750753418078417 ·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/28328
Cite as: The Hon. Chamara Sampath Dasanayake. 10th Parliament, Parliament of Sri Lanka. Hansard, 6 June 2025. No. 1750753418078417. Politick, https://staging.politick.io/lk/speeches/28328