Sri Lanka’s coconut yield next year may be reduced by the current dry weather, the Coconut Research Institute has warned, even though this year’s crop is running ahead of last year’s.
Institute chairman Professor Ajith Jayaweera said that if dry conditions persist over the coming months, the situation will escalate, Hiru News reported. He said coconut yield this year is up 11% on last year.
Why the warning is about next year
The lag is a feature of the crop. A coconut takes roughly a year to develop from flowering to harvest, so moisture stress in one season shows up in the following season’s nut count rather than the current one. That is why the institute can report an 11% gain for this year and a warning for the next in the same statement.
Jayaweera did not give a projected size for any shortfall, and Hiru News did not report which districts are most exposed. No other verified newsroom had filed the statement at the time of writing.
The government anticipated this in August
The warning lands on a policy the Cabinet approved less than three weeks ago for exactly this risk. Ministers approved a coconut land rehabilitation programme covering about 85,000 acres on 11 August, explicitly against the backdrop of concerns over a possible El Niño condition in the months ahead.
The scheme’s payment schedule points at soil moisture: Rs. 700 per tree for mulching with fertilizer and dolomite, Rs. 200 per tree for mulching with dolomite alone, and Rs. 50,000 an acre for irrigation of coconut lands. Incentives cover up to 65% of a grower’s costs and are limited to smallholders with five acres or less. The programme runs three years.
A weaker 2027 crop would also complicate the production target the government has set. Plantation Minister Vidyaratna tied a planned coconut floor price to an output goal of 4,200 million nuts a year by 2030 in June.
Dry spell context
Government figures this week put more than 84,500 people across seven districts as affected by El Niño-linked dry weather, and major reservoir storage has continued to fall. The National Water Supply and Drainage Board has turned to groundwater and tube wells in the worst-affected areas.
