Agriculture is a very big part of the country’s export basket but what needs to happen is create value addition in that sector Prabhash Subasinghe – Chairman, Sri Lanka Export (Pictured) Development Board said.
“We don’t have abundance of agriculture in Sri Lanka so we need to create niche products with the best branding best marketing and best packeting and go into niche markets. That is the kind of agricultural value addition Sri Lanka should be looking at because we don’t have an abundance of raw material.”
With rubber products being a billion dollar export from Sri Lanka, Subasinghe questioned as to why the country was not looking at new areas in automobile industry, industrial sector, medical industry and even technological products that have certain components of rubber. He said there were more foreign investments coming in for rubber with a Chinese firm recently investing USD 300 million in the rubber sector. He said the know-how was available but what was required was embarking into new areas.
Subasinghe said Sri Lanka exports around USD 270 million sea food and this could be easily be increased to a USD 1 billion export business . He said the pharmaceutical sector could be viewed as a potential new export sector for Sri Lanka.
