• Farmers, activists warn imported hybrid seeds and chemical dependency have replaced climate-resilient local varieties
• Officials say stricter seed import testing rules were introduced to prevent unregulated varieties entering local farms
• Dept. disputes import dependency claims, says 70% of vegetable seeds still produced locally
• Lack of food sovereignty policies pushes SL deeper into import-dependent farming, environmentalists claim
• Seed sovereignty loss uproots women from their historic role as primary seed savers
• Soil depletion from chemical farming driving forest clearance, worsening human-wildlife conflict

When the 2021 fertiliser ban threw Sri Lanka’s agriculture into crisis overnight, it also revealed something that agroecology practitioners and seed conservationists had been warning about for years: the country’s farming system had been built on a foundation it could no longer afford – chemically dependent, import-reliant, and stripped of the biodiversity that once made it resilient.

What has been lost goes far beyond the disruption of a single policy. Sri Lanka was once home to around 3,000 varieties of rice. By the time a study was conducted in 1992, only 750 could be accounted for. Approximately 70 varieties of cereal and maize once existed in the country; many are no longer cultivated. Older vegetable varieties have disappeared from markets entirely. And the farmers who once maintained these varieties, along with the knowledge of how to grow them, are rapidly disappearing too.

“Even when seeds are available in villages, the number of people who know how to manage them is decreasing,” said Centre for Environmental Justice (CEJ) Chairman Hemantha Withanage. “Many of these traditional varieties have already been lost.”

Replacing diversity with dependency

The transformation of Sri Lanka’s agricultural landscape began in the 1960s with the Green Revolution, a global push to increase food yields through improved seed varieties and chemical inputs. In Sri Lanka, it started with the introduction of IR8, a high-yielding rice variety developed by the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) in the Philippines.

Vimukthi de Silva, an agroecology practitioner and farmer with the Movement for Land and Agricultural Reform (MONLAR), described what the country gave up in exchange for those yields.

“We were not a rice-only nation,” she said. “Our diet was grain based – finger millet, foxtail millet, maize – and our chena cultivation was actually an incredibly sophisticated system. It had a name: ‘nawa dalu’ (new leaves) – the way of variety, with grains, pulses, vegetables, oilseeds, and even flowers all growing together.”

The paddy field itself, she said, was an entire ecosystem. “There were specific sections such as ‘devata’ and ‘owita,’ each for different purposes. Yams grew along the marshy edges. Kohila grew where the water sat. On the bunds, farmers grew okra, long beans, and different kinds of beans for the household every day. And in the water, there were fish.”

With the arrival of agrarian settlements came strict land-use regulations that dismantled that diversity. “Farmers were told to grow rice and bananas,” de Silva said. “They were actually barred from planting a coconut tree inside the paddy area. Uniformity was the goal and with that, traditional crop rotation was destroyed.”

The new high-yielding varieties required synthetic fertilisers to perform. Urea was introduced and with it came a dependency on external inputs that deepened over the following decades, leaving Sri Lanka, by the time of the 2021 fertiliser ban, acutely exposed.

Today, according to de Silva, 95% of Sri Lanka’s vegetable seeds are imported, primarily from Thailand and Malaysia. The State has largely withdrawn from seed production, ceding the sector to private companies. Varieties like Pacific maize by Syngenta are widely used, though their precise genetic status, whether hybrid or genetically modified, is frequently unclear to farmers and consumers alike, according to her.

“We often don’t know if these are simple hybrids or Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs),” de Silva said. “And many imported seeds are treated with chemicals that are actually banned for use within Sri Lanka.”

De Silva pointed to several dimensions of the crisis that extended beyond seed availability. The traditional chena system, she said, had largely disappeared, with farmers in Mahaweli regions being pushed into hybrid chilli monocultures as a direct example of how agricultural diversity was being replaced by corporate-driven uniformity.

On the question of what was filling that vacuum, she raised concerns about transparency. Varieties like Red Lady papaya and Pacific maize by Syngenta are widely used across the country, yet farmers frequently do not know whether these were simple hybrids or GMOs.

Many imported seeds, she added, were treated with chemicals banned for use within Sri Lanka. The profit motive driving these choices had also eroded the nutritional value of food itself. “Modern tomatoes are bred to have thick skins so they don’t bruise during transport. Not for health. Not for taste. For the truck ride,” she said.

At the international level, she noted that while frameworks like the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Peasants existed to protect farmer rights, corporate-led platforms like CropLife continued to push for greater control over the seed sector. For de Silva, all of these threads lead to the same conclusion. “Without seed sovereignty, you cannot have food sovereignty,” she said.

De Silva also brought a dimension to the crisis that is rarely discussed in policy circles: the role of women in seed conservation and what their displacement has meant for the food system as a whole.

Before the rise of the open economy and the corporate seed sector, she said, the autonomy over seeds rested almost entirely with women, who were historically the primary practitioners of seed saving across the world.

“The protection of seeds and the survival of the food system was carried by the responsibility and connection of women,” she said, drawing a parallel between women’s role in social reproduction and their stewardship of the food system itself.

That chain, she argued, had been severely broken. As modern economic shifts displaced women from their lands and pushed them into urban areas and industrial zones as unskilled labour, the knowledge and the practice they carried with them was lost alongside them. De Silva noted that the disappearance of traditional seeds was therefore not only an agricultural or ecological crisis, but also one of gender and economic justice.

What the dept. says

Not all of these characterisations go unchallenged. Department of Agriculture Seed Certification Service Additional Director and Rice Research and Development Institute Director Dr. M.G.D. Lakmini Priyantha disputed what she described as a misleading picture of Sri Lanka’s seed sovereignty.

“Regarding paddy, we do not import even a small amount,” she said. “Our paddy cultivation is 100% local. These are varieties developed by our scientists from local types; nothing is imported, there are no hybrids. Our seeds are generally open-pollinated.”

On vegetables, she stated that the claim of total import dependence was incorrect. “People say we are totally reliant on imported hybrid seeds. That is a very incorrect narrative. In reality, 70% of vegetables are produced within Sri Lanka – 30% by the Department of Agriculture, 40% by the local private sector. I am speaking with data. Over the last 10 years, we have consistently produced about 70% of our seeds locally.”

She acknowledged that for up-country vegetables – carrots, leeks, and cabbage – Sri Lanka was entirely dependent on imported seeds because local climatic conditions did not support seed production for those crops.

On the question of chemical fertilisers, Dr. Priyantha’s position was that integration, not elimination, was the appropriate approach. “Agricultural chemicals are like medicine, not harmful if taken at the correct dosage and at the right time. We calculate exact nutrient requirements and recommend only what the plant removes from the soil. To feed the entire country, including those who do not own land, we cannot rely on organic farming alone.”

She noted that the department’s seed import regulations had been strengthened around 2007. Under that framework, imported varieties had to be tested for two seasons at research stations and one season in farmer fields before approval, and had to be accompanied by both phytosanitary and International Seed Testing Association (ISTA) certificates. “Only smuggled seeds bypass these regulations,” she said.

Seeds that no longer have a market

The disappearance of traditional varieties is not only a conservation problem. It is also, according to Withanage, an economic one because the market has consistently been structured to reward yield over resilience.

“Traditional seeds have lower yield, but their resilience is far higher,” he said. “Ma-vee rice can survive drought. It can survive floods, even days of being submerged, and recover. One day of heavy rain can destroy a modern hybrid crop – just one day.” 

Withanage pointed to the example of the ma-vee variety historically grown in the flood-prone Nilwala valley. “That rice would survive being submerged for five months,” de Silva added. “It had adapted to that environment over hundreds of years of farmers growing it in exactly that place. Those resilient genes are being lost.”

With markets prioritising appearance and yield, those varieties have no commercial footing. A few – suwandel, kuruluthuda, and pachchaperumal – have found niche markets among urban, middle-class consumers, but are often priced at over Rs. 600 per kg. “That is not a solution,” Withanage said. “That makes heritage food a luxury product. It should be the foundation of what everyone eats.”

The soil beneath those varieties has also been changed by decades of chemical farming. “Modern farming has effectively killed the soil. Heavy chemicals, pesticides, weedicides – the soil microorganisms are gone. That soil can now only support hybrid seeds. Traditional seeds cannot grow in it, so even if you want to return to traditional varieties, the land won’t allow it, not without years of rebuilding.”

The consequence? A cycle of depletion and displacement. “When soil is exhausted – and it happens within 10–15 years under modern methods – farmers move.”

Living seeds, not locked seeds

In the absence of adequate institutional response, community-led conservation efforts have attempted to preserve what remains.

MONLAR has, through partnerships with local seed protection organisations, preserved 84 varieties of rice, 60 to 70 varieties of yams, 12 varieties of bananas, and approximately 40 types of grains and indigenous vegetables. The Rajanganaya Indigenous Seed Protectors’ Primary Agri-Product Marketing Society works alongside MONLAR to distribute these varieties to farmers across the country.

De Silva was deliberate about the language used to describe the effort. “We don’t call it a seed bank,” she said. “A bank is where you store something for profit. Seeds are not savings. They are life. They must be in the fields.”

That philosophy of keeping seeds active rather than archived is also central to the work of the Rathugala Indigenous People Development Society, which has conserved nearly 60 types of indigenous seeds, including paddy, vegetables, and fruits, and distributes them to communities beyond their own.

Rathugala Indigenous People Development Society President D.M.D. Dissanayake said that the distinction between storing and growing was not merely philosophical. “People think conservation means putting seeds in a bottle and storing them somewhere,” he said. “That is not conservation. Seeds must live. Every few months, we produce new seeds from the field. Then we protect them with specific leaves, natural materials, until the next planting season. They must keep moving. A seed that is not growing is already dying.”

The Rathugala community, made up of ‘Adivasi’ or Sri Lanka’s indigenous people, came to farming not by choice but by displacement. “We were forest people,” Dissanayake said. “We lived on yams, medicinal plants, leaves, and fruits from the forest. Farming came later when we were pushed out, when our children started going to school, when we needed money to buy things from shops. Then we had to grow things to sell.”

Their farming method, which they called ‘krushi-vana’ (forest agriculture), or ecological forest farming, mimicked the layered structure of a natural forest. “The forest has layers – canopy above, then mid-level trees, then shrubs, then ground plants. We plant in the same way. And when you create those layers, animals come, insects come, and they balance each other. The pest control happens by itself. We don’t need chemicals because we have an ecosystem,” Dissanayake said.

The society’s network of approximately 25 master farmers now spans eight provinces and 19 districts. “We have already proven it works,” Dissanayake said. “We are not asking people to blindly believe us. We have the numbers.”

The formal vault

At the institutional level, the Plant Genetic Resources Centre (PGRC) in Gannoruwa maintains Sri Lanka’s National Seed Bank under the Department of Agriculture.

Seed Conservation Unit Deputy Director of Agriculture E.S.C. Edirisinghe said that the gene bank held approximately 17,000 registered accessions as of 2024, spanning rice, cereals, grain legumes, vegetables, oilseeds, medicinal plants, and fruits.

Seeds are maintained in two distinct collections. An active collection is stored at 5°C with 25–30% relative humidity, used for research, regeneration, evaluation, and distribution. A base collection is kept at 1°C in hermetically sealed, airtight containers held not for distribution but as a security reserve against loss.

Edirisinghe noted that not all seeds could be preserved this way. Recalcitrant varieties, typically those from plants propagated vegetatively, cannot survive the conditions of a standard gene bank. These are instead maintained in field gene banks and botanical gardens.

Gene robbery: The int’l dimension

Beyond local conservation challenges, de Silva pointed to a global dimension of the seed crisis, one driven by international legal frameworks and corporate interest in genetic resources.

Under UPOV 78, a convention of the International Union for the Protection of New Varieties of Plants, farmers retained the right to save and exchange seeds. UPOV 91, a later convention, removed many of those protections, shifting authority to those defined as breeders – a category dominated in practice by large seed corporations.

“Under these systems, you can have a seed growing in your own field and not hold the legal rights to it,” de Silva said. “They call it plant variety protection. We call it gene robbery.”

A more recent development she described as being particularly alarming is Digital Sequence Information (DSI) – the digitisation of seed DNA – being pushed by countries including Japan and the Netherlands. By digitising genetic sequences rather than physically removing seeds, corporations and research institutions could potentially access and commercialise genetic material without triggering the benefit-sharing obligations owed to the communities that had preserved those traits over generations.

“They say they are not taking seeds from your fields but only digitising the DNA,” de Silva said. “But those genes came from here – from farmers who selected, saved, and protected those traits across hundreds of years. And now someone else will own the digital copy of that work.”

On the scale of corporate control, she said: “Companies may physically control only 20–25% of seed varieties, but they have captured over 50% of the global food market. In Sri Lanka, while farmers still hold many seeds, the popular food market is dominated by multinational interests. The maize for animal feed is almost entirely grown from imported seeds.”

Seed sovereignty

Following the 2021 fertiliser ban, MONLAR launched what it called the Master Farmer programme – a large-scale effort to demonstrate that agroecological methods can maintain farm productivity without synthetic inputs.

“It was a difficult time, but it created a chance to prove what we had been saying for years,” de Silva said.

Under the programme, one farmer was trained per village; that farmer then trained others across the community. As of the time of reporting, the initiative had reached 4,000 farmers across 74 villages, covering tea, grain, and rice cultivation.

“We have done formal research – three seasons, counting and comparing yields,” de Silva said. “We have shown that using ‘jeevamrutham’ and super-compost, you can produce high yields even with hybrid seeds. Everyone said you cannot grow hybrid carrots without heavy chemicals. We proved them wrong.”

She was clear, however, that the approach was not simply about replacing one input with another. “It is the whole system – crop diversification, companion cropping. You need to think like an ecosystem, not a factory.”

Withanage also drew a direct line between the loss of seed sovereignty and the country’s worsening environmental crises, including the Human-Elephant Conflict (HEC). Modern farming methods, he said, had depleted soil productivity within 10–15 years, forcing farmers to clear forest land in areas like Buttala and Katharagama to find fresh, fertile ground for crops like maize.

That deforestation, he argued, was fragmenting elephant habitats and pushing animals into human settlements, making seed sovereignty not merely an agricultural issue but a conservation one as well. “If we had a policy rooted in food sovereignty, using traditional seeds suited to the land, we would not need to keep clearing forests to feed the country,” he said.

Food security vs. food sovereignty

Withanage returned throughout his remarks to a distinction he believed was central to why Sri Lanka’s seed crisis had persisted and worsened despite decades of awareness: “Sri Lanka focuses on food security, not food sovereignty. Those are not the same thing.”

Food security, as currently practised, means ensuring sufficient food is available – measured by yield, price stability, and supply. He argued that this was a reactive framework: “The Government only responds when food prices rise because of a monsoon failure or El Niño. That is the trigger. Then it looks for ways to increase production quickly.”

Food sovereignty is different; it is the right of communities to produce food through their own methods, using their own seeds, suited to their own land. Had policy been oriented around food sovereignty, Withanage argued, the resilience of traditional varieties could have been leveraged precisely to manage the climate-driven disruptions the country regularly faced.

“If you have a policy rooted in food sovereignty, you use traditional seeds to solve food security problems. Ma-vee rice can survive droughts and floods both. If we were growing it at scale, a monsoon failure would not be a national crisis. But we are not growing it, because there is no policy to support it.”

The structural consequences of that gap are, in his view, compounding. Soil has degraded beyond the point where traditional varieties can grow, forest has been cleared to replace exhausted farmland, and in the agricultural workforce, children are increasingly leaving the profession.

“The Ministry of Agriculture and the department need a complete overhaul to make heritage and sustainability the priority, not the afterthought,” Withanage said. “Right now, traditional seeds are a side project, a niche – something for enthusiasts and civil society groups – but they should not be a side project; they are the foundation. We are building on sand.”