- Urges regulation of private paddy buyers
The National Agrarian Unity organisation has called on the Government to introduce a floating price mechanism for rice, arguing that existing pricing policies are unfair to farmers.
Speaking to The Daily Morning yesterday (17), the National Agrarian Unity President Anuradha Tennakoon claimed that while paddy prices continue to fluctuate, the Government has maintained a stable retail price for rice through a gazette notification.
“When the price of paddy goes down, the benefit of that should be going to the customer," Tennakoon said. “But, stable prices for rice in the market have been gazetted on 9 December of last year (2025). For instance, the maximum retail price for a kg of Nadu is Rs. 230”. According to Tennakoon, current prices show that a kg of wet paddy is around Rs. 80 and dried paddy ranges between Rs. 95 to Rs. 100. “To produce a kg of rice, 1.5 kg of paddy is required. If we assume that a kg of paddy is Rs. 100, it requires Rs. 150 worth of paddy to make a kg of rice,” he explained. “Even if packaging, electricity, transport and other costs are added, a kg of rice could be produced for the market at least at a Rs. 200 price range in the given situation. But, as there is a stable price, this profit directly goes to the paddy mill owners and this is an ongoing mafia."
Tennakoon further claimed that while the Paddy Marketing Board has set a controlled price for farmers at Rs. 120, farmers do not actually receive this price. “The harvest of paddy this season is around 1.25 million metric tonnes (MT). It is only 80,000 MT that the Government buys. To sell the rest of the harvest, the farmers have to go to private paddy buyers, and they buy from us for very low prices. We need the Government to regulate the private buyers and to take actions to make the minimum price work,” he said.
On Monday (16), the Government announced the minimum prices at which the Board will purchase paddy from farmers for the 2025 / this year (2026) Maha cultivation season. The Board will purchase Nadu paddy at Rs. 120 per kg, Samba paddy at Rs. 130 per kg, and Keeri Samba paddy at Rs. 140 per kg.