Delays in approving maize imports risk pushing up chicken and egg prices as the festive season approaches, the All Island Poultry Association of Sri Lanka has warned.
Association President Ajith Gunasekara said animal feed manufacturers have been forced to substitute rice for maize, and that the switch has produced a marked decline in both poultry meat and egg output, Hiru News reported.
He said roughly 20% of small-scale poultry producers have already left the industry because of the shortage of feed ingredients.
Why maize matters here
Maize is the dominant component of commercial poultry feed, and Sri Lanka meets demand from a combination of local cultivation — harvested around February — and imports. When the import channel closes or slows, feed millers have no equivalent substitute: rice can replace maize as a starch source but does not match it on cost or nutritional profile at feed scale, which is why the association links the substitution directly to falling output rather than simply to higher costs.
The timing is the industry’s stated concern. Demand for chicken and eggs rises into the year-end festive period, and birds placed now determine supply then — so a feed gap in October is felt at the retail counter weeks later.
A long-running constraint, not a new one
Maize supply has repeatedly bottlenecked Sri Lanka’s poultry sector, and the headlines it generates are close to interchangeable across years. Earlier rounds have involved an outright import ban, a commodity levy on imported maize, import-tax reductions intended to bring chicken and egg prices down, and complaints that maize collectors were withholding stocks. Gunasekara himself has been quoted in several of those earlier rounds.
What distinguishes the current round is the specific mechanism the association names: not a ban or a levy, but administrative delay in granting import approvals, combined with the rice-substitution response and the 20% small-producer exit figure.
LankaNewz has previously reported on egg prices rising on feed shortages and on the Rs. 50-per-kilo commodity levy on maize, both of which belong to that earlier series and should not be read as describing the current situation.
Not reported
The association has not published the volume of maize awaiting approval, the identity of the approving agency, how long the approvals have been pending, or the size of the production decline it attributes to the substitution. No government response had been reported at the time of writing.
Hiru News was the only verified newsroom LankaNewz tracks carrying its own account of this statement at the time of writing. Ada Derana also reported it, but its site is currently unreachable from our infrastructure and the filing could not be independently fetched or dated, so it is not cited here.
Source: Maize shortage threatens poultry production — Hiru News, October 3.
