Sri Lanka should set aside money for agricultural disaster response before hazards strike rather than mobilising it afresh during each emergency, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization’s representative in the country has argued, marking World Food Day with a call to convert weather forecasts into pre-agreed spending triggers.

Writing in Lanka Business Online, Vimlendra Sharan, FAO Representative for Sri Lanka and the Maldives, framed the choice as between continuing to pay heavily after disasters or investing to protect production beforehand. World Food Day falls today, 16 October, under the theme “Innovate today. Nourish tomorrow.”

The agricultural share of Ditwah

Sharan put the World Bank’s estimate of Cyclone Ditwah’s direct physical damage at US$4.1 billion, about 4% of GDP — the same total this desk has carried since the cyclone made landfall on 27 November 2025, killing 646 people and affecting 2.2 million.

The new detail is the sectoral split. Agriculture alone absorbed an estimated US$814 million. Set against the roughly US$973 million absorbed by the transport sector, the two together account for about 44% of the headline damage total. Sharan stressed these are estimates of physical damage only — not lost income and production, nor the eventual cost of recovery.

His financial case rests on two benchmark ratios: FAO’s global evidence that risk-informed early action in agriculture has returned up to US$7 in avoided losses and additional benefits per US$1 invested, and the World Meteorological Organization’s estimate of about US$9 in economic benefits per dollar spent on multi-hazard early warning systems. He explicitly cautioned that these are global findings rather than guaranteed project returns.

As an illustration — and, he wrote, “not a proposed budget” — a US$10 million agricultural preparedness and early-action financing window would equal roughly 1.2% of Ditwah’s agricultural damage. He cited Nepal’s US$150 million contingent disaster-financing facility, arranged ahead of any emergency, as a working precedent, alongside Bangladesh and India on warnings and community networks.

What FAO is already running here

Sharan said FAO is supporting an integrated Flood Anticipatory Action Protocol for Batticaloa, a drought trigger for Kurunegala, and a weather-linked leptospirosis trigger connecting meteorological data to public health risk, plus work with the Departments of Meteorology and Agriculture on operational drought forecasting.

Two of his proposals already have Sri Lankan precedents his article does not mention.

The first is institutional. Sharan calls for Sri Lanka to institutionalise preparedness financing with “transparent forecast-based triggers and delivery responsibilities agreed in advance.” A national framework for precisely that was launched four months ago: the Disaster Management Centre’s National Anticipatory Action Roadmap for 2026–2030, developed with World Food Programme technical leadership and US funding, which covers impact-based forecasting, early warning and forecast-based financing — the release of funds on pre-agreed triggers. FAO and WFP are distinct agencies, and the roadmap is a framework rather than a funded facility, so the op-ed’s emphasis on money is not redundant. But the policy architecture it calls for is not absent.

The second is operational. Among the “rapid channels” Sharan recommends are digital input vouchers — a mechanism FAO itself deployed in Sri Lanka in April, when it launched a US$300,000 fertiliser e-voucher scheme for 3,489 smallholder paddy farmers in Anuradhapura, 1,686 of them women, timed to the Yala season.

The financing argument meets a spending problem

The case for arranging money in advance runs into a finding from the institution whose damage estimate anchors it. In the World Bank’s October Development Update, only about 8% of the Rs. 500 billion allocated for Cyclone Ditwah reconstruction had been disbursed by mid-year, alongside 16.7% of the full-year capital budget. The Bank attributed this to “weaknesses in public investment management, including project selection, procurement, and implementation capacity — rather than financing constraints,” as this desk reported.

On that evidence, Sri Lanka’s recent constraint has not been securing funds but spending the funds it had. Sharan’s proposal is partly responsive to this: pre-agreed delivery responsibilities, rapid disbursement channels and shock-responsive social protection are execution machinery, not simply more money, and he notes that prearranged donor financing should complement domestic resources “without assuming that additional public debt is always the answer.” He also proposes measurable tests of success — hectares planted on time, livelihoods protected, households kept out of emergency assistance. Neither the op-ed nor any filing addresses the two findings together.

The timing matters because El Niño is expected to bring further climatic pressures, a risk already visible in Sri Lanka this month in a flood alert on the Nilwala and in halted irrigation releases.

Not reported

The op-ed gives no figure for what Sri Lanka currently spends on agricultural preparedness, no cost for the Batticaloa, Kurunegala or leptospirosis protocols, and no indication of whether the proposed financing window would sit inside the existing national roadmap or alongside it. No government response had been reported at the time of writing.

Sharan also references the World Food Day Youth Innovation Challenge, run with the Ministry of Education and Hatton National Bank. Colombo Gazette reported its launch on 20 August — too old to cite as a source here, and noted rather than relied upon — describing a pipeline running from a nationwide call for concept notes through roughly 25 teams at an online pitching round to ten prototype teams, with finalists presenting at the national World Food Day celebrations, the top five pitching to judges and investors and the top three receiving cash awards. This desk has not previously covered the challenge.

No other verified newsroom had published this year’s FAO op-ed at the time of writing, so this article rests on a single verified source. That is the normal pattern for a guest column. A near-identically framed FAO op-ed under the previous year’s theme, “Hand in Hand for Better Foods and a Better Future,” appeared on island.lk and ft.lk for World Food Day 2025 with Sharan as lead author alongside two co-authors; it is a separate article from a different year and is not a source for this report.