A consumer rights group has accused officials in the Ministry of Finance of trying to lift Sri Lanka’s restrictions on palm oil imports by misleading the President and the Cabinet, and has asked the President to step in and stop it.

Ranjith Withanage, president of the National Movement for Consumer Rights Protection (NMCRP), said restrictions on palm oil imports were imposed in 2021 following a decision by an expert panel to safeguard public health and food safety, and that the government elected two years ago had kept that policy in place, the Daily Mirror reported at 3.35 p.m.

“A group of corrupt officials in the Ministry of Finance are now preparing to remove the restrictions on palm oil imports into Sri Lanka by putting forward a budget proposal and allowing palm oil to be imported again,” he said.

The allegation is the NMCRP’s and is not supported in the filing by documents, named officials or a response from the ministry.

Two expert panels, two opposite findings

The claim rests on the authority of an expert panel — and that is where it becomes contested, because a second expert panel has since reached the opposite conclusion about palm oil and health.

This desk reported in April that a 13-member expert committee appointed by the Plantations Ministry found no basis for the environmental and health concerns cited in Sri Lanka’s 2019 measure, and concluded there was “a strong socio-economic case” for reversing it. That report was shared with the Cabinet and Parliament, the Palm Oil Industry Association said at the time, and regional plantation companies began preparing to invest on the strength of it.

So one panel’s health finding is the basis for keeping restrictions, and another panel’s health finding is the basis for removing them. Neither Thursday’s filing nor the NMCRP’s statement acknowledges the second panel exists.

The two measures are not the same thing

A distinction the reporting does not draw, and which matters for reading the dispute: Sri Lanka has two separate palm oil policies.

The 2019 measure is a ban on cultivation — the one the Plantations Ministry’s committee examined, and the reason oil palm estates that covered about 10,400 hectares were ordered uprooted. The 2021 measure is a set of restrictions on imports, which is what the NMCRP is defending.

The combined effect is that Sri Lanka restricts both growing palm oil and bringing it in, and the two policies are promoted by different ministries on different grounds. A change to one does not automatically change the other, and conflating them is easy because both are routinely called “the palm oil ban”.

What the filing does not establish

The Daily Mirror’s account does not identify which budget proposal is meant, what it would actually change, which restrictions would go, or when it would be tabled. It does not name any official, give the ministry’s response, or say what evidence the NMCRP has that the President and Cabinet were given misleading information rather than simply different advice.

It also does not say what the 2021 panel’s health finding was, who sat on it, or whether its reasoning has been revisited.

Not reported

Ada Derana filed on the statement under the headline “Consumer rights group raises alarm over move to lift palm oil import restrictions”. Its site has returned a CloudFront block to this desk for 34 days and could not be fetched or dated, so it is named here rather than cited. Reports also appeared on non-verified aggregator sites, which do not count toward this article’s sourcing.

No other verified newsroom had filed on the NMCRP’s statement at the time of writing, and this account is accordingly single-source.