Wholesale prices for several upcountry and low-country vegetables have risen sharply as rain continues across the island, with tomatoes roughly two-thirds more expensive than a week ago and cabbage more than doubling.
The increases were reported by the Daily Mirror on Monday morning, which attributes both the figures and the outlook to Anil Indrajith, former Chief Organiser of the Manning Market Traders Union. Manning Market in Pettah is the country’s principal wholesale vegetable market, so its prices set the floor for retail across Colombo.
What has moved
| Vegetable | Last week | Now |
|---|---|---|
| Tomatoes | Rs 350–400 | Rs 600–650 |
| Capsicum | Rs 250 | Rs 400–450 |
| Cabbage | Rs 150 | Rs 350 |
All figures are wholesale prices per kilogram.
Tomatoes have become the most expensive vegetable on the market, Indrajith said, putting the wholesale price at around Rs 600 a kilogram. On the midpoints of the ranges given, that is a rise of about two-thirds in a week. Cabbage has risen most steeply in proportional terms, more than doubling from Rs 150 to Rs 350. Those proportions are this desk’s own arithmetic on the published figures; the filing itself gives no percentages.
The same account prices beans at Rs 400–500 a kilogram, green chillies at Rs 350–400, carrots at Rs 200–250 and leeks at around Rs 200, though it does not say what those four cost previously, so no change can be calculated for them. At the top of its range, beans are close to tomatoes.
Why
Indrajith attributed the increases mainly to the prevailing weather, and warned that prices could rise further in the coming weeks as demand builds ahead of the festive season.
Rain has been falling across much of the island for more than a week as the island takes the indirect effects of the Bay of Bengal system now named Cyclone Arnab. The Disaster Management Centre puts 10,311 people in 21 districts as affected by the current spell, and reservoirs in the North Western and North Central basins have been spilling. Heavy rain damages standing crops, interrupts harvesting and makes collection roads difficult — the mechanism by which a weather event reaches a wholesale price — but the filing does not itself describe any of that, nor name a growing area that has lost production.
This is the second time this year the desk has recorded weather driving vegetable prices. In August, prices rose alongside an El Niño-linked spell that affected 84,546 people.
Not reported
The filing gives no retail prices, only wholesale, so the figures are not what a shopper pays. It does not name the festival behind the expected demand, give a date for it, or say how long traders expect the increases to last.
It does not identify which growing regions have been affected, quantify crop losses, or carry any response from the Department of Agriculture, the Ministry of Agriculture or the Consumer Affairs Authority. No official body is quoted — the sole attribution is to a former office-holder of a traders’ union, who is a market participant rather than a regulator.
The comparison baseline is “last week”, which is not dated.
Corroboration. Ada Derana filed on the same subject from a different angle, reporting a surge in vegetable prices alongside a 20% fall in egg and chicken purchases, but the site has returned a CloudFront 403 to this desk for 45 consecutive days and no publication date could be extracted, so it is named here rather than cited. No filing on these figures was found from NewsFirst, EconomyNext, Daily FT or Hiru at the time of writing. “Vegetable prices rise” is a headline that recurs several times a year in Sri Lankan reporting; a search returned Daily Mirror and Hiru articles under near-identical headlines from earlier periods, none of them current, and no figure from any of those has been used here.