About 40% of Sri Lanka’s annual fish production is lost to post-harvest wastage, the President’s Media Division said on Tuesday, against annual output of close to 400,000 metric tonnes. The figure was put to a meeting on the Ministry of Fisheries, Aquatic and Ocean Resources’ 2027 Budget proposals, held at the Presidential Secretariat on 27 October.
President Anura Kumara Dissanayake instructed officials to prepare plans to cut those losses and to turn the fisheries sector into a commercially viable industry, the Daily Mirror reported.
On the two figures given, the loss works out at roughly 160,000 tonnes a year — that arithmetic is this desk’s own, and the filing does not state a tonnage.
The meeting also covered introducing modern vessels to promote deep-sea fishing, attracting private-sector investment, and developing coastal infrastructure and what the statement called environmentally friendly ports. The President said production had to rise while fishing communities’ incomes improved and fish remained affordable to consumers — three objectives the statement does not reconcile with one another.
Officials reviewed financial assistance programmes and difficulties in running fisheries loan schemes. The President directed Finance Ministry officials to set sector-specific criteria for those schemes. Aquaculture and freshwater fisheries were also discussed, with officials told to work with the Mahaweli Authority on land disputes affecting freshwater fishing.
Minister Ramalingam Chandrasekar, Deputy Minister Rathna Gamage and senior ministry officials attended.
The figure arrives before the study that is meant to measure it
Three days earlier, the Fisheries Ministry said it was negotiating an agreement with Japan’s JICA under which a four-month feasibility study starting in November would measure how much of the catch is lost and why — work this desk reported on 24 October. The 40% figure therefore predates the study commissioned to establish it, and no source explains where it comes from or how recently it was derived.
The problem is long-standing rather than new. The Sunday Times reported in March 2018 that the National Aquatic Resources Research and Development Agency put post-harvest fish quality loss at 40–60%, alongside a Rs 2 billion plan to reduce it; that report is far outside this site’s sourcing window and is named here only to date the problem, not as current reporting. The President also reviewed fisheries projects and 2027 Budget priorities at an earlier sitting on 23 July 2026, according to a Daily FT report of that date, which did not carry the 40% figure.
Not reported
The statement gives no baseline year for the 40% estimate, no breakdown between spoilage at sea, at landing sites and in transport, and no cost in rupees or foreign exchange. It names no funding allocation for the 2027 Budget, and sets no target or deadline for reducing the losses.
Ada Derana also reported this statement, but its site has been returning CloudFront errors to this desk for several weeks and the filing could not be fetched or date-verified, so it is not cited. A search of other verified newsrooms found no independent report, so this article rests on the Daily Mirror alone.