The retail price of dried chillies has climbed to Rs 1,300 a kilogram after Indian trade associations stopped exporting to Sri Lanka, the body representing essential-goods importers says.
S. Vinayagasundaram, chairman of the Essential Food Commodities Importers’ Association, said the halt in dried chilli imports from India is what has driven the price up, Hiru News reported at 1.23 p.m. on Thursday.
The standards dispute behind it
The trigger appears to be a consignment backlog at the port. Customs media spokesman Chandana Punchihewa said recently that more than 100 containers of imported dried chillies are being held at Customs on the grounds that they do not meet the required standard.
Those containers were rejected by the Standards Institution and by food inspectors, Punchihewa said. They will not be released onto the local market, and the plan is to re-export them.
It is in the face of that situation, Vinayagasundaram said, that Indian trade associations have stopped exporting dried chillies to Sri Lanka.
Potatoes and big onions up about 10%
The association chairman also said prices of imported potatoes and “B” onions have risen by roughly 10 per cent, which he attributed to the prevailing El Niño conditions rather than to the standards dispute.
All three are import staples rather than items the domestic harvest covers, which is why they move with trade policy and overseas growing conditions. On big onions the gap is documented: Sri Lanka consumes an estimated 320,000 tonnes a year, and the largest local crop on record was about 100,000 tonnes in 2014. The government prepared an alternate-market plan for food imports ahead of El Niño in September; the filing does not say whether that plan has been activated.
Household food costs were already moving. Vegetable prices rose through late October on wet weather, and national inflation held at a 40-month high of 8.1 per cent in September.
A note on the commodity
Hiru’s English headline slug renders the third commodity as “jackfruit”. The Sinhala text gives ලොකු ළූණු / බී ළූණු — big onions, the imported Bombay variety, and the outlet’s own photograph for the story shows potatoes, onions and dried chillies. Jackfruit is a domestically grown fruit and is not an imported staple; this article reports big onions.
Not reported
The filing does not say who took the decision that stopped the trade, or whether Indian exporters, Indian trade bodies or the Sri Lankan authorities initiated it. It does not say which standard the rejected containers failed, when they were detained, what they are worth, or who bears the cost of re-export. There is no response from the Standards Institution, the Ministry of Trade or the Indian authorities, and no indication of when supply might resume.
