Wholesale vegetable prices have climbed again at the Keppetipola Economic Centre, with malu miris reaching Rs 700 a kilogram, as rain continues to destroy standing crops.
Keppetipola, in the Badulla district, is one of the principal economic centres through which up-country vegetables are distributed. The prices were reported by Hiru News on Monday morning.
Monday’s wholesale prices
| Vegetable | Wholesale, per kg |
|---|---|
| Malu miris (capsicum) | Rs 700 |
| Beans | Rs 650 |
| Cabbage | Rs 450 |
Traders attribute the increases to vegetable harvests being destroyed along with the rain.
How this compares
This is the second round of weather-driven increases the desk has recorded in a week. On 26 October, wholesale prices at Manning Market in Pettah were cabbage Rs 350, beans Rs 400–500 and capsicum Rs 400–450, attributed to the same cause.
Set against those figures, cabbage is about Rs 100 higher, beans are at or above the top of the earlier range, and malu miris is well above it. But the two sets are not strictly comparable: Manning Market is the low-country wholesale market in Colombo and Keppetipola is the up-country collection centre, so part of any difference is distance and market rather than movement in price over the week. Neither filing gives a previous price for the same market, so no rate of increase can be calculated for Keppetipola itself.
The weather behind it
Rain has been falling across much of the island for more than two weeks. The island has been taking the effects of successive Bay of Bengal systems — Cyclone Arnab and now Cyclone Murasu, which has prompted red warnings for deep-sea fishing. Heavy rain damages standing crops, interrupts harvesting and makes collection roads difficult, which is how a weather system reaches a wholesale price.
Not reported
Hiru gives three vegetables and no others, no previous prices, and no retail figures, so nothing can be said here about what shoppers are paying. It names no trader, official or association — the attribution is to “traders” generally — and quotes no response from the Department of Agriculture, the Ministry of Agriculture or the Consumer Affairs Authority. It does not identify which growing areas have lost production, quantify the losses, or carry a forecast for how long the increases will last.
Corroboration. No other verified newsroom had filed these Keppetipola figures at the time of writing: the Daily Mirror’s rail carried nothing on vegetable prices, Ada Derana remains behind a CloudFront 403, and EconomyNext was returning a site-wide HTTP 520. “Vegetable prices rise” is a headline that recurs several times a year in Sri Lankan reporting; a search returned near-identical stories from earlier periods, including one from December 2025, and no figure from any of them has been used here.
