The Cabinet of Ministers has approved a draft Biosafety Bill that will regulate genetically modified organisms (GMOs) entering Sri Lanka or being released from laboratory settings, NewsFirst reported on Thursday.
Environment Minister Dr. Dhammika Patabendi told reporters that the proposed bill provides provisions to prevent potential adverse effects that organisms produced through modern biotechnology and genetic modification may have on public health, animals, plants and the overall ecosystem.
Under the new draft bill, it will be mandatory to ensure that genetically modified seeds, food products or animals do not pose a risk to the environment or human health before they are imported into the country or released outside laboratory settings, the minister said.
The framework gives Sri Lanka, for the first time, a dedicated legal instrument to handle GMO clearance — until now governed by a patchwork of plant quarantine, food safety and import-licensing rules rather than a single biosafety statute. Sri Lanka is a party to the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety under the Convention on Biological Diversity, which requires signatories to put in place national-level biosafety regimes covering the transboundary movement of living modified organisms.
The draft bill will now move to legislative drafting before being tabled in Parliament. The Environment Ministry has not yet published the full text or the timeline for gazetting.
The Biosafety Bill follows a series of recent environment legislation under Minister Patabendi, including amendments to the National Environment Act that updated environmental impact assessment thresholds, and the establishment of a Cabinet sub-committee on upper watershed management.
Sources: NewsFirst — Cabinet Greenlights Draft Biosafety Bill.
