The Agriculture 2.0 Playbook

A debate worth having The debate around palm oil in Sri Lanka is worth having. Public concern around health, food quality, environmental sustainability, and long-term agricultural direction should not be dismissed. In many ways, awareness is the first step toward better public thinking. Mixed opinions are useful too. They force difficult subjects into the open and prevent silence from becoming policy. But awareness is only the starting point. It cannot be the conclusion. Once

Palm oil in Sri Lanka is often discussed as a policy failure, an environmental misstep, or a crop that never truly belonged here. The narrative is usually emotional and polarized—framed as a moral debate rather than an economic or operational one. In most discussions, palm oil is treated as an exception: an error that was eventually corrected. But when viewed through the lens of productivity, systems, and long-term competitiveness, palm oil tells a very different story. Not o

Productivity didn’t decline overnight. It stalled in transition. For decades, Sri Lanka  stood tall among plantation economies. Tea, rubber, coconut—and later oil palm—were once benchmarks of efficiency, quality, and global relevance.Yet today, Sri Lanka’s plantation productivity tells a different story: flat yields, rising costs, shrinking margins , and increasing dependence on protection rather than competitiveness. Meanwhile, peers didn’t stand still. Countries like Malays