Production base should be widened to increase exports

Sarath de Silva, President of the National Chamber of Exporters of Sri Lanka said that we cannot increase exports, unless the production base is widened. We do export what is produced by the plantation community, the fisheries community, and the farmers’ big and small and industrialists that are in production today. He was speaking at 15th AGM of the National Chamber of Exporters of Sri Lanka recently.

He said in most instances, we in Sri Lanka, compete among exporters to procure a product whatever is available.

This creates an internal competition, raising the local price, so that FOB becomes prohibitive in comparison, to our competitors in the global market. Specially, China, India, Vietnam, Australia and South Africa. Hence, I believe our chamber should not only be exporting what we produce at present, but go to the extent of encouraging Sri Lankans to produce more, so that, we could export more.

This mainly applies to the agri products which is our main source of raw material for our industry with a higher local added value.

We are blessed with two monsoons and now we have 180,000 hectares in the Eastern and Northern provinces to work on. We too have many sources of inland water bodies for fresh water fisheries.

We have mineral resources to explore.

We, at the chamber would not only, engage ourselves in promotion of exports but also encourage members, to explore the possibility of entering into production, upgrading the product yield and further adding value to our local raw materials. Then we would have enough produce to export to the globe and achieve the targeted export revenue.

May it be the famous Sri Lankan tea which is the ‘Jewel of our Crown’ which has crossed the billion dollar mark during the presidency of Rohan Fernando who himself is a leading exporter of tea; The Garment Industry, which caters to the leading brand names in the world, may it be our gems and jewellery, may it be our world renowned porcelain ware, may it be our coconuts, specially the desiccated which is considered the best in the world, may it be rubber that is exported and manufactured to the world’s best industrial tyres today, may it be our world famous cinnamon the demand for which is so much that we could expand our cultivation all products that are exported from our country caters to the upper end of the consumer market and adorn the shelves of leading supermarkets and hypermarkets, caters to the cream of the community in the developed world.

Hence we have established a quality symbol, that is ‘Sri Lanka’ that we could be proud of.

But our cost of production is prohibitive to compete with China and India.

It would be the prime task during my tenure, to negotiate with the input suppliers, mainly the Government Organisations such as the Petroleum Corporation, Electricity Board.

so that we could create a special tariff for export oriented industries, relieving the burden of overloaded costs of basic inputs common to all our industries.