Marking International Day for Biodiversity today (22nd May), Dilani Hirimuthugodage looks at the Sri Lankan interventions in the wake of its ratification of the International Convention on Biological Diversity 19 years ago. She asserts that concrete steps must be taken soon if Sri Lanka is to safeguard its rich bio diversity, in the midst of the rapid development taking place.

Sri Lanka banned the imports of Genetically Modified (GM) food in 2001, becoming the first country in the world to do so. However, in 2006, the government passed an Extra-Ordinary Gazette to the Food Act of 1980, allowing GM food importation and in 2011 the government passed a National Policy on Biosafety which covers the import of Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs), i.e., GM food or GM crops. But do we really know what is and isn’t GM? Should we be worried? How important is the GMO issue for Sri Lanka? This article attempts to answer these questions by discussing the present scenario of GMOs in Sri Lanka in the global context. Author Dilani Hirimuthugodage argues that neither the full-scale adoption nor the full-scale rejection of GMOs is a viable option.

As Divi Neguma, the government’s latest grassroots economic development initiative, marks one year since its introduction, we took a look at the key features of the programme, its potential to help livelihood development and raise incomes, and the key improvements that need to be made

> By Dilani Hirimuthugodage, Research Assistant – IPS Imperative for Developing Countries The biological and genetic materials found in different animals, plants and micro organisms were initially recognized as a common property of human kind and were freely exchanged between countries. This situation started to change with globalization and privatization of plant varieties. In the [...]