India’s Foreign Policy
India to help Sri Lanka to boost dairy production
- Sri Lanka to scale up its dairy production to become self-sufficient has sought technical assistance from India’s National Dairy Development Board (NDDB) and market leader Amul.
- The assistance will revive a collaboration that Sri Lanka attempted in the late 1990s, but failed to take forward.
- The former president of Sri Lanka Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga invited India’s “milk man” Verghese Kurien to set up the ‘Kiriya’ dairy project, named after the Sinhala word for milk.
- A $20 million joint venture between the NDDB and Sri Lanka’s MILCO was announced, but the project did not take off, in the wake of resistance from nationalist worker unions and powerful business lobbies in Sri Lanka.
- The UN World Food Programme (WFP) said that at least 56,000 children in Sri Lanka currently suffer from severe acute malnutrition.
- The severe acute malnutrition among children had increased to 1.4 per cent this year up from 1.1 per cent.
