Climate change and food security in Sri Lanka: towards food sovereignty

This study explored food security and climate change issues and assessed how food sovereignty contributes to addressing the climate change impacts on entire food systems. It aimed to contextualise food security, climate change, and food sovereignty within Sri Lanka's current development discourse by bringing global learning, experience, and scholarship together. Using a narrative review of extant literature and eight in-depth expert interviews, the study finds that climate change adversely impacts global and Sri Lankan food security, escalating poverty, hunger, and malnutrition, disproportionately affecting developing nations and poor, marginalised communities. The paper argues that promoting food sovereignty—through agroecology and small-scale farming—could alleviate such impacts. Given Sri Lanka’s challenges in food security, poverty, climate change, and persistent development disparities, moving towards food sovereignty requires significant policy reforms and structural changes in governance, administrative systems, and wider society.

Mahinda Senevi Gunaratne, R. B. Radin Firdaus, Shamila Indika Rathnasooriya