Value chain stakeholder meeting on processed food and pepper sectors begins today

The United Nations Industrial Development Organisation (UNIDO) will convene a two-day stakeholder meeting to discuss and validate UNIDO’s findings in a value chain (VC) assessment of processed food and pepper today at Renuka City Hotel in Colombo. 

The invitation extends to all public and private stakeholders participating in the processed food and pepper VCs.  

This event will take place within the framework of the European Union (EU) funded EU–Sri Lanka Trade Related Assistance project.

The stakeholder meeting will help to calibrate the recommendations put forth in a three-chapter report. The report will provide an in-depth analysis of the existing gaps and challenges in the aforementioned sectors and in the institutional and regulatory frameworks with respect to food safety and quality. It will also provide recommendations to strengthen compliance with international export requirements and to increase productivity among small and medium-sized enterprises (SME) based on bottlenecks identified in the VCs.

The cinnamon VC comes within the purview of the Ministry of Primary Industries. The spices sector has been selected as one of the six priority sectors in Sri Lanka’s National Export Strategy (NES) that is currently being planned and seeks to increase Sri Lanka’s export revenue to $27 billion by 2022. The final report will expound on bridging gaps in institutional services to facilitate the adoption of food safety and quality assurance systems and on competitiveness constraints reflected in the production and marketing characteristics of SMEs.

This VC assessment exercise is an important step towards boosting Sri Lanka’s compliance capacity in meeting international export requirements to enable Sri Lankan agro-exporters to reach South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) and EU markets.