Three months on (February 2026)

By Vimlendra Sharan, FAO Representative for Sri Lanka and the Maldives

Three months after Cyclone Ditwah swept across Sri Lanka in late November 2025, the headlines have moved on. In many places, the floodwaters have receded, emergency support has reached affected communities, and farmers are doing what they always do, trying to salvage what they can and prepare for the next season. Yet the most important question now is not how quickly agriculture can return to “normal”.  It is whether Sri Lanka will rebuild in a way that breaks the cycle of risks that made Ditwah so devastating in the first place.

Ditwah was not simply a bad storm. It was a stress test for our food system, our land and water management, and the institutions meant to protect livelihoods. It showed, in harsh detail, how quickly losses multiply when farms sit in flood pathways, when irrigation and drainage are designed for yesterday’s rainfall, when safety nets are thin, and when early warnings do not consistently translate into early action.

In the immediate aftermath, the damage was rightly measured in flooded hectares, broken canals and damaged infrastructure, and families who lost a season’s worth of income overnight. Those impacts remain real. But three months on, the clearer lesson is why the shock travelled so far and so fast. Over time, exposure has become the default: cultivation and settlement have expanded into floodplains and unstable slopes, driven by land pressure and weak enforcement of risk-informed planning. Infrastructure that should cushion shocks, tanks, canals, embankments, culverts, too often became a failure point because maintenance has lagged and design standards have not kept pace with extreme weather. At farm level, production risk remains concentrated, with limited diversification and high sensitivity to a single event arriving at the wrong stage of the season. Meanwhile, indebted households with delayed access to liquidity struggled to recover, and the information reaching farmers was not always specific enough to prompt practical decisions at the right time.

If Sri Lanka takes only one message from Ditwah, it should be this: recovery spending, by itself, is not resilience. Rebuilding must reduce recurring losses, not merely replace what was damaged. That requires choices that are sometimes harder politically and administratively, but far cheaper than repeating the same cycle of emergency, repair, and regret.

First, Sri Lanka needs farming systems that do not collapse in an “all-or-nothing” way when water stays on fields for days. That means making diversification the norm, not the exception. It means supporting farmers to adopt crop mixes and planting schedules that spread risk, expanding the availability of stress-tolerant and short-duration varieties, and treating soil health and field drainage as essential productivity infrastructure. It also means paying far more attention to livestock and fisheries, where simple measures like safer siting, elevated shelters, protected feed storage, and better-designed ponds can prevent avoidable losses.

Second, we must stop rebuilding infrastructure to the standards of the past. Irrigation and drainage networks, rural roads, bridges, storage facilities and market access are not just development assets; they are risk management systems. Every major repair should be screened through a simple question: will this investment reduce risk under today’s and tomorrow’s rainfall patterns, or will it lock vulnerability in for the next 20 years? Design standards should reflect projected intensity, not historical averages. Catchment-to-field water management must combine engineered solutions with natural buffers such as wetlands, riparian strips and mangroves that reduce surge, erosion and siltation. Most importantly, hazard information must translate into enforceable land-use decisions, including where rebuilding should not happen and where fair support is needed for people to relocate or shift livelihoods safely.

Third, Sri Lanka must share risk more fairly between farmers, markets and the state. Ditwah exposed how quickly a climate shock becomes a debt crisis for rural households. Faster liquidity after a disaster is not a luxury; it is the difference between recovery and long-term impoverishment. Crop insurance needs to be expanded and improved beyond rice, including high-value crops, and designed for quicker payouts. At the national level, rapid-trigger disaster financing can provide immediate fiscal space to support early recovery without derailing budgets. Public funding and concessional climate finance should be channelled into a clear pipeline of resilience investments, rather than fragmented projects that do not add up to systemic change.

Fourth, early warning must finally become early action. We need not just better forecasts but clearer, localised guidance that farmers can act on, linked to reservoir levels, flood risk, and the realities of protecting seed, inputs and livestock. Extension services must be equipped for a climate era, with practical training in climate-smart practices and risk reduction. And the data systems across meteorology, irrigation, agriculture and social protection must talk to each other so that support can be triggered quickly when thresholds are crossed, instead of being assembled after losses are already locked in.

What does this mean in practice? Over the coming months, the focus should be on completing priority irrigation and drainage works with “build-back-better” standards, supporting replanting packages that include soil and drainage measures rather than seed alone, and preventing distress coping through temporary protection for the most vulnerable households. Over the next few years, the country should aim to roll out climate-smart production and advisory bundles in selected river basins, institutionalise agriculture-focused post-disaster assessments that translate into funded plans, and pilot shock-responsive safety nets and rapid-trigger insurance in cyclone-exposed districts. Over the longer term, repeated loss zones must be reoriented towards flood-compatible systems and slope-stabilising perennials, while catchment rehabilitation and natural infrastructure restoration are treated as productivity investments, not optional environmental add-ons.

None of this is abstract. The cost of inaction is paid in failed harvests, lost income, higher food prices and deeper rural debt. The opportunity is equally concrete: if Sri Lanka uses the post-Ditwah period to modernise agriculture making production more resilient, infrastructure smarter, finance faster and institutions more responsive, then Ditwah can become more than a disaster. It can become the turning point where the country decides to stop repairing vulnerability and start building resilience.