People in this country have been forced to bear the costs incurred for the importation of a shipload of contaminated organic fertiliser from China.
Agriculture Minister Mahinda Amaraweera said the amount of US$6.9 paid for the Chinese fertiliser ship has already been recovered from the people of Sri Lanka.
The Minister said that his ministry looked into all the possibilities of recovering at least a sum of US$6.5 million from the Chinese supplier, but that too ended up without any success.
The minister explained that the president’s position is to deal with the issue of the Chinese fertiliser ship in a way that does not harm the bilateral relations between the two countries.
To explore the possibility of recovering the money, the government has now decided to entrust the matter to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to devise a suitable process.
The minister made these remarks after the Auditor General issued a special report requiring the government to sue the company involved in the fertiliser deal with Qingdao Seawin Biotech.
The Minister said that since he took over the Ministry of Agriculture, he had discussed the issue relating to the fertiliser ship on several occasions and the goodwill between the two countries had dropped to a very low ebb owing to this.
He said that he tried to get chemical fertiliser instead of organic fertilizer, but the minister said that the company had informed him that they do not produce any other form of fertiliser other than the organic type.
The minister says that, accordingly, we wouldn’t be able to retrieve the money paid for the shipload of organic fertilizer.
