Abstract:
Agriculture is a vital sector in Sri Lanka as it plays key role in GDP, export income and total
employment. This sector contributes 7.42 percent and 15 percent to GDP and export income in
Sri lanka, respectively, and also it provides employment to about 26.1 percent of the labour force
exceeding the contribution of any other single sector (Central Bank of Sri Lanka, 2017).
Agricultural production is vulnerable to variation in climate, which affects almost all the regions
in the Universal. Using a collective cross-sectional data from major paddy producing regions in
Ampara and Sri Lanka, the responsiveness of paddy production to average temperature and
rainfall variation was analyzed. This study purposes to examine the relationship between rainfall
and paddy production. Samplings from 100 farmer’s households had been gathered by
questionnaire survey as primary data and the secondary data. Rainfall data of 135 years and 20
years / 40 seasons paddy cultivation data has been utilized to analyses the result. As the result,
the study finds that through the 3, 5 years moving average had shown high drier seasons of the
years. The paddy production was very high in Maha season but this was very low in Yala season
because of the rainfall variability. Paddy yield under various climate change scenarios. Both
average temperature and rainfall have concave, non-monotonic effects upon paddy production,
which implies that variations in growing climate are likely to have negative effects on paddy
production. It was found that modest increases in average temperature and variation in rainfall
had only a small effect of unclear sign, but increases in average temperature beyond 2.010C were
likely to have strong negative effects on paddy production. For example, 3.08oC increase in
average temperature individually or in combination with changing rainfall can lead to
approximately 32% yield drop in Sri Lanka and 26% in study areas of paddy production.
