Eight months after a devastating cyclone hit Sri Lanka and ravaged its livestock sector, Nepal suffered a similar fate, this time from a flood triggered by a glacier collapse. The consequences were similar – loss of life, collapsing infrastructure, broken logistical networks, and food systems thrown into disarray.
In a column written in December 2025, I highlighted how livestock production in South Asia and Asia more broadly was becoming vulnerable to climate change risks. While not all natural disasters can be directly attributed to climate change, the growing frequency of such events is telling. At the time, I argued that we need to prepare financing and insurance mechanisms to enable faster recovery once a disaster strikes.
Tithli Sadhu, Associate Professor and Associate Dean of the School of Agriculture at SR University in India, made a similar argument in the aftermath of the Nepal floods. She emphasized the need for “efficiency in normal times, resilience during disruption, and rapid recovery afterward,” adding that this was “only the beginning” of many such events to come.
Dr Sadhu also noted that climate change is altering the environmental conditions under which hazards occur, “while ecosystem degradation is weakening our capacity to cope with them.”
Preparing for continuous disruption
“The long-term consequences may eventually appear in the food system through repeated crop losses, rising food prices, declining agricultural productivity, greater dependence on imports, rural indebtedness, and migration. For this reason, protecting agriculture is no longer only a rural issue, but a matter of economic stability, national resilience, and human security.”
To avoid such outcomes, we can learn a lesson from Sri Lanka in the wake of Cyclone Ditwah. In the aftermath, a key concern was the looming food security crisis in 2026. To avert this, the government channeled funding into the farming sector to cover disaster-related losses and to provide a buffer for reinvestment. As a result, Sri Lanka has managed to keep food prices stable (given the global energy crisis) and maintain a continuous food supply.
Sanjika Perera, Director General of the Department of Animal Production and Health, told Asian Agribiz that one reason farmers were able to recover so quickly was the availability of financing. He stressed that, moving forward, livestock producers would need access to crop and livestock insurance schemes to achieve what Dr Sadhu called for: “resilience during disruption and rapid recovery afterward.”
I will close with one example from Sri Lanka’s layer industry. In 2025, we recorded a historic high in egg production, producing nearly 3 billion eggs. The cyclone caused extensive damage across the layer belt, particularly in the Northwestern Province, prompting many to predict egg shortages this year.
Still, Dr Perera expects egg production to reach 3.5 billion in 2026. While below the 4 billion target, this would be a notable achievement for a country still recovering from a once-in-a-century cyclone.
