Sri Lanka is expecting paddy output during the minor Yala cropping season to fall 48 percent to 789,000 metric tonnes in 2017 from a year earlier amid lagging effects of last year’s drought and floods in the wet zone. Sri Lanka’s main Maha season paddy output has already plunged 49 percent to an estimated 1.478 million tonnes, down from last year’s record 2.9 million tonnes. Rains returned in the first quarter of 2017 with floods in the Western and South-Western areas of the island, but major irrigation tanks in the dry zone remain at low levels. Dry zone tanks are filled during the North Eastern monsoon in the last quarter of the year. Both monsoons failed in 2016, leading to low water levels for rice growing this year. Floods in Colombo, Gampaha, Matara, Ratnapura and Hambantota destroyed 5,349 hectares of newly sown paddy, leading to 16,870 metric tonnes of crop losses. This year, only about 400,000 hactares of rice is expected to be sown, down 20 percent from last year. Total expected paddy output in 2017 would be 2.267 million tonnes, down 48 percent from last year’s 4,420 million tonnes.