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Tracy
Tracy
Jul 28 2026
24In a small holding outside a village that most Colombo residents would struggle to place on a map, a farmer checks the temperature inside a broiler shed before sunrise. She has done this every morning for years, long before anyone outside her district had heard of the International Finance Corporation. Her chickens will never carry her name. They will carry New Anthoney’s. But her margin, her risk, and her children’s school fees all depend on how well this arrangement works.
That arrangement, contract farming, is the quiet backbone of Sri Lanka’s poultry industry, and it sits at the centre of what New Anthoney’s is now scaling up. IFC has committed up to ten million dollars to New Anthoney’s Farms Group, with a portion drawn from the Global Agriculture and Food Security Program’s Private Sector Window. But the number that matters more to a village near Kurunegala and Gampaha districts is this one: at least two hundred smallholder farmers are expected to benefit directly, most of them low income, and a fifth of them women who run these operations themselves.
The weight smallholders already carry
Sri Lanka’s poultry sector has always leaned on smallholders more than the public conversation admits. They make up around eighty five percent of the country’s poultry farms, yet account for less than a third of total supply, boxed in by limited access to credit, inconsistent input quality, and thin bargaining power against larger buyers. New Anthoney’s model works differently. Smallholders already contribute roughly forty percent of the company’s production through contract farming and outgrower schemes, a proportion far above the national norm, and the expansion now underway is built to deepen that relationship rather than sideline it.
What a formal contract changes
The mechanics are straightforward enough to explain but easy to underestimate in impact. A contract farmer receives day old chicks, feed, and technical guidance from New Anthoney’s, then raises the birds to market weight under agreed welfare and biosecurity standards, before the company buys back the finished stock at a pre agreed price. It shifts the farmer’s biggest risk, market price volatility, onto the company’s books, while letting the company scale production without owning every shed itself. For a household in a rural district, it converts an unpredictable trade into something closer to a wage with upside.
What the IFC investment changes is scale and formality. New Anthoney’s expects to create more than nine hundred jobs as production capacity increases, and the outgrower network is set to grow alongside it, with women expected to make up over a fifth of newly engaged farmers. That figure is worth sitting with. Poultry rearing at the smallholder level in Sri Lanka has traditionally been treated as supplementary income, often managed by women alongside other household responsibilities, yet rarely recognised as a primary economic contribution in its own right. A formal contract, with defined inputs and a guaranteed offtake price, gives that work a different status. It becomes bankable. It becomes something a rural household can plan a year around instead of a season.
A steadier link in the food chain
There is also a food security dimension that rarely makes it into the community narrative but sits underneath all of it. Chicken is Sri Lanka’s most accessible source of animal protein, and its price is watched by ordinary households the way fuel prices are watched by commuters. Strengthening the domestic supply chain, particularly by giving smallholders better access to markets and more consistent productivity, has a direct bearing on how stable and how affordable that protein stays for consumers who have nothing to do with contract farming at all. That reliability matters more given New Anthoney’s standing as Sri Lanka’s only fully antibiotic free poultry producer, since the same network of contract farmers is also the one being asked to hold that standard at scale. IFC’s own framing of the project ties it explicitly to that resilience goal, positioning smallholder integration as central to a more stable poultry sector rather than incidental to it.
Leadership that has to hold at the farm gate
Neil Suraweera, Chief Executive Officer of New Anthoney’s Farms Group, has described the partnership as the next phase for a company that began in 1986 as a smallholder enterprise itself, a detail that gives the current arrangement an almost circular logic. A business that started small is now the one extending formal market access to smallholders across the country. The antibiotic free standard is a newer chapter within that history, introduced in 2018 and still unmatched by any other producer in Sri Lanka, and Chairman Emil Stanley has framed it as inseparable from that same rural network, since the standards a contract farmer is asked to meet are what make the wider claim credible in the first place.
Why this matters now
None of this is charity, and nobody involved is describing it that way. It is a supply chain decision that happens to carry a strong social return. IFC’s involvement, including the concessional layer through GAFSP, exists precisely because blended finance can absorb some of the risk that would otherwise make this kind of smallholder heavy expansion harder to justify on commercial terms alone. Carsten Mueller, IFC’s regional industry director for manufacturing, agribusiness and services in Asia Pacific, has pointed to the project’s role in building a more resilient value chain, one where smallholder productivity and market access improve in tandem with the company’s own growth rather than as an afterthought to it.
For the export side of the business, the expansion is expected to lift capacity meaningfully, with New Anthoney’s projected to increase annual exports by close to thirty percent from current levels once the new capacity comes online. But export volume does not explain why a farmer near Kurunegala or Gapmaha checks her shed temperature before dawn, or why a fifth of the new contract farmers expected to join this network will be women running their own operations for the first time on paper as well as in practice.
The real measure of this investment will not show up in a shipping manifest. It will show up in how many rural households can point to a fixed contract instead of a market gamble, and in how many of those households are headed by women whose work, for the first time, comes with a name on a document. That is a smaller story than ten million dollars. It is also the one that will still matter in the district long after the announcement has scrolled off the news feed.
