by The Collective for Climate and Economic Justice, Groundviews, Colombo, June 25, 2026
Photo courtesy of Amila Udagedara
On June 17, 2026 delegates filed into the Galle Face hotel for the Mineral Sands Technical Conference. Inside, the Chamber of Commerce was doing what it does best: opening doors for capital and closing them on everyone else as Sri Lanka’s coastal ecosystems were prepped for extraction.
A different kind of gathering was taking shape on the pavement outside.
The platinum sponsor of the event was Capital Metals PLC, a UK-incorporated, AIM listed company with exploration licences covering a significant stretch of Sri Lanka’s eastern coast. The co-organiser was Mineral Technologies Australia, a technical services firm to the global mineral sands industry. Minister of Industry Entrepreneurship and Development Sunil Handunneththi opened the conference, signalling the government’s strong endorsement of the industry’s agenda. It was a conference designed by industry for industry with profit as its compass. There was no space for the voices of people or planet.
One week before the conference, Environment Minister Dr. Dhammika Patabendi described the government’s new environmental framework as providing businesses with “absolute operational clarity before a single plant is laid,” allowing industrial developers to expand “clearly, rapidly and without bureaucratic delays.” These statements were not addressed to fishing communities; they were addressed to investors.
Conference entry cost Rs.16,500 for Sri Lankan participants and Rs.80,000 for foreign participants. The programme and subsequent media reporting indicated the event was conducted entirely in English. The speakers were drawn overwhelmingly from Australia, the US, South Africa, the Netherlands and India. This conference was designed to exclude the fishing families of Mannar, the paddy farmers of Ampara and the lagoon communities of Vaharai. It was designed so the future of their ecosystems could be decided in their absence.
License by license the coast has been sold
Capital Metals PLC holds an 84 km² licence area on the Akkaraipattu-Panama coastal stretch in the Ampara district with applications for a further 599 km² pending approval. Its processing plant is proposed for Oluvil port. Communities that would be affected depend on lagoon fishing, livestock farming and paddy cultivation.
Locals in Vaharai have filed a Fundamental Rights petition against a mining company over coastal erosion, flooding, destruction of mangroves and coral reefs and groundwater depletion. The Eastern coastline from Mannar to Ampara is being opened for industrial mining, community by community, licence by licence.
The Geological Survey and Mines Bureau (GSMB) issued 471 industrial mineral exploration licences over 30 years under a first come, first served system its own officials have acknowledged is corrupt. Not one led to an active mine. In 2024, the Supreme Court ruled the unsolicited licensing process was unconstitutional under Article 12. All licences are currently suspended pending review. This is the system the June 17 conference was celebrating.
Citizens resist coastal exploitation
Outside Galle Face Hotel, a teach out organised by the Collective for Climate and Economic Justice (CCEJ) brought together citizens, students, researchers and activists speaking out against the conference’s purpose, claiming that the coastline was not a commodity and that the people most affected by industrial mining plans have never been invited to the table. The event was moderated by journalist Shabeer Mohammed with speakers sharing information in Sinhala, Tamil and English.
Swasthika Arulingam, human rights lawyer and trade unionist, opened with words that cut to the heart of the matter. “The Chamber of Commerce and the minister are speaking to a group of white people about mining inside the Galle Face Hotel,” she said. “The previous governments and this government have been giving licences to companies, including foreign companies…. did you at least discuss with us? Before this absolute degradation of our beaches, our coasts, did you talk to us? We know what has happened in Kokilai, in Mannar and what the Port City construction did to our beaches. This is not imagination. We already know what is going to happen.”
Sajeewa Chamikara of the Movement for Land and Agricultural Reform said that Capital Metals’ 2021 EIA contained a significant discrepancy with the realities faced by local residents. He warned that the project is being framed as a success by involving ministers and public figures, including Aravinda de Silva, the celebrated cricketer appointed to Capital Metals’ board in August 2025. The toxic chemicals and massive waste involved in mineral processing, he said, were burdens Sri Lanka could not sustain and the refinement processes consumed vast amounts of fresh groundwater, putting drinking water, agriculture and fishing at grave risk.
Dr. Amali Wedagedara, feminist political economist and Senior Researcher at the Bandaranaike Centre for International Studies, exposed a fundamental contradiction: while the government promoted value addition as a condition of mining, the very companies seeking licences argued that value addition was too advanced for Sri Lanka. The economic benefit being promised, she pointed out, could not be compared to what would be permanently lost.
Melani Gunathilaka of Climate Action Now warned that industrial extraction would strip away the natural coastal buffers protecting thousands of families from the compounding threats of ocean warming and sea level rise. The World Bank and Asian Development Bank’s Climate Risk Country Profile: Sri Lanka (2021) projects that approximately 230,000 to 400,000 people could be living in areas exposed to a one in a100 year coastal flood event by the 2030s. Mining those same coasts now is not development. It is the deliberate destruction of the only protection these communities have.
Muditha Katuwawala, founder of The Pearl Protectors, reminded the crowd that rivers carried sediment that replenished beaches, a cycle that extraction would permanently disrupt. “They will be here for a little while, extract, make millions and go back; this is what has been happening all around the world,” he said.
Francis Priyankara Costa of the National Fisheries Solidarity Movement emphasised that the fishing communities would not go quietly. He addressed the president directly. “You used to be with the people. Now you are acting as if you don’t know anything,” he said, acknowledging IMF pressures but pointing out that the government must have the backbone to prioritise the people over the demands of foreign capital.
Selvarathnam Dilaxan, a youth activist from Mannar, had visited Pulmoddai, where 50 years of mining had defoliated 2,000 acres of coastal land. Residents told him sand dunes had once held back the 2004 tsunami. Those dunes are now gone.
The team from Mannar performed Karunilam, a protest anthem by M.C. Eric Fernando and Abishek Thilakarathnam, composed in response to the threat of industrial mining on their home, Mannar Island. It captured the sorrow and defiance of communities facing not just corporate pressure but state repression. From the streets of Mannar to the president’s office, their opposition to development that harms their land has gone unheard.
Hemantha Withanage, co-founder of the Centre for Environmental Justice (CEJ) and chair of Friends of the Earth International, documented the full geographic scale. From Kirinda to Puttalam, licences cover some of the most environmentally sensitive areas, including zones adjacent to Yala, Panama and Nilaveli. In Vaharai, CEJ went to court against a company that attempted in 2024 to proceed with mining using an environmental impact assessment conducted in 2012. He highlighted the Eppawala case of 2000: the state is only custodian of the country’s resources. Assessments must be conducted, results published and communities consulted. Only with people’s agreement can extraction proceed. “The former governments did not follow this. The new one is not either. Respect the Eppawala verdict,” he said.
Who is the main culprit?
Capital Metals PLC is the renamed Equatorial Palm Oil PLC. In 2013, Equatorial Palm Oil’s security team and the Liberian Police Support Unit assaulted members of the Jogbahn Clan resisting plantation expansion. Global Witness documented the intimidation; EPO admitted providing logistical support to the police. Michael Frayne, who founded Capital Metals Limited in 2015, previously served as Joint Managing Director of Asia Energy PLC, behind the Phulbari coal project in Bangladesh, where on August 26, 2006 the Bangladesh Rifles opened fire on more than 50,000 protesters, killing three. Frayne left Capital Metals on July 1, 2023. In an era of binding business and human rights frameworks, track record is not a footnote. It is the only evidence that matters.
Capital Metals’ chairman Greg Martyr has spoken openly at investor webcasts about lobbying Sri Lanka’s National Minerals Policy, expressing confidence the government had “listened to us,” and welcoming the transfer of the GSMB from the Ministry of Environment to Industry, noting that under Environment “some people in the mines department thought their job was to stop mining”.
Capital Metals projects average annual revenues of $74 million at full production from its Sri Lanka operations. Set this against what the country already earns without destroying its coastline: worker remittances $6,575 million; garments over $5 billion; tourism, $3,169 million; and tea $1.51 billion. The government’s own auditors flagged a material uncertainty in Capital Metals’ 2025 annual report.
What we stand to lose
Now set these numbers against what cannot be priced at all. The ecosystem services that the coastal environments provide, the fisheries replenished by mangroves, the shorelines protected by dunes, the freshwater secured by intact aquifers and the ecological balance of a small island nation whose survival is inseparable from the health of its coasts. Five of the world’s seven sea turtle species nest on Sri Lanka’s shores, making it one of very few places in South Asia where the endangered Leatherback nests. Industrial mining threatens to destroy these habitats permanently. The numbers do not add up. The losses never could.
The international record is unambiguous: in Vietnam, Kerala, Senegal and Madagascar, heavy mineral sand mining has resulted in groundwater depletion, displacement of communities and coastal erosion that takes a minimum of 60 years to restore at costs borne by the state. Sri Lanka has already lived this. The Chunnakam groundwater case is the warning.
An island with no beaches
The Ceylon Chamber of Commerce conference was not a consultation. It was a sales event, convened under ministerial patronage, sponsored by the company most invested in a positive outcome with no space for the communities whose lives are at stake.
The people of Mannar, Oluvil, Vaharai, Kokilai and Thirukkovil have not been invited to these decisions. The sand that holds the coast together belongs to everyone. The Supreme Court has affirmed the state holds these spaces only in trust for the people, not to sell to the highest bidder.
The beaches, lagoons, fishing grounds and water table are not assets on an investor’s balance sheet. They are the inheritance of a people. It is time to act before the damage becomes irreversible.
The Collective for Climate and Economic Justice (CCEJ) is a group of lawyers, researchers, economists, educators, environmentalists, business professionals, journalists and activists working to protect Sri Lanka’s environment for future generations.