Tea industry at crossroads of sustainability
Sri Lanka’s tea industry is at the crossroads of how to secure a reasonable and sustainable return on investments vis-à-vis the investment, a former planter and successful business professional said. Speaking as chief guest at the annual meeting held in Colombo of the Planters Association of Ceylon (PA), Mahendra Amarasooriya, a one-time veteran planter and eight times Chairman of the PA, said there is a range of problems confronting the tea industry, one being the per day wage.
He noted that the per day wage has risen to Rs 500 in 2011 from Rs 101 in 1998 while there has been no proportionate increase in the prices. The human productivity and land productivity needs to be looked into while another issue is a shortage of workers.All problems taken together and no foreseeable solutions in sight, Mr Amarasooriya remarked that soon the tea planters would have to leave the land with the workers as this would inevitably happen.
He said a serious problem is that the second generation of workers is not willing to follow their parents in tea plucking as they are now more educated and prefer even a peon’s job elsewhere. He said that the tea plantations are old and replanting is a problem as the gestation period would be four years.
On the issue of status and dignity of workers, he said the plantation companies should improve the status of workers by using a more dignified nomenclature to sound as more technically-oriented rather than sounding as a manual worker.With more research which is now lacking, there is a need for new varieties of high yielding tea plants that would grow faster to reduce the gestation period as done in getting high yielding paddy varieties. With worker stock being a problem, there is an urgent need to introduce innovative methods of plucking.
He said that there appears to be some indecision in making value addition to export ‘Pure Ceylon Tea’ and said that the way forward is to make them specialized branded products, rather than export them as commodities. Spotlighting the point in issue, Mr Amarasooriya said that Merril J. Fernando’s Dilmah tea has worked hard on the ‘Pure Ceylon Tea’ issue and said Dilmah has a 9% market share in Australia and 6% in New Zealand and this product has a footprint in several other countries including the Middle-East.
His other suggestion was to make tea plantations part of the tourism expansion growth. He said the government expects 2.5 million tourists by 2016 and there would not be enough room capacity to accommodate them all.Many tea plantations have estate bungalows built by the British providing picturesque and panoramic views of surrounding hills and called upon every tea plantation to be a tourist centre.
He said that the economies of the tea plantations are not that sound enough to embark on cost high innovative programmes.Therefore, the government must intervene to save this industry that generated an export income of Rs 346 billion in 2011.
Diversification is necessary and crops like cinnamon and pepper could be planted or replace tea depending on the viability of which is the most economical crop in a particular estate. He said that one of the drawbacks has been the estate trade unions do not realize the importance of some of these matters. He said that while workers should be given support to meet the effects of inflation, but a salary increase was not the solution.
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