Plantation workers: Down to 200,000 from 500,000

By Shelton Hettarachchi (Nuwara Eliya Correspondent)

Tea pluckers

The number of workers in Sri Lanka’s tea and rubber plantations has fallen dramatically by more than half in the 25-years to 200,000 from half a million in 1980, a top official said. Dr. Sarath Abeysinghe, Director of the Tea Research Institute (TRI), attributed this sharp drop mainly due to young people living on plantations being attracted by jobs in the garment industry and overseas.

He was speaking to journalists on the sidelines of a ‘crop clinic’ organized by the TRI at its institute at Thalawakele aimed at finding practical solutions to problems in the tea industry.

More than 700 representatives from plantation companies, managers and assistant managers of plantations and field officers gathered for the event where also new technical knowledge about the industry was shared.

Dr. Abeysinghe said one of the main problems is the increase in the cost of production and reduced fertilizer use and a shortage of labour. He said that though the production cost of a kilogram of tea in India and Kenya was around Rs. 150, in Sri Lanka it was Rs. 200 and 60 percent of seeds for re-plantation is picked from tea plants older than 50 years.

Dr. Abeysinghe pointed out that among the solutions are using tea-shoots for replanting and opting for alternative power sources to reduce use of electricity.“We are also trying to introduce new equipment to pluck tea and other research is in progress to keep the tea production cost low,” he said.

He said that one of the objectives of the ‘crop clinic’ was also obtaining the assistance of the small scale tea growers and providing them with the necessary technical knowledge to improve production. Dr. Abeysinghe said they hope to conduct the same clinic in other locations as well.