Trouble brewing for Sri Lanka tea farmers

Despite production shortfalls coupled with increased demand making the daily cuppa dearer, the men and women who toil the land have little reason to cheer, for they must uproot tea bushes desiccated by a severe drought.

Tea farmer N. K. Atapattu, 42, picked a crop of nearly 2,000 kilograms (4,409 pounds) of tea leaves from his small plot last year but the crop is sharply down in the first quarter of this year.

The tea harvest fell more than 50 percent in the first three months of the year on the highlands, according to official figures, and Atapattu and his fellow farmers are praying for better weather.

Nalini Aluthgama, 61, says her newly planted home plot at the village of Kotmale, some 170 kilometers (106 miles) east of Colombo by road, is devastated.

“I have just removed over 100 dead tea bushes,” Aluthgama said while volunteers joined in to uproot the dead wood. “Most of my plants are about three years old and they don't give much of a crop.”

The volunteers get a token two dollars a day for working on the tea plots.

Dhammika Manaweera, 42, the secretary of a local tea farming association, says all her 53-strong membership have suffered because of the drought.

The British charity Oxfam has been helping the local community to learn more about new techniques in tea growing and get the maximum from their inputs, but when it comes to weather, they are helpless.

“We have taken these farmers to experts and taught them good agricultural practices, but they don't have income security because of uncertain weather,” said Oxfam's Tharanga Godallage.

This is an area where climate change is affecting an entire community uprooted 25 years ago to make way for a hydro-irrigation reservoir which inundated their traditional farmlands.

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