Science brews for Sri Lanka tea growers

World tea prices are rising - but farmers in one tea-producing area are looking to science to save their livelihoods.
Their crops grow at Kotmale, in south-central Sri Lanka, the island where tea is one of the largest export earners.
In Kotmale, problems with soil fertility coupled with a severe drought earlier this year led to thousands of subsistence farmers having to destroy their tea bushes.
The farmers were resettled in Kotmale 25 years ago after their traditional farmlands were flooded by a hydro-irrigation reservoir.
Now Sri Lanka’s Tea Research Institute is trying to develop drought-resistant tea crops and looking at other ways of helping sustain the struggling small farmers.
One proposal is for them to mix their tea efforts with vegetables and other commercial crops.
Tea Institute director Dr Sarath Abeysinghe says tea brought in $US1.3 billion in foreign exchange in 2008.
“If you take the employment through the tea industry, the tea industry employs directly and indirectly about one million people,” he told Radio Australia’s Connect Asia program.
“So it is not only foreign exchange earnings, it is a big employment area in Sri Lanka.”
Dr Abeysinghe says the drought means yields from the first quarter of this year will be definitely lower compared to last year.
Not all of Sri Lanka is a tea-grower’s paradise.
The expert says the plants require a specific soil type and a certain amount of rain.
“We cannot grow tea all over the country because tea plant needs certain type of soil, and has to have a certain type of climate,” he says.
Kotmale is a mid-country area, with mid-level geological elevations.
“So in that area, the soils are not that fertile and soil is eroded,” Dr Abeysinghe says.
“So we have started (a) program to improve soil fertility by various means.”
He says also that “with tea, one can grow pepper and sometimes avocado.
“Through this program . . . while improving the productivity of tea we are trying to introduce the other crops.
“We call it intercropping - with pepper, avocado and other commercial crops.
“We are looking at a holistic approach - not only tea - to improve the livelihood of the small landholders in that area.” (Source: www.radioaustralianews.net.au)