20 mn new tea plants to be cultivated next year

..a bid to revive output that had dropped in last five years

Moves were under way to cultivate 20 million new tea plants next year with a view to increasing the national tea production, which had been hampered during the last few years, Company Estate Reforms, Tea and Rubber Estates Related Crops Cultivation and Factories Modernization and Tea and Rubber Export Promotion State Minister Kanaka Herath said on Monday in Kandy.

He said that it was to increase the national tea output with the aim of uplifting that industry since it had been observed that there had been a severe drop in tea production since 2015. Having identified the situation, the State Ministry was assisting the private sector to establish 500 tea nurseries, which could produce 25 million tea saplings per annum.    

The State Minister was speaking at the ceremony launched by the Tea Small Holdings Development Authority to provide financial and physical subsidies including water pumps to new tea nurseries in the Kandy district. The programme was held under the theme ‘A revival of the golden leaf’ (Ran Dallata Nawodayak) at the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) in Kandy.

He said that the government would purchase those tea plants from nursery owners at a price of Rs 26 per sapling.

“Under this programme, 500 tea planters in the country will be provided with cash and water pumps. The President understands the value of the tea sector and has focused on it with a vision of prosperity” the State Minister added.

According to him, with the 2021 Budget Proposal the government has doubled the allocations to the tea sector.

State Minister Herath said that when the country’s exports collapsed due to the Covid-19 pandemic, foreign exchange however continued to flow into the country from the tea industry despite the drop in production in the past five years.

He said the tea production had fallen from 340 million kilos in 2014 to 290 million kilos in recent years, adding that the drought had also severely affected the current year’s tea production.

The State Minister said that about 75 per cent of the total tea production in the country came from small tea estates. He said that plans were afoot to increase tea production in the next five years and that a revival of the golden leaf is expected to achieve that goal.

Members of Parliament Gunathilake Rajapaksa, Attorney-at-Law Udayana Kirindagoda, Prof. Ranjith Bandara and Regional Manager, Tea Small Holdings Development Authority, Kandy Gemunu Ranasinghe, were present at the occasion.