Small is more productive

Anjana SAMARASINGHE

TEA: Annual productivity of tea smallholders is higher than large-scale plantation companies.

Annual productivity of tea smallholders is recorded as 1867 kilograms per hectare in 2005.

In the corporate sector it is recorded as 1292 kilograms per hectare last year, Deputy General Manager (Development) of Tea Small Holdings Development Authority M. B Cyril said.

However, annual national productivity is recorded as 1615 kilograms per hectare. In 2004 tea smallholders have used 137,000 metric tonnes of fertiliser and large-scale companies have used 41,400 metric tonnes, he said.

Re-planting rate of the tea smallholders accounted at 0.9 percent per annum and it is less than 0.5 percent in the corporate sector. Sri Lanka needs to have annual re-planting rate of 2 percent (which means 2000 hectares per year).

However, Sri Lanka was able to achieve only 900 hectares in last year.

Tea smallholder sector has 118,000 hectares under cultivation and 110,000 hectares under plucking. This is an increase of 45 percent over the last ten years. The corporate sector has 86,000 hectares under plucking, he said.

Sri Lanka produced 317 million kilograms of tea last year and tea smallholders contributed 205.8 kilograms for the total production. Corporate sector produced 111.39 kilograms to the total production last year.