For more than a century, Ceylon Tea was not just an export crop. It was the main foreign exchange earner of the nation – a national inheritance left behind by British planters who, whatever one may say of colonial exploitation, built an industrial and managerial system of extraordinary discipline. They also did something rarely acknowledged today: they trained Ceylonese planters and superintendents to run those estates with the same precision and discipline when the British eventually departed.
After independence, and through the early years of nationalisation, these Sri Lankan planters maintained excellent agricultural standards, meticulous field supervision, and efficient manufacturing. Standards remained high even as costs rose through wage hikes, because these managers understood – as their teachers had – that the industry’s success depended on uncompromising discipline from leaf to auction.
Yet today, the same plantation sector that once fed our economy has collapsed to a shadow of its former self. And the most remarkable part is this: Sri Lanka has lost more than half its plantation tea output in thirty years – and as a nation, we barely noticed.
Because the fall in RPC production has been masked by the rise of tea smallholders, who expanded their output and kept Sri Lanka’s total annual production near the 250,000 metric ton mark. (In 1995, the total national output was 246,000 MT.)
The national figure stayed stable, and the illusion of a functioning plantation sector remained intact.
If production has fallen so dramatically, how is it that several plantation companies recorded billion-rupee profits and paid handsome dividends and bonuses?
The uncomfortable answer is this:
These profits were not earned by strengthening the estates – but by extracting value from a dying asset.
To control their Cost of Production (COP), RPCs reduced their resident workforce through golden handshakes and strict no-recruitment policies. The average age of an estate worker today is well above 45, and the sector has no young labour force willing to take up field work.
To compensate, many companies outsourced plucking, resulting in what any old-school planter would call unacceptable harvesting standards. The once-famous ‘two leaves and a bud’ became three, four, or five leaves – often without a bud at all. The raw material deteriorated, and so did the output.
Other consequences followed: