‘Like wastelands’: Sri Lanka tea plantations suffer Cyclone Ditwah’s wrath

By Dilrukshi Handunnetti

COLOMBO – Sundaram Muttupillai, 46, had been working on a tea estate in Thalawakelle in Sri Lanka’s central district of Nuwara Eliya since he turned 17.

However, a devastating cyclone last week, the worst to hit the Indian Ocean island in a century, has left him without work or a home.

Cyclone Ditwah left a huge trail of destruction across the island, killing at least 638 people and affecting more than two million, or a 10th of the country’s population. Sri Lankan President Anura Kumara Dissanayake declared a state of emergency last week and named 22 of the island’s 25 districts as disaster zones.

Central Sri Lanka – the country’s tea and vegetable heartland – was the worst hit, with official data on Monday (8) showing at least 471 deaths in the region, apart from the massive destruction across the hilly plantations.

“It is all gone. We know the rolling hills to be unpredictable, and from time to time, there have been mudslides and homes destroyed by the rainfall. Now the roads are impassable. We do not have the essentials, nor any hope of overcoming the cyclone’s impact,” Muttupillai told Al Jazeera.

‘Homes and livelihoods gone’

Tea is a key Sri Lankan export and the second largest source of its export revenue after apparels. Ranked the world’s fourth-largest tea exporter by value, according to the Observatory of Economic Complexity (OEC), Sri Lanka is globally known for its unique tea blends and value-added products such as tea bags and packaged tea, often commanding higher prices.

Despite economic challenges and political upheavals, the country’s tea industry has retained an annual revenue of $1.3bn in recent years, with a projected revenue of $1.5bn by the end of the year.

However, the cyclone-induced floods and landslides uprooted many fully grown tea plantations, destroyed roads and railway lines, and affected the delivery of essentials, such as fertilizers for crops. Thousands of plantation workers have been rendered homeless.

“Nothing we ever faced could have prepared us for what we endured last week. It has killed our hopes of being able to continue living and working in the plantations. Our homes and livelihoods are gone,” said Muttupillai.

Senthilnathan Palansamy, 34, who works at a tea plantation in Badulla in the Uva Province, says the cyclone buried entire hamlets under the soil, forcing him to consider a shift in his livelihood.

“The plantations are unsafe. There will not be any work for several months. We will have to snap out of plantation lives and work somewhere else,” he told Al Jazeera from a government shelter where he has taken refuge along with his 30-year-old wife Mariappan Sharmila, also a tea plucker, and their two children.

Prabath Chandrakeerthi, Sri Lanka’s commissioner general of essential services, last week estimated the total economic losses caused by the cyclone to be approximately $6bn, which is almost 3.5% of the country’s gross domestic product (GDP).

In the tea industry, preliminary estimates predict an output decline of up to 35% , according to a member of a presidential committee on cyclone recovery, who requested anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the media. He said the plantation community would be especially hit.

“The plantation sector has faced many challenges in recent years. The cyclone’s impact will take some time to recover. This would mean the resumption of work for plantation workers will get delayed, making an already vulnerable community more vulnerable. Workers will face severe livelihood problems,” he said.

Economic vulnerabilities

In 2023, as Sri Lanka reeled under its worst economic crisis since gaining independence from the British in 1948, its government entered into a $2.9bn bailout loan agreement with the International Monetary Fund (IMF). On Friday (5), the global lender said it was considering a request by the Sri Lankan government for a $200m fund on top of the $347m tranche due later this month for post-cyclone relief works.

Moreover, Sri Lanka’s current public debt stands at nearly $100bn, 99.5% of its GDP, leaving barely any room for further financial shocks. But the cyclone has exacerbated the country’s economic vulnerabilities, which threaten its exports and domestic food availability, say the experts.

Dhananath Fernando, chief executive at Advocata Institute, an independent think tank in Sri Lanka, believes the economic devastation caused by Ditwah is at par with what happened during the catastrophic 2004 tsunami, which killed more than 35,000 people.

However, Fernando says, the impact of the cyclone is likely to be harsher as he predicts a sharp increase in consumer prices due to the disruption of supply chains.

“The cyclone has dealt a heavy blow, and this shock will significantly reduce overall growth, not just our export capacity, but also local consumption. The export basket will reflect the shock, reducing foreign earnings, vital to keep the economy afloat,” he told Al Jazeera.

Fernando warned that tea plantation workers would be forced to shift to other professions – “inevitable, considering the level of shock”, as he put it – adding that the shift would not be good for the economy.

“Sri Lanka’s approach to debt sustainability is founded on economic development. Our focus is to repay debt by growing the economy. For this to happen, we cannot afford people to shift from the plantations in search of other options,” he said.

In October, the Tea Exporters Association of Sri Lanka (TEASL) had set a target of $1.5bn in export earnings for 2025, a slight increase from $1.43bn in 2024. The projection was supported by a global rise in demand for more value-added products such as tea packs and bags.

But a source at TEASL told Al Jazeera on condition of anonymity that the target may not be feasible now due to the cyclone’s impact on tea-growing highlands. “Destruction to the sector is so vast, and it has dealt a huge blow to an industry that was picking up. Rebuilding will require both time and resources,” he said.

Omar Rajarathnam, executive director of Factum, another think tank based in Colombo, said the government should consider external shocks, given the island’s high vulnerability to extreme weather and climate crisis, before setting up revenue targets in sectors like tea.

“Even if we did not face a disaster of this magnitude, extreme weather should be factored in as part of industry preparedness, and projections should include multiple scenarios and mitigation methods,” he told Al Jazeera.

As the South Asian country recovers from the deadly cyclone, many tea plantation workers say they are lucky to be alive.

“The tea plantations are now like wastelands. The crops are devastated, homes destroyed, and we have lost so many people. I don’t know whether we would ever recover,” Palansamy’s wife, Sharmila, told Al Jazeera.

-aljazeera.com