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

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 635 people and affecting more than two million people, 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 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 fertilisers 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 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 percent of the country’s gross domestic product (GDP).

In the tea industry, preliminary estimates predict an output decline of up to 35 percent, according to a member of a presidential committee on cyclone recovery, who requested anonymity because he was not authorised 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.