Tea Board Chairman Rohan Pethiyagoda strongly criticized current and previous Governments for consistently making crucial mistakes that drastically hampered the performance of Regional Plantation Companies (RPCs) and the wider tea industry, citing examples of prohibiting the harvesting of timber and the banning of glyphosate.
He was speaking at the 163rd AGM of the Planters’ Association of Ceylon.
“Two years ago the government banned glyphosate. Who should have taken that decision? We have a registrar of pesticides, we have a fertilizer secretariat, we have a medical research institute and a tea research institute. Nobody was consulted and to this day there is nobody who is accountable for that decision,” he stated.
Heaping further criticism on the Government, Pethiyagoda went on to highlight the failure of the Tea Research Institute to recommend a single alternative to glyphosate, in turn caused by a chronic lack of funding to the institute, which last year was only allocated Rs. 90 million for research.
“Due to this many plantation owners have started using alternatives that are not authorized. Sooner or later this is going to lead to importing countries putting restrictions on Sri Lankan tea imports and this is a serious problem but I cannot wake up this Government to think seriously about it. The Government encourages you to plant fire wood and then discourages you from harvesting it. Even wood lots that you have planted for timber cannot be harvested. This is stupidity simply because the whole idea of forestry is that you harvest it. We often hear that the RPCs are too big, but your average size is just 3,500 hectares which is an area of 7 x 5 kilometers as a rectangle which is certainly not an excessive amount of land to manage,” he said.
Pethiyagoda also called for gradual but sweeping changes to the lives of estate sector employees and their families, noting that many of these issues were not in fact the fault of RPCs but rather a long-standing
“We need a new plantation society. You have 200,000 labour residents on your estates and their families, almost 1 million people, for whom you provide housing, healthcare, education and nutrition. The plantation workers are yet to become full citizens in the meaningful sense of citizenship in this country. We have failed to help them integrate with the rest of society.”
“Even as they expand in population they can’t expand in area and no Government has found the political will to allow these townships to develop into modern, urban units. The rightful place of plantation workers is in towns, not estates.” (SS)
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