The Sri Lanka Tea Board (SLTB) is funding 70 new tea nurseries to support an accelerated replanting campaign aimed at lifting annual tea production to 400 million kilograms by 2030, Hiru News reported.
SLTB Tea Commissioner Mahesh Jayawardena, speaking to The Sunday Morning Business, said the board is prioritising faster replanting of tea bushes to raise national output.
Replanting has been an ongoing process supported by fertiliser subsidies since the 1980s, he said, but the board has now expanded the programme with special emphasis on abandoned tea plantations.
Why estates were abandoned
Jayawardena attributed abandonment to volatile weather, labour shortages, soil degradation and ageing tea bushes. The SLTB is working through which abandoned estates can realistically be replanted.
He acknowledged replanting will not be feasible on some land, and that those areas could instead be redirected to alternative agricultural uses — an admission that part of Sri Lanka’s abandoned tea acreage is not coming back into tea at all.
The Tea Small Holdings Development Authority has launched a similar investment initiative, though Jayawardena said he did not have details of its project.
The scale of the recovery
Jayawardena said annual output had fallen from about 340 million kg to roughly 250 million kg, and is now recovering as fertiliser is reapplied with continuing subsidy support.
Alongside replanting — which he identified as the main driver for reaching the target — the SLTB has introduced subsidies for irrigation, mechanisation and tea infilling, with a tentative goal of 400 million kg a year by 2030.
Those figures set the size of the task. Going from roughly 250 million kg to 400 million kg is an increase of about 150 million kg, or 60%, inside roughly four years. It would also put output about 18% above the 340 million kg the industry was managing before the decline — so the target is not a recovery to a previous level but a move beyond it. Both calculations are ours, derived from the figures Jayawardena gave.
Context
The 400 million kg goal is not new to the Tea Board. It is the same national target carried by the Ceylon Tea Village programme launched in July, which paired it with a US$2.5 billion tea export earnings ambition and an integrated package for smallholders including high-density demonstration plots and new nurseries. The 70 nurseries announced here appear to sit within that broader push, though Hiru does not say so.
The fertiliser dependency Jayawardena describes also has an external exposure. In remarks released this month, the UN Resident Coordinator flagged China’s export restrictions on fertiliser as one of the pressures on Sri Lanka and urged the Government to diversify fertiliser supply through its diplomatic missions. A recovery premised on reapplying fertiliser under subsidy is a recovery exposed to that supply.
Not reported
Hiru gives no cost for the 70 nurseries, does not say where they will be located, how many plants each is expected to produce, or when they will be operational. It does not say how many abandoned estates have been assessed so far, how many hectares are involved, or how much of that land has been judged unsuitable for tea.
It gives no current annual production figure — only that output is recovering from about 250 million kg — so the starting point for the 2030 target is not stated precisely. The value of the irrigation, mechanisation and infilling subsidies is not given, nor is the total cost of the replanting campaign or the source of its funding.
The Tea Small Holdings Development Authority’s parallel initiative is unquantified, and no industry or planters’ association response to the 2030 target is reported.
No other verified newsroom had filed on the 70 nurseries at the time of writing; Hiru’s account is a relay of The Sunday Morning Business.
