Sri Lanka’s Regional Plantation Companies have 19 years left on their land leases and say that is shorter than the time it takes a newly planted tea bush to repay the cost of planting it — an argument the industry is using to press for the lease term to be restored.

The case was set out this week in a plantation-sector position paper carried by Hiru News, Lanka Business Online and the Daily FT, the last of which ran it as a column. The figures and the proposals below are the industry’s, not this desk’s.

The arithmetic the industry is making

A tea bush yields its first crop after five years, meaningful returns after a decade, and takes more than 20 years to repay the original investment. Leases granted in 1992 originally ran 99 years and were later cut to 53 years, leaving 19 years outstanding.

The consequence the companies draw is a financing one: banks will not lend against an agricultural project whose payback runs past the end of the borrower’s legal tenure. Restoring the 46 years removed from the original term would, they argue, unlock capital for replanting, diversification and non-crop ventures such as estate eco-tourism.

The operating position

In the first seven months of 2026, tea output fell 3% to 152.5 million kilograms and sheet rubber production dropped almost 18%. Labour accounts for roughly 65% of production costs, and a recent Rs 200 wage increase added an estimated Rs 6 billion to industry outlays. Fertiliser costs rose from about Rs 100,000 to Rs 220,000 per metric tonne, which the paper attributes to disruption around the Strait of Hormuz — the same pressure that has driven planters to seek fertiliser price relief.

RPCs manage close to a quarter of national tea acreage. Citing World Bank estimates, the paper puts the wider agrifood sector at about a sixth of GDP, more than 40% of employment and nearly 30% of goods exports.

What else is being asked for

On trade, the Planters’ Association wants the minimum local content for duty-free imported tea re-exported after blending raised from 30% to 50%, with quality testing applied to imported teas. It says the 30% threshold has stood for nearly three decades while roughly 30% of domestic green and CTC teas go unsold. Value-added teas are more than half of tea exports.

On diversification, it points to Malwatte, where avocado planting density rose from 150 to 800 trees per hectare since 2015 and about 60% of cinnamon processing is automated, and notes that legal caps have held oil palm to roughly 10,400 hectares of a planned 20,000 — a restriction that persists despite an expert panel backing a lift of the ban. In Uva, where annual rainfall falls below 500mm, it argues tea is increasingly unviable.

It also asks for simpler tube well approvals for drip irrigation, firmer enforcement against encroachment on estate land, and stronger state research institutes, citing tightening Maximum Residue Limits abroad and the emergence of Pesta disease in rubber.

Context

Most of these themes were already on the record in September, when the Planters’ Association’s incoming chairman set out a five-point revival plan at its 172nd AGM covering value addition, R&D, land use, irrigation and tenure. What is new here is the costing: the seven-month production figures, the wage and fertiliser numbers, and the explicit framing of the ask as restoring 46 years.

Not reported

The paper does not say who in government is being asked to decide, whether any lease-extension proposal is formally before the Cabinet, or what the extension would cost in forgone lease rentals. It names no author or signatory. The tea export revenue figure is garbled in the Hiru text and is omitted here rather than guessed at. No government response is reported in any of the three filings.