Sri Lankan tea pickers’ dreams shattered by economic crisis
BOGAWANTALAWA, Sri Lanka On a lush plantation in Sri Lanka, Arulappan Ideijody deftly plucks the tips of each tea bush, throwing them over her shoulder into an open basket on her back.
After a month of picking more than 18 kg (40 lb) of such tea leaves each day, she and her husband, fellow picker Michael Colin, 48, receive about 30,000 rupees, worth about $80 after the island nation devalued its currency.
“It is not close to enough money,” Ms Arulappan, 42, said of their earnings, which must support the couple’s three children and her elderly mother-in-law.
“Where we used to eat two vegetables, now we can only afford one.”
She is one of millions of Sri Lankans reeling from the island’s worst economic crisis in decades.
The COVID-19 pandemic severed the tourism lifeline of the Indian Ocean nation, already short of revenue in the wake of steep tax cuts by the government.
Left critically short of foreign currency to buy essential supplies of food, fuel and medicines, Sri Lanka has turned to the International Monetary Fund for an emergency bailout.
Rampant inflation and shortages sparked weeks of protests that have sometimes turned violent.
Plantation workers like Ms Arulappan, who hail predominantly from the island’s Tamil minority, are affected more than most, as they own no land to provide a cushion against soaring food prices.
Her family is one of 17 living in traditional “line homes”, or boxlike, single-storey terraces unchanged in design from the days of Britain’s colonial rule, which ended in 1948.
Emerald-green hills stretch for miles around, while rising over the cottages is fragrant woodsmoke from burning tea branches the families use for their cooking fires.
Their fortunes mirror the rise and fall of an economy that emerged from a decades-long civil war in 2009.
Buoyed by a booming tourism industry and exports of items such as garments and plantation products like tea, rubber and cinnamon, Sri Lanka attained a GDP double almost that of neighbouring India in 2020.