Long before the country defaulted on its international debt for the first time in May 2022 and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which added to the country’s problems, Nagamma tea workers cut back on meals due to Global trade froze in times of crisis. Coronavirus pandemic.
Blood, sweat and leeches
Her precarious situation in the central highlands of Sri Lanka has not changed, but not for the sake of trying.
“We worked even when it rained and while the leeches sucked our blood,” she said, looking out from the workers’ cabin at the 100-acre plantation, where she began working at the age of 14. “We don’t have enough money to buy chicken, fish or food. any other meat. We only eat vegetables and leaves. Even sending our children to school, providing them with adequate meals is difficult for us. We are going through a very difficult time.”
Dressed in a frayed plastic wrap around her tiny, bartender-style waist and an oversized quilted jacket more like a sponge than for protection from the rain, the 38-year-old mother-of-four walks into the station fill in to start her eight-hour shift.
With sacks full of tea leaves after a morning at the plantation, the workers headed to the factory to weigh them.
Bring a family
At best, Nagamma can hope to earn $3 a day as a tea picker, assuming she meets her daily quota of 16 to 20 kilograms of leaves – the equivalent of two bags. full load. But spiral price means she can buy less than half of the rice and flour she used to buymaking it harder than ever to feed her 10 relatives living in her cramped cottage.
“Nutritional foods such as vegetables, fruits, high protein diets are simply simply out of reach. We need to act now to ensure that this situation does not get worse,” said Rushini Perrera, Head of Resilience, Preparedness, Response and Social Protection at Chapter UN World Food Program (WFP).
“The latest surveys indicate that this is continuing to escalate, with households not consuming enough of the diet across the country.”
Health check
In addition to the lack of regular nutritious food, fuel and medicine continue to be supply shortage worrying.
United Nations agencies and partners responded in June to the Government’s request for international assistance with an appeal that has helped the humanitarian community reach more than one million of Sri Lanka’s most vulnerable people. cash, food, school meals, medicine, livelihood protection and support, and aims to raise a total of $149.7 million to reach 3.4 million people in need.
As Sri Lankans turned on the television news to watch President Ranil Wickremesinghe publicly pledge that “no one should starve to death” during next year’s impending food security crisis, aid groups also responded. expressed deep concern about the knock-on effects of food, fuel and medicine shortages on the next generation of Sri Lankans.
“We have 215,000 women will give birth from June to December 2022. This is a large part of women who need support with medication and care,” explains Kunle Adeniyi, UN Population Fund (UNFPA).UNFPA) Country Representative in Sri Lanka.
out of pill
Pointing to “serious difficulties” in maintaining vital maternal and newborn outreach activities in remote communities because of the fuel crisis earlier this year, Mr. Adeniyi warned that many drugs were out of stock “since the challenges began” in March 2022.
Worrying are the signs that family is “lowering” health because they can’t go to medical facilities either, or because fuel costs are high, or because they’re working to make ends meet.
“(Vulnerable Sri Lankans) need to be able to access health facilities to ensure that we don’t reverse the great gains we have made in terms of health,” Adeniyi said. Maternal health in Sri Lanka. “Women’s lives don’t stop there.”
Lunchtime in the factory at Blue Field tea plantation in Ramboda, Sri Lanka.
Fuel disappointment
That need for urgent action also holds true in the capital, Colombo, where months-long power and fuel shortages have led to mass protests and deadly fuel riots, leaving the General The then president Gotabaya Rajapaksa had to leave the country on July 13 and resign. He returned to the island in early September.
Today, many Sri Lankans share their frustration at the scale of the country’s problems and their impact on everyday life – not least the country’s tricycle taxi owners. The government has just doubled the weekly petrol quota for taxi drivers from 5 liters to 10 liters; For drivers like Kumar in Colombo, it’s a positive development that can’t come too soon.
“The economy is down a lot,” he explains, before pointing out the lack of Western tourists that many are involved in the terrorist attacks on Easter Sunday 2019. “It’s not like that. back in the day, people didn’t hire us, price has increased so they can’t afford to go with us anymore. We also cannot reduce the price, the price of gasoline is extremely high, and we have our own children to look after them, and we have to buy books and furniture for them.”
Back at the tea farm in Ramboda, occasionally a group of Western tourists visit the factory and learn about how the beverage is made.
Tea estate agent Haidrooze cooks small wheat pancakes on the stove in the kitchen of his cottage in Ramboda, Sri Lanka.
original recipe
The seven-stage production process – a noisy and fragrant combination of drying, coating, rolling, grinding and grading – has changed little in the 100 years since the factory opened. The large volume of hot air required to dry the leaves bursts from the wood-burning furnace; it was one of several decades old wrought-metal machines operated according to a secret passed down from father to son.
Snapshots and travel reports of the lush rainforest surrounding the old factory abound on visitors’ social media accounts. But everyday reality is far from idyllic for Nagamma and the hundreds of thousands of tea plantation workers in the hills like hers, many of them descended from migrant workers who arrived from India between 1837 and 1939, to work on the fields. Sri Lanka’s coffee, tea and rubber plantations.
Workers at the Blue Field tea plantation take a break between shifts in the plantation on a rainy day in Ramboda, Sri Lanka.
Repetitive stress
Seeing Nagamma hard at work – barefoot on a steep hillside – any preconceptions that tea picking is a light activity would quickly disappear.
With a swift and powerful thrust of her arms, she snatched handfuls of fresh tea buds from the waist-high tea bushes, before shoving them into the large bag on her back. Weeds and broken branches must be identified and removed, and workers must be careful when wearing flip-flops into the narrow aisles of the site, especially as they turn to mud during the early rains. this early year.
One of the problems with working in wet weather, explains Nagamma, is that the sharp leaves often bleed fingers softened by rain and repetitive tea picking.
Dismissal
There is no shortage of challenges for Nagamma’s owner, who owns privately owned Blue Field tea, has been force it to drastically reduce its workforcedown to 150.
In the better days, it employed 250 workers, but that was before a nationwide ban on chemical fertilizers, pesticides and other agricultural essentials went into effect in March 2021, leaving production and profits fell sharply.
Despite the government ban, damage has occurred and Sri Lanka’s agricultural sector has struggled to fully recover. That is largely due to hyperinflation that has pushed fertilizer and seed prices out of reach for many, which in turn has resulted in less harvest, but also due to a lack of regular investment in modern machinery.
Students go home for lunch despite heavy rains that came early this year in Ramboda, Sri Lanka.
Farmers lose value
At the height of the crisis, vegetable growers like Soita had to find 45,000 rupees for a 50-kilogram bag of fertilizer, he recalls. Today, the price has dropped back to Rs 25,0000, but is still about 17 times higher than in better times, said the barefoot farmer, as he mixed the precious persimmons into the heavy soil at his plot, with the help of a simple pickaxe.
Customer relations officer Abdull Bary Mursheed said: “September was a particularly difficult month for the 100-year-old tea factory. disastrous level of productions – from 2.5 tonnes to just one ton per day – leading to chronic fuel shortages, fertilizer shortages and prolonged power cuts.
“It is a huge difference,” said Mr. Abdull Bary, worried for the future of the factory, as the younger generation knows they can earn twice as much outside the Nuwara Eliya area, including on the public construction school.
“Most of the employees… are looking for work outside. And the future, I do not know; the problem is, we can’t find staff here. ”
