Bogawantalawa, May 5 (BUS): On a lush farm in Sri Lanka, Arulappan Ideijody deftly plucks the ends of each tea bush, throwing them over her shoulder into an open basket on her back.
After a month of picking more than 18 kilograms (40 pounds) of these tiny leaves every day, she and her husband, colleague Michael Cullen, 48, earned about 30,000 rupees, worth about $80, after the island nation devalued its currency.
“It’s not close to enough money,” Arulapan, 42, said of their earnings that should support the couple’s three children and elderly mother-in-law.
“Where we used to eat two vegetables, now we can only buy one.”
Reuters said she is one of millions of Sri Lankans suffering from the island’s worst economic crisis in decades.
The COVID-19 pandemic has cut off the tourism lifeline of this Indian Ocean nation, which is already suffering from a revenue shortfall in the wake of massive tax cuts by the government.
With Sri Lanka suffering from an acute shortage of foreign currency to purchase basic supplies of food, fuel and medicine, it turned to the International Monetary Fund for an emergency rescue plan.
Rampant inflation and food shortages sparked weeks of protests that sometimes turned violent.
Farm workers such as Arulappan, who are mostly descended from the island’s minority Tamils, are affected more than most, as they do not own land to provide protection against rising food prices.
Her family is one of 17 living in “traditional houses,” or box-like one-story terraces, the layout of which has not changed since the days of British colonial rule, which ended in 1948.
Emerald green hills stretch for miles around, while fragrant wood smoke rises above the huts from the burning of tea branches that families use in their cooking fires.
Their fortunes reflect the ups and downs 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 clothing and farm products such as tea, rubber and cinnamon, Sri Lanka achieved double the GDP of neighboring India in 2020.
Arulapan left school at the age of 14 and worked in a garment factory before marrying and moving to the farm in Bogawantalawa, a valley in the Central Highlands famous for drinking fine tea and a four-hour drive east of Colombo, the commercial capital.
Flexible working hours allowed her to look after her children and start a small business selling vegetables to other workers on credit.
But the pandemic has been a setback for the family and the country, shutting down the economy for months and cutting off the tourism sector, a major source of foreign exchange.
“There were days when we only ate rice,” Arolapan said.
The tea industry, which supports hundreds of thousands of people, also suffered from a controversial government decision last year to ban chemical fertilizers as a health measure. Although this was later reversed, the ban resulted in a shortage of fertilizers.
Tea production in the first quarter fell 15% year-on-year to its lowest level since 2009, as the Sri Lanka Tea Board said dry weather was causing losses to bushes that were not getting enough fertilizer after the ban.
Combined with prolonged power outages, fuel shortages and high inflation, this has helped drive the industry to “almost total collapse,” said Roshan Rajadorai, a spokesman for the farm union.
The crisis has left Arolapan unable to make payments for the past two months on a series of high-interest loans she took to start her business, afford a family wedding, and pay off other debts.
Food price inflation approaches 50% per year, with transportation costs rising approximately 70%; Official figures appear, although in practice the figures are higher.
The price of flour has doubled over the past year, putting many farm workers out of reach of many farm workers, the coconut-filled flatbread they nibble while picking tea.
“We had to switch to rice,” Arolapan said. “But even that is too expensive now.”
The cost of a two-kilometre bus ride to school for her two young children has also more than doubled in recent months, but the couple continues to pay private tuition to ensure a better life for them.
“I would never want to see my kids working on a farm,” Michael said.
However, the crisis was doomed by the college education plans of their eldest son Aksun Rai.
I saved up Arulappan for two years to buy a laptop and promised the 22-year-old if he did well in his final exams.
Above the family’s metal wardrobe is a file containing a brochure for the university he was planning to study at. But the financial burden was great.
“You have to provide for the family,” Arulapan told her son before leaving to work at a broom factory in Colombo.
She does not yet know where he lives.
HF