The great tea illusion

How we lost an industry and didn’t notice

- By Jivaka Atapattu

FOR more than a century, Ceylon Tea was not just an export crop.

It was the main foreign exchange earner of the nation — a national inheritance left behind by British planters who, whatever one may say of colonial exploitation, built an industrial and managerial system of extraordinary discipline. They also did something rarely acknowledged today: they trained Ceylonese planters and superintendents to run those estates with the same precision and discipline when the British eventually departed.

After independence, and through the early years of nationalisation, these Sri Lankan planters maintained excellent agricultural standards, meticulous field supervision, and efficient manufacturing. Standards remained high even as costs rose through wage hikes, because these managers understood — as their teachers had — that the industry’s success depended on uncompromising discipline from leaf to auction.

Yet today, the same plantation sector that once fed our economy has collapsed to a shadow of its former self. And the most remarkable part is this: Sri Lanka has lost more than half its plantation tea output in thirty years — and as a nation, we barely noticed.