Assessing the Influence of Labour Scarcity in Tea Plantations in Sri Lanka

Tea industry is a labour intensive industry and worker scarcity is being felt as a major impediment in tea sector. The objectives of this study were (i) to calculate supply and demand gap of the tea plantation workers and severity percentage of each selected estate (ii) to calculate annual labour declining rates in different tea growing regions (iii) to assess the effect of severity of labour scarcity on the productivity and cost of production in tea plantations. Time series data for ten-year period were collected from the estate records and stratified random sampling technique was used to select 66 sample estates. The results showed that compound annual labour declining rates in Up, Mid, Uva and Low-Country were 2.94%, 4.87%, 4.22% and 5.06%, respectively. Monthly severity level of each estate was calculated by using the gap between number of required and available workers. It was revealed that average productivity level declined with the increase of labour scarcity and means productivity difference increases with raise of severity of labour scarcity. There is a strong negative correlation between productivity levels and cost of production. Since these findings highlighted the importance of identifying solutions to worker scarcity, responsible authorities have to take actions either to attract and retain worker in tea plantations or to promote mitigation measures such as adopting labour efficient techniques; e.g. mechanization of field practices or employing different farming models or introducing labour bank to this problem for the sustainable tea industry in Sri Lanka.