Sri Lanka is paying some foreign debts with tea, rather than cash. But an abrupt ban on chemical fertilizers has hurt crop yields and tea pickers are losing hours and wages as food prices double.

People pluck tea leaves at a plantation in Bogawantalawa, Sri Lanka, on May 20, 2025. Sri Lanka earned 1.43 billion U.S. dollars from tea exports in 2024, with an increase of more than 9 percent ...

Sri Lanka's tea industry grapples with a steep wage hike, but some estate owners embrace new approaches to balance worker welfare and productivity in a bid to save the sector.

Members of Sri Lanka's Malaiyaha community during their 252-kilometer-long walk in 2023 to highlight the centuries-old discrimination they face and demand equal rights as citizens. ... She said that ...

Residents in a tea estate village in Sri Lanka. ( Foreign Correspondent: Tom Joyner ) Many of the tea pluckers on Sri Lanka's vast estates also live on site in supplied homes known as line houses.

Ironically, Iraq, a war-torn country, is Sri Lanka’s largest tea importer with purchases of 34.2 million kg in 2024. Sri Lanka emerged as the world’s largest tea exporter in 1990, with production ...

With a standard tea bag costing around 10 US cents, it can be hard to picture the human capital expended in cultivating, plucking, processing, tasting and blending before the tea hits your lips.

Hatton (Sri Lanka) (AFP) – The backbone of the economy, Sri Lanka's tea pickers are determined to use their powerful vote to choose a president this month who will change grim working conditions ...

In 2015 Sri Lanka was producing 340 million kg of tea which was hampered by the Glyphosate ban fiasco. As the industry was slowly recovering from this after laws were brought in place to allow for the ...

Sri Lanka's tea industry grapples with a steep wage hike, but some estate owners embrace new approaches to balance worker welfare and productivity in a bid to save the sector.

The backbone of the economy, Sri Lanka's tea pickers are determined to use their powerful vote to choose a president this month who will change grim working conditions for good.