|
|
|
  |
| Sunday, 24 April 2005 |
 |
|
 |
Business |  |
| News Business Features Editorial
|
Growers to
rescue coconut industry
by Elmo Leonard Unless Sri Lanka's dwindling coconut harvest of around 2.7 billion nuts per year, is increased to over four billion, the industry faces an imminent calamity of an insufficient yield to feed the export oriented desiccated coconut industry. For decades now, the once thriving coconut oil industry has its mills in rust and ruin, one side of the coin being that the country has no coconuts to keep this industry going. For far too many years has the fragmentation of prime coconut plantations gone into providing land for development and housing in the western, southern and north-western provinces, unhindered. Also, the dependence on imported vegetable oil for over two decades has left the island's 65 coconut oil mills closed, bar to produce the little coconut oil which is used to flavour the palm oil imported into the country so that it could be retailed as coconut oil. The harvest of coconuts which greatly varies from year to year dependent on wet weather, often leaves little or no coconuts to feed the nation's desiccated coconut mills. This has resulted in a colossal loss of employment of millions in the desiccated coconut and coconut oil industries. For the average citizen when the retail price of a coconut drops to around Rs 15, as is the case now, they are satisfied. The consumer does not know that she consumes 60 percent of the island's coconut yield, or that the consumer in Sri Lanka bears the highest per capita consumption of coconut in the world. When the price of a coconut reached Rs 30 during the year end of 2004, there was resistance to buying from a coconut consumer public. The Coconut Growers' Association of Sri Lanka (CGA) numbering 900 members now have plans to increase the island's current nut average from 1,200 per acre to 4,000 per acre as a means of increasing production. One way is through drip irrigation CGA's vice president, Nimal Samarakkody said. Now, coconut plantations of over five acres in extent are increasingly using drip irrigation, in the coconut plantations of Puttalam, Nattandiya and Wennappuwa, utilising the Indian line of credit. Drip irrigation overcomes the vagaries of weather and ensures a continuous supply line to the consumer and miller. CGA members have successfully introduced 5,000 acres of drip irrigated coconut land in dry Mahaweli areas resulting in high production, and are now taking this system of plantation into lands in Moneragala, Samarakkody said. The use of artificial fertiliser for a few years makes the land dependent on it, while there are moves to reintroduce cattle to coconut estates, so that cattle waste will provide the manure as in years gone by. Intercropping is also catching up among the CGA membership and is being used as a means of increasing yield and improving soil fertility. The crops being intercropped are papaya, pine, passion, banana, cashew, ginger, vanilla and pepper. The fuelwood, Gini seria which provides high yields of wood of high calorific value is also being introduced with success and the fuelwood is being used to produce electricity. The Coconut Research Institute in Lunuwila and the Coconut Cultivation Board are providing high yielding coconut seedlings in their attempt to increase production. |
|
| News | Business | Features
| Editorial | Security
| Produced by Lake House |
