Workshop on tea industry future:

New business model for tea estates, exports

The Tea Exporters Association (TEA) recently conducted a workshop on tea strategy development on the theme 'Way forward towards 2020' at the Export Development Board auditorium recently.

Minister of Plantation Industries, Navin Dissanayake was the chief guest. Many stakeholders of the industry were also present.

The panel of speakers included Advisor, Ministry of Development Strategies and International Trade, Dr. Indrajith Coomaraswamy, Chairman, Planters' Association of Ceylon, Roshan Rajadurai, CEO, Wealth Lanka Management Ltd., Mangala Boyagoda, Chairman, Sri Lanka Tea Factory Owners Association, Anil Alwis, CEO, Symbiosis Business Partners, Lasantha Abeywickrama, Chairman, Calamander Group, Singapore, Roman Scott and Chairman, Colombo Brokers Association, Anil Cooke.

The workshop was conducted to encourage stakeholders and policymakers to understand the future needs of the tea industry and map-out a strategy to ensure its sustainability. It focused on four key areas of the tea sector - new business models for plantation and manufacturing sectors, marketing of Ceylon Tea in today's context, current trends and prospects in the global tea market along with the implications of exchange rate fluctuations on the tea industry.

Chairman, Tea Exporters' Association, Rohan Fernando said, "In a world where wheeler-dealers are embraced as respectable entrepreneurs, the hard work and genuine entrepreneurship of stakeholders of a 150-year-old industry goes unnoticed and most often taken for granted."

Fernando said the Tea Exporters' Association came up with a model that a vast majority of its membership believed will sustain growth and pave the way to be a strong global player. The brief version of the model has been compressed to 15 points and a few of them are - improve quality, expedite the FTA with China and Turkey, simplify tax on tea exports, support R&D on new tea products, ease restrictions on import of foreign teas for re-export, fast track approach to increase tea production and lower cost of production.

Minister of Plantation Industries Navin Dissanayake said, "In an industry where there are diverse opinions, ideas, views and going through a certain amount of change in the world, we need to select the most achievable and quantifiable one. Therefore, we need to explore new models by facilitating new thought and exchange ideas as many lives depend on the sector." "Marketing is an essential tool that we lack and due to this we are losing a lot of markets. Issues pertaining to the quality of raw material have also being raised and our ministry has appointed a committee to prepare a quality charter and I urge all stakeholders to sign it and understand the processes necessary to achieve a minimum standard for Ceylon Tea," he said.

Officials of the Planters Association of Ceylon said politics should be separated from the economics of the industry and proposed that productivity based wages and revenue sharing wage models are needed for the sustainability of the sector and that a new autonomous social business enterprise model will be developed by them and they should receive a bigger share of the retail price of tea.

They also said that they would work hard to enhance the quality of life of the workers while working along with the State to bear the social cost of the plantation population and provide services and amenities as done for the other sectors.

Other salient proposals and strategies made at the workshop were: To move away from traditional markets and produce locally branded products and focus more on product innovation and current global trends to cater to the rich Western markets which have sophisticated consumers with buying power.