Ailing plantation sector needs a holistic approach, not piecemeal fixes

livemint.com:

₹200 per kg of leaf, and will collapse without urgent financial support. According to industry reports, 50 of the 87 registered gardens that qualify for the “Darjeeling Tea" GI tag, are up for sale. India’s overall production of tea has remained flat for several years at around 1.3 billion kgs, while the average price of CTC tea fell to ₹171 per kg in FY23.

Export earnings, at a shade over $800 million in FY23, are well below the over $1.2 billion each that Kenya and Sri Lanka earned from tea exports. Coffee is in a slightly better shape. India’s exports of 398,000 tonnes of coffee in FY23 accounted for just 2.5% of the global market.

A staggering 99% of coffee plantations are under 10 hectares in size, leaving no scope for improvements in productivity and output, or the financial leeway for investments. As a result, output has been nearly flat for years, even as Vietnam, now the world’s second-biggest coffee exporter, has pushed up its output a hundredfold in three decades since 1986! The story is a little different in other plantation crops. India’s pepper output, at around 64,000 tonnes last year, is dwarfed by Vietnam, which produces more than 241,000 tonnes.

As usual, the government’s solution for the various ills of the plantation sector has been to change the legislation. Even here, the efforts have hung fire for years. New legislation to replace existing Acts governing tea, coffee, rubber, spices and tobacco has once again failed to make it to Parliament, with drafts being sent back to the NITI Ayog for refinement.

But legislation alone is unlikely to solve the problem. The sector, partly due to the multiplicity of departments and ministries having a say over its fate, ends up falling off the budgetary radar. In