A blow to spice cultivations

By Shezna Shums

Sri Lankan spices are seeing damaging results to their flowering plants, which in turn lowers the annual yield of certain spice cultivations.

The Director of the Department of Export Agriculture, Department of Agriculture, Peradeniya, Lionel Gunaratna told the Daily FT that the crops of cloves, pepper and nutmeg saw their flowering plants damaged due to the rains during the early part of the year as well as the ongoing rains.

The rains during January and February and at present have resulted in irregular and inadequate flowering plants in spice cultivations. There is no physical damage but the flowers have been affected and maybe irregular for the upcoming cultivations.

The Director explained that the low yields will only be felt after the damage was done and that it would result in a lower annual yield this year. This low yield will add to the past year’s diminishing figures of certain Sri Lankan spice exports.

Fertiliser subsidies given by the Government towards these spice cultivations are also low, which has a damaging effect on the majority of small time spice cultivations.

According to the Department of Export Agriculture, about 60 per cent of spice cultivations including cinnamon are done by small scale cultivators who have less than one acre of land to cultivate.

The Director noted that the fertiliser given to spice cultivators was not significant when compared to the fertiliser subsidy given to paddy farmers and small time tea growers.

Gunaratna added that cinnamon was the main crop for Sri Lanka and that was where most improvement was needed.

Currently Sri Lankan cinnamon occupies 90 per cent of the world market.

Cinnamon cultivation requires a lot of fertiliser as cinnamon plants have to entirely be taken out when being harvested and new plants have to be replanted for the new cultivation.

“Application of adequate fertiliser is important to ensure that good quality cinnamon is produced,” explained Gunaratna.

“Due to the high cost of fertiliser most of the small scale growers are not applying the adequate amount of fertiliser to their cultivations, which results in a lower yield,” he noted.

Gunaratna added that owing to this problem, the quantity of spices exported by Sri Lanka has been dropping over the last three to four years. “Last year the export of spices was on the decline,” he added.

However, the Department, with the Ministry of Minor Export Crop Promotion, is providing certain incentives to improve the spice cultivations and that such incentives include loans for fertiliser and other components for product improvement and even cash grants for the farmers to be able to buy and apply chemical fertiliser to their cultivations.

With regard to the cinnamon cultivations, most of the small scale farmers are in the areas of Galle, Matara and Ratnapura.

According to the Director, the current national annual average yield for a hectare is 450 kilos of cinnamon. However, there is potential for one hectare to provide an annual yield of 1,200 kilos of cinnamon.

“There are some plantations which presently produce more that 450 kilos of cinnamon a year, but with the normal amount of fertiliser and care, the potential is to grow 1,200 kilos of cinnamon annually, while with more intensive work the yield can even go up to 1,700 kilos a year,” he explained.

Some of the problems faced by spice cultivators are that some plantations are over 100 years old and now need replanting and rehabilitation to the soil. Soil conservation is also important when these cultivations are within the wet zones and receive vast quantities of rainfall.

Other means of improving the spice cultivations is to do gap filling of the land, provide ploughing material and improve the application of manure.

The DEA’s function

The Department of Export Agriculture (DEA) is a main Government institution which comes under the purview of the Ministry of Minor Export Crops Promotion. It is responsible for the research and development by means of productivity, production and quality improvements of a group of perennial Export Agricultural Crops (EAC), namely cinnamon, pepper, cardamom, clove, nutmeg, coffee, cocoa, vanilla, betel, citronella, lemon grass and arecanut, traditionally grown in Sri Lanka.