By Knut-Erik Helle
(Text and photos)

In the shadow of old colonial buildings, colourful work teams of women are plucking leaves in the intense green field with ten thousands tea bushes neatly lined up. Small rugged graveyards scattered between the vast plantations break the postcard like harmony. They tell a different story. A story about Tamil low cast hindu semi-slave workers converting to Christianity as a last desperate act to gain respect and a faint degree of superficial dignity. Small conservative American evangelic churches have aggressively baptised among the up country Tamils subdued in poverty for the last 20 years. Often offering some clothes in one hand, and the bible in the other. The graveyards for the workers have been established in the middle of the plantation were they’ve worked all their life. From tea to earth, and from earth to tea.


Hard rain


– Pluck all the leaves! Don’t leave any! If you don’t manage ten kilos before lunch, you’ll not get your salary! The field supervisor dressed in fitting kaki shorts, leather boots and an Indiana Jones-like hat, knows how to encourage the women plucking tea on the Dickwella estate in the Uva district of Sri Lanka. They are plucking the leaves of the renowned black Ceylon tea until they sometimes start bleeding. A total of between 20 and 25 kilos they have to hand in by the end of the day to get their day salary of only 135 rupiees. Today it’s raining and the additional weight of the moister following the leaves are deducted from the total with about three kilos. If the women manage to pick more than the going rate, they’ll get a few rupiees more per extra kilo.

– My greatest wish is that my grandchildren won’t suffer as we do, Sivanthalingam Vairai tells. She has been plucking tealeaves for 25 years now and lived all her life on the estate. Today the work is especially difficult because the rain makes both the ground and leaves slippery. Blood leaches and poisonous snakes are an integral part of their day in the field. Likewise are the pain stuck in the back and the feet after all the years between the tea bushes.


Sivanthalingam’s story


– We try our best to give our grandchildren the best education possible, so they can go away and get work somewhere else. Here, the salary is not enough to manage on, Sivanthalingam explains, and throws a worried look in direction of the supervisor. Where the grandchildren go, doesn’t seem that important, as long as they don’t stay on the tea estate.

– We have fought to see our children grow up, she adds. The food the estate workers eat are hardly nutritious. Flat bread made on white flour, some rice and occationally some fried vegetables are the fixed meal of any day.

– The work is hard for us women. We have to work all day at the plantation and in addition do everything in the home. The men and the boys want to be free, Sivanthalingam tells. There isn’t any alternative other than to work on the estate, and thus it has been for the last three generations. Short after Folkevett magazine had interviewed Sivanthalingam the estate manager showed up.

– What are you doing here? Do you have permission? You can’t be here! Estate manager Mr. S. Vsivalingam wasn’t at all keen on our interest in the condition of their workers.


The colonial heritage


Sivanthalingam Vairai and most of the plantation sector workers on Sri Lanka are Tamils from India. For 150 years they have been plucking tea on the island. The English colonial planters established tea plantations from 1867, after the coffee crops failed due to blight. The colonial rulers freely adopted large areas of the island as crown land. But they couldn’t make the local people interested in working on the estates. After failing to persuade local farmers with heavy taxation leading to hunger, they started looking elsewhere, and found plenty of labour in Nadu, south of India. The Nadu Tamils where fighting drough and failing crops, and thousands died from hunger in the years up till 1850. Low cast Hindus and unemployed had the hardest time trying to manage.

The English colonial rulers on Sri Lanka took efficiently advantage of the situation and promised the Nadu Tamils a prosperious future as plantation workers. Thousands of male workers came first, clearing the jungle and making roads. As soon as the plantations were established, women were also offered work as pluckers, first with coffee and later tea. The travel to Sri Lanka was everything else than prosperous. Several thousands of Tamils died on the road of malaria, snake bites and starvation. Between 1871 and 1881 about 24.000 Tamils made the journey to the teardrop shaped island every year. To go back was next to impossible, because many were in dept from raising funds for the boat trip from India. To pay the dept was hard as their salary on the plantation was low. The English had secured the stable labour force they needed and the Nadu Tamils had become plantation slaves under harsh colonial dicipline in a foreign country without any rights. Today the Tamils still live in the so called line houses on the plantation, isolated from the rest of the Sri Lankian society. The most obvious change is that 23 private tea companies manage the estates. According to the workers life is not much easier now.


Company rule worse


Old workers still remember how it was to work during the colonial time. Arumu Rama Sundaram is one of them. He was ten years old when he started working.

– We managed better when we worked for the English, than life these days. Even if the salary was low we managed because everything was cheap, he tells. Despite the hard discipline, the English took better care of both the plantation and the workers, compared to the private tea-companies today, according to Sundaram. The colonial rulers maintained the estates better, making it easier for the pluckers to do their work. Women who needed to take a break to breastfeed their child, used to be taken care of by the English women on the estate. She got a glass of milk and biscuits, and they made sure her breast was washed before feeding the child.

– Today it’s not like this. The companies are just interested in making a good profit, Sinnasamy point out. However, the plantation workers have more liberty now than under English rule. Nowadays the workers can leave the plantation and get visitors from the outside without written permission from the estate-management. But now as before the up country Tamil workers are still missing the most basic rights other labourers get in Sri Lanka. Still thousands of up country Tamils are stateless, and their children have less oppertunity of both getting an education and work outside the tea-estate. According to the historian Sithamperam Nadesan, the violence and suppression was integral in keeping the plantation economy in the country. The system introduced by the English, where continued by the government on Sri Lanka.

– The workers where victims of fraud, injustice and violent suppression, he writes in a book about the situation of the tea-estate Tamils up till our time.


Life on the edge


The greatest every day challenge for the plantation workers are to manage from one salary to the next.

– The inflation and prices go up far faster than our salary. It’s hard to manage, Sinnathambi Sinnasamy says. On the Dickwella-estate the price for a kilo of rice was 25 rupies back in 1996. Today the same rice costs 35 rupies. Several years with inflation in Sri Lanka takes it’s toll. In periods there are also not enough work.

– In the dry season we get only two days of work a week. This is not enough to manage on. We have to live on credit and stamp what we have of valuable things, Sinnasamy tells. Up to three months every year the workers have to manage almost without an income. Most of the estate workers depend on buying the things they need, as most of them don’t own any land they can grow vegetables. Even the tea they have to pay for. They buy the tea that is of so low grade that no one else will buy it.

– The tea we get are called the “labours dust”. That doesn’t make us feel very appreciated, Sinnasamy adds. In his opinion Sri Lanka and the estate owners have given very little in return for the effort of the Tamils, that have kept the important tea-production going for generations.

– If we say we want better salary or other benefits, the companies say they are running at a loss and threaten to close the estate, the old tea worker tells. But he don’t believe them. He’s convinced someone is earning good money on the tea they pluck and that is sold worldwide. It is just not them.


Fighting the poverty


– Most people drinking tea around the world don’t know how the plantation workers suffers in Sri Lanka, Prabath Kumara claims. He is co-ordinator for Future in Our Hands Development Fund that have been working the last ten years to improve the lives of the up country Tamils.

– The last 50 years not much have changes for the tea estate workers, but we try to help them find their own solutions to their problems, Kumara tells. Poverty reduction programs among the Tamils are not welcomed by the companies running the estates. They fear that if the workers organise and their standard of living is raised, they might not want to work in the estate anymore. If the estate-families want support from Future in Our Hands and their extra income generating programs the organisation demand that the use of alcohole is reduced. The consumption of the locally produced spirits Kasippu is an increasing problem many estate families are struggling with. With regard not only to the family income, but also the health of the men and domestic violence. Both methanol and mosquito coils are used to produced the poor quality spirit.

– The plantation workers have little oppertunity to save money and to invest in for example a small shop or growing vegetables that can be sold at the market. This we help them with. The families that participate in or saving program may after some time take small loans to start activities that help them generate extra income, Kumara explains. The organisation also gives courses teaching workers everything from how to tailor or produce glass in small scale production. Future in Our Hands is also giving extra classes to the youth on the estate, in order to prepare them better for the final exams at high school level. The public schools for the plantation children struggle with few teachers and limited resources. Schools for Buddhist and Muslim children get far more resources both in terms of teachers and material, as for example computers. Just to see a computer is something the plantation children can wait a long time for.


Fields of poison


Added to the everyday struggle to manage, the use of some of the worst pesticides comes in addition. On the Dickwella estate the workers complained they got no protection gear. To see workers with gloves, boots and masks are rare sight on the plantations of Sri Lanka.

– We have asked to get the proper protection gear, but we’re still waiting. It is like this on most of the estates in the Uva district, one workers tells. Several of them shows the problems they’ve got with the skin and also tell they get pain in the chest. They tell the names of several of the chemicals they use on the plantation. Among them are Gramoxone, also known as Paraquat. This pesticide is banned in most western countries as it’s highly toxic. But on Sri Lanka it is still used, and without proper protection many of the workers that have to deal with the dangerous chemical. As the tea estate workers also live on the plantation, there is a big problem with chemicals pollution their drinking water. They often get their water from small streams, with drainage from the whole plantation.

– The health security for the workers in the plantation sector is very low. The chemicals that are used have resulted in a rising number of stomach cancer and several other health problems including stillborns and damages to the fetus, Prabath Kumara tells. The wide spread use of agrochemicals have also resulted in serious problems with erosion and degrading of the soil. The production of tea drops as well, together with the faltering soil fertility.


An ecological disaster


Sri Lanka is renown for a large diversity of endemic species. The large monocultures of tea takes has contributed in pushing the biodiversity on the island to the very limits.

– The tea plantations where a mistake from the start. Now we just have to deal with them as best we can, Kumara says. He stress that the plantations are far from sustainable. – The solution now is ecological farming. Thus we can save both the environment and the health of the workers, Prabath Kumara points out. Kariyawasam Thilak from the environmental organisation Green Movement on Sri Lanka claims that the private companies nowadays do much worse than the English before them in terms of sustainable management.

– The English understood the value of keeping small patches of forest on the plantation. Today the private companies clear cut the remains of jungle in order to make as much money as possible – as fast as possible. The remaining forests are important both in order to secure the natural water supply and moreover sustain the biodiversity, Thilak explains. Short sighted profit hunt for profit is also behind the degrading soil fertility, he claims.

– It costs money maintain the soil and prevent erosion. In the colonial era they had more knowledge on how to preserve the environment than the private companies show today, Thilak points out. Because of the tea plantations on Sri Lanka several species are threatened with extinction. The massive deforestation and use of chemicals are the main reasons. Even the endangered asian elephant have suffered from the tea.

– In the Hortton plains national park there where elephants before. Today we can’t find any, because the park is surrounded by tea plantations. The corridors the elephant needs to move between the big forest areas are lost. The tea blocks the way, Kariyawasam Thilak explains.


A tea heaven


The Thotulagalla plantation is not like any other on Sri Lanka. With help from Future in Our Hands the production is now ecological, without any use of chemicals. In addition the products reaching the consumers from Thotulagalla are fair trade. The price they get for their tea is both more stable and higher. The workers don’t get a higher salary though, but the some of the price difference western consumers pay more than they do for regular tea are building up a fund that a chosen group of workers manage. The money may be spent for giving out soft loans to arrange a wedding or raising the standards of living among the workers. A group of women are planning to get some computers and make sure their kids have the opportunity to use the modern technology, not found in their schools. The workers say they feel the future is more secured with the fair trade funds. Accoring to Green movement a lot more has to be done in order to reform the plantation industry.

– Sri Lanka needs a land reform. The private companies should be transformed into companies of the workers. The Tamils should manage these companies. They have both the knowledge and will to use the land sensible, Kariyawasam Thilak claims.

– The workers should get more from the land that now are leased out to private companies, he adds. Future In Our Hands stress the relation between the consumers and the workers.

– Consumers and workers have to come together and find alternatives, and make sure that the workers have live decent lives and that the money not only goes to the middlemen, Prabath Kumara stress.