Major challenges confront Sri Lanka’s spices’ industry with regard to production, productivity, quality, value addition and branding and if these challenges are successfully tackled, production could be doubled. This was pointed out by Sarada De Silva, out-going Chairman, The Spice Council (TSC) at its 11th AGM held in Colombo last week. Nanda Kohona was elected [...]

The Sunday Times Sri Lanka

Major challenges confront Sri Lanka’s spice exporters

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Major challenges confront Sri Lanka’s spices’ industry with regard to production, productivity, quality, value addition and branding and if these challenges are successfully tackled, production could be doubled.

This was pointed out by Sarada De Silva, out-going Chairman, The Spice Council (TSC) at its 11th AGM held in Colombo last week. Nanda Kohona was elected as the new Chairman for 2014/2015.

Mr. De Silva stated that on the production side, 70 per cent of the industry are smallholders who cultivate less than one hectare and they should be supported to move from subsistence farming to commercial agriculture. He said that for commercial farming to succeed the government should provide them land, consistent policies and no interference. He said that they could double the production of the spice industry with better agriculture practices. The example he cited is the cinnamon and pepper industries where the national average is around 450 kilos per hectare.
Vietnam has around 43,000 hectares and exports over 110,000 metric tons, whereas Sri Lanka has 31,000 hectares but exports only 15,000 MT only, he said.

As there is very strict hygiene and quality standards have to be met in exports, he said and a few who export inferior spices ruins the export market. He pointed out that due to this reason since 2012 a large number of cinnamon containers were returned.He noted with concern that due to influencing the government by a few individual cinnamon exporters, the SLS 81 standards introduced by the government to be compulsorily adhered to by the cinnamon exporters was not implemented. He insisted that value addition is the way forward, though there are some drawbacks. He said that it is encouraging that many companies are adding value to spices and hoped that more organisations would follow suit.
He noted that the UNIDO, WTO, Spice Council and Ministry of Commerce and Industry works according to plans and have developed and validated National Competency Standards and Curriculum for cinnamon field and factory operations.

A sum of Rs. 28.5 million was given by the Finance Ministry for the cinnamon training academy work, he said.

Mr. De Silva said that while the programme works smoothly, they have requested the balance funding of Rs. 36 million to continue the programme.He said that in 2013 cinnamon, pepper, cloves, essential oils and other spice products did extremely well and in spite of the economic downturn in the West, the spice sector increased its exports in value terms by over 40 per cent in dollar terms. He said that the first six months of this year has not been favourable due to drought which severely affected the production of pepper, cloves, nutmeg, etc.

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