Permanent Representative to United Nations (UN) Agencies in Rome, Ambassador Cindy McCain, and US Ambassador to Sri Lanka, Julie Chung participated in a meeting with the IFAD Country Director for Sri Lanka and Maldives, officers of the Smallholder Tea and Rubber Revitalization (STaRR) Project, and some STaRR beneficiaries in Kandy district during the official visit to the several development projects of the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), UN World Food Programme (WFP), and International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) implemented in the North Western and Central provinces of Sri Lanka. The STaRR is an IFAD-funded key project being implemented under the Ministry of Plantation Industries.
The Ambassadors discussed how the project assisted tea and rubber smallholders are facing the challenges raised by the current crisis and shortage of agricultural inputs including fertiliser and cost escalation for inputs. The STaRR project beneficiaries representing the tea smallholder development societies outlined the way of strengthening them with the startup support being extended by the STaRR project for diversifying their income through home gardening, animal husbandry, intercrops under tea and rubber cultivations, farming and non-farming income generations activities through project rural finance program.
Many more activities have now been creating results at ground, the Project Director of STaRR. Janka Amarasingha highlighted at the meeting.
Increasing the productivity of tea lands and promoting new rubber cultivation in nontraditional areas of the country for improving sustainable livelihoods of Chena cultivated farmers and tea smallholders are the long-felt development initiatives of the project.
Supporting the replanting of old unproductive tea lands with high-yielding cultivars and promoting rubber new cultivation to improve the rubber supply chain as a means to improve the livelihood of people, are in practice at present under project interventions.
The project interventions have been helping the Tea and Rubber smallholders to adopt new technologies and practices that have enabled them to increase the productivity of their tea and Rubber lands.
The STaRR project aims to introduce significantly faster and more cost-effective tea replanting techniques in 4,500 hectares and 3000 hectares of rubber new cultivation of smallholders’ lands targeting 32,000 households through the mobilisation of resources and coordinating of stakeholders to improve the value chain management process to improve their food security, increase their income and strengthen their resilient through revitalising tea and rubber development.
As per the present achievements, the project has completed tea replanting in 2,500 ha in six districts with the support of the Tea Smallholding Development Authority and Tea Research Institute, and Rubber new planting in 3,000 ha in two districts under the technical guidance of Rubber Development Department and Rubber Research Institute.
Of these, latex tapping from new rubber plantations has already commenced in 44 ha by 64 Rubber smallholders under project assistance.
The STaRR project has been under implementation in eight districts of Sri Lanka since, 2016 with the financial assistance of IFAD and the Government.
Project interventions on smallholder tea development are in the Galle, Matara, Ratnapura, Badulla, Kandy and Nuwara Eliya districts. The rubber new cultivation interventions are in Moneragala and Ampara districts as non-traditional areas. The STaRR’s benefits go to 32,000 households in eight districts. The IFAD contribution to the project is USD 25.7 million.