Last updated on August 11th, 2020 at 02:44 pm
The key role of Agricultural Economics Division are economic evaluations of TRI recommendations; prioritization of all institutional research; resource planning in cultivation and production of tea, socio-economics issues, policy issues and marketing issues in tea sector.
Key Research Areas
- Identifying appropriate measures to overcome worker shortage in small holdings
- Identification of Typology and Trajectories of Tea based peasant farming systems by
- modeling LU & LC Dynamic Changes in tea growing areas
- Investigation on impact of crop diversification in tea sector
- Evaluating research recommendations& micro-analyses for tea sector
- Investigation on impact of product diversification towards exporter & industry performance
- Investigating the social and economic impacts of alternative worker deployment models in large
- scale tea plantations in Sri Lanka
Major Achievements
- Prioritized research using Composite Approach for Decision Making in Agricultural Research (CADMAR) methodology
- Procedure for economic analysis was set out
- Developed Soil conservation Index (SCI)
- Studied potential for tea based tourism in tea plantations
- Developed a procedure for land use planning & management of tea plantations by using Geographic Information System (GIS)
- Investigated labour availability, labour planning & labour use in tea plantations
- Developed a methodology to estimate value of tea bushes in different stages
- Manual on cost of tea cultivation
- Economic/business models – replanting & infilling
- Studied Inter-regional productivity variations among tea smallholders
- Studied Socio-Economic impact of climate change in tea plantations
- Conducted a survey to identify severity of worker scarcity in large tea plantations
- Investigated on worker absenteeism and turnover in tea plantations
- Investigated livelihood security and determinants of poverty of estate workers
- Investigated on alternative worker deployment models
- Assessment of financial feasibility of diversifying to CTC tea production in Sri Lanka
- Studied the market for value added tea products of Sri Lanka, liberal tea import policy on value added tea exporters & different producer groups of Sri Lanka
- Prepared tea sector policy for inclusion in the plantation policy