AFP, Hikkaduwa, Sri Lanka :
Ten years after the Asian tsunami devastated Sarath Kumara’s cinnamon plantation in Sri Lanka, forcing him to start over with nothing, the farmer faces a new threat from further afield.
Sri Lanka is the world’s leading cinnamon supplier thanks to its centuries-old industry, whose lush, green plantations are strung along the island’s southern coast where European colonists and Arab traders once flocked.
But the industry says its product known the world over as “Ceylon cinnamon” is being undermined by a cheaper rival called “cassia cinnamon” grown mostly in China, Southeast Asia and neighbouring India.
“It took about four years before I could get any crops from new trees and it is only now they are giving a full yield,” Kumara, 54, said at his ancestral farm in Hikkaduwa, 100 kilometres (60 miles) south of Colombo.
“I have not seen cassia, but we know that some people (abroad) adulterate our cinnamon with cassia or sell cassia as Ceylon cinnamon.”
Kumara lost a brother and a sister-in-law, while half of his 9,000 trees were uprooted, when walls of water destroyed plantations in the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami and left 31,000 people dead and a million homeless across the country.
The industry eventually recovered to become stronger than ever thanks to international donors and a herculean effort by its farmers who replanted half a million cinnamon trees in Hikkaduwa, and adjoining Balapitiya area.
