For the Price of a Cup of Tea? The Disaster Trade Investigates the Environmental Cost of your Morning Cuppa
Starting today, on International Day for Disaster Risk Reduction, the Disaster Trade is beginning work to explore a new and vital nexus of trade and environmental hazards: the Sri Lankan highlands, where international tea and rubber exports play a key role in in exacerbating the risk of landslides.
In doing so, The Disaster Trade is bringing in two new team members: academics Amila Buddhika Jayasinghe and Chethika Abenayake from the University of Moratuwa in Colombo, Sri Lanka. These new team members bring strong recent experience of analysing the intersection of landslide risk and land use change in Sri Lanka’s upland areas. As Drs. Amila, Chethika and their team recently revealed in a 2018 paper on the issue, land use change related to commercial agricultural commodity production was implicated in up to 80% of landslides in some areas.
For Sri Lankans, this is a major issue. According to historical data, the ‘first eight decades of 19th century recorded only six major landslide events, in Sri Lanka but the two decades since 1981 have registered five major occurrence of landslides’: a trend which has accelerated in recent years. Whilst Sri Lanka experienced an average of less than 50 annual landslides up to 2002, this number has since rapidly increased. They are now a clear and ever-present danger to communities living in the affected areas, punctuated by intermittent major disasters. In 2017, for example, floods and landslides were responsible for the deaths of over 150 people, whilst December 2019 saw flooding and landslides prompt the evacuation of over 20,000 people.
Yet remote as they may seem to UK residents, this regular procession of disasters is neither natural, nor as far removed from their everyday lives as they might appear. Rather, ever since British colonisers first introduced tea to the Sri Lankan highlands in 1839, the region’s endemic hazards have been structured increasingly by the products that are grown and traded there. In 2014, for example, 38 people were killed on a tea plantation, when part of a cultivated hillside collapsed, burying dozens.
Some 180 years after the British first began commercially cultivating Sri Lanka’s uplands, traditional tea growing areas like Sabaragamuwa province are the source of a range of agricultural commodities, including rubber, coconut, and paddy, each of which leaves its mark on the disaster risk profile of the area on which it is grown. The UK, the US and Europe, where many of these commodities are ultimately consumed, enjoy the fruits of this hazardous landscape, without needing to consider the risks of their production.
And the situation is worsening. As the impacts of climate change shift rainfall patterns around the region, landslides are becoming more common and more deadly. Recent precipitation variation studies in Sri Lanka have revealed a significant increase of rainfall in terms of intensity and frequency: factors strongly linked to the risk of landslides. The role of British trade in shaping and intensifying these disasters is therefore a topic for urgent investigation. The supply chains on which we depend are powerful structural forces on the natural environment beyond our borders. With this new area of focus, The Disaster Trade is seeking new ways to understand these complex processes and bring them to national attention.