Japan’s Platform Foundation JPF has offered grant assistance for flood and landslide affected families in 15 GS divisions at Deniyaya, Kotapola and Matara, Project Manager Chisato Takahashi told the Daily News.
She said, “Under this relief project, we have offered needed financial assistance to 150 families to repair and rebuild their badly damaged houses following the floods and landslides due to heavy rains in the area during the last monsoon.
“In addition, the project is also helping tea smallholders in Deniyaya to shift from artificial fertilizer and insecticide to nature friendly organic manure and pests control processes of tea cultivation,” she added.
“We have been working with tea smallholders in Deniyaya since 2011 to provide them technical know how to do organic tea cultivation. In this process, we offered them financial support to do away with artificial fertilizer and poisonous pest control chemicals.”
She also said “tea smallholders with financial assistance from the JPF have increased their tea yield with low cost as a result of making use of organic manure. Now, they would not have to spend heavily on artificial fertilizer and insecticide. On other hand, their tea production had increased and in turn, it had fetched higher prices in the Japanese tea market.”
“The group of these small scale organic tea farmers now supply their tea leaf to the Nilmini Organic Tea Factory, where they produced organic tea. We also have taken initiatives to further expand the organic tea market in Japan and Europe, to bring more benefits to organic tea smallholders in Deniyaya,” he added.