{"id":125004,"date":"2022-05-05T12:44:52","date_gmt":"2022-05-05T19:44:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/?p=125004"},"modified":"2022-05-05T12:44:52","modified_gmt":"2022-05-05T19:44:52","slug":"sri-lanka-tea-exports-lowest-in-23-years","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/2022\/05\/05\/sri-lanka-tea-exports-lowest-in-23-years\/","title":{"rendered":"Sri Lanka tea exports lowest in 23 years"},"content":{"rendered":"<h2><span style=\"color: #0000ff;\"><em>Courtesy Daily Mirror<\/em><\/span><\/h2>\n\n\n<p>AFP: Crisis-struck Sri Lanka\u2019s vital tea exports have dropped to their lowest level in 23 years, official figures showed yesterday, hit by a fertiliser ban and the war in Ukraine.<br>Tea is the island nation\u2019s biggest export commodity, bringing in about US $ 1.3 billion annually before the current economic downturn, the worst since independence in 1948.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>But a bungled ban on fertiliser imports last year &#8212; introduced in a doomed effort to save foreign currency and avoid a debt default &#8212; hit growers hard, with production falling 18 percent on-year for the period from November 2021 to February 2022.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Customs data showed that first-quarter exports in 2022 correspondingly plunged to 63.7 million kilos (140 million pounds), down from 69.8 million kilos in the January-March period last year.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The tally was the lowest since the first quarter of 1999, when the country shipped out 60.3 million kilos of tea.\u2019<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Courtesy Daily Mirror AFP: Crisis-struck Sri Lanka\u2019s vital tea exports have dropped to their lowest level in 23 years, official figures showed yesterday, hit by a fertiliser ban and the war in Ukraine.Tea is the island nation\u2019s biggest export commodity, bringing in about US $ 1.3 billion annually before the current economic downturn, the worst [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":true,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[160,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-125004","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-agriculture","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/125004","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=125004"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/125004\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=125004"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=125004"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=125004"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}