Soil erosion control measures impact on productivity of tea leaves and economics of tea plantation in South India

摘要

Effective Soil and Water Conservation (SWC) measures are needed to control water induced soil erosion for not only sustained agricultural production but also for ecological balance of hills in southern India. Land degradation due to soil erosion is aserious problem in the region due to low adoption rate of recommended SWC measures owing to high initial investment cost and no eventual benefits in short term. The research study assessed the costs and benefits of three SWC measures in new tea plantation. Financial Cost Benefit Analysis (FCBA) was done considering the long term impacts of SWC measures in tea plantation. The result shows that it takes at least 6 years to recover the initial investment towards planting of tea clones without SWC and only4 years with SWC measures. However, all the three SWC measures are attractive for the farmers and gave higher financial returns in terms of benefit cost ratio (BCR), net present value (NPV) and internal rate of return (IRR). Among the SWC measures, growing economically important cover crop like French bean (Phaseolus vulgaris) alongwith contour staggered trenches (CST) in new tea plantation was observed to be effective SWC measure, more attractive for the farmers and economically efficient to small andmarginal farmers since cover crop provides returns in the initial year of tea planting. Financial efficiency of only SWC measures indicated that investment made on SWC measures was able to recover within 3 years in case of CST and in the same year for cover crop. It was also observed that these SWC measures can generate considerable employment opportunity for the family members. The result of the sensitivity analysis showed profitability of these SWC measures even under adverse situations. It is concluded that high investment costs on tea planting and SWC measures coupled with initial low returns are major hindrances to farmers in the southern hills of India. Small scale credit schemes at reasonable interest rate by any financial institution or tea processing factories, group or joint farming for sharing their labours, annual phasing out the tea planting depending on investment capacity are the some of the suggested mechanisms to overcome the problem of high initial investment cost to adopt SWC measures for preventing environmental degradation in the hilly region.