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By Channa Kasturisinghe

Sri Lanka is the single largest supplier of coir fibre to the international market. However, India earns much more than Sri Lanka by exporting value added products such as brooms, brushes, mats geotextiles and rubberised coir. Sri Lanka's coir industry also has to face competition from alternative raw materials such as flax, hemp, jute, sisal and synthetic foams and fibre.

The total revenue from the export of coir fibre and finished products in 2000 was four billion rupees (US$52million). This figure corresponds to five percent of total agricultural exports, one percent of all exports and 0.3 percent of Sri Lanka's GDP.

The industry employs an estimated 35,000 to 45,000 people which is 0.6 percent of the entire domestic workforce.

The coir industry has the added advantage of having the image as an eco-friendly raw material with additional attributes of resilience to biodegradation and to mechanical deformation. The country's coir industry is equipped with a well-developed infrastructure for production and processing and the experience with wide range of primary and secondary processing technologies. In addition, the raw material is abundant here in Sri Lanka with 90 percent of inputs are locally produced.

Not having a commonly used quality classification and control system for fibre, which has resulted in inconsistent fibre quality supplied to foreign customers has been the major weakness of this industry.

Our industry largely sells low value commodity products and value addition is done offshore. Frequent lack of proximity to customers and products being commonly sold on a price-only basis have been major hindrances to the progress of this industry. Even the domestic markets for coir products are poorly developed. The industry does not control the use of cess funds collected from exported coir products.

However, the growing trend in western countries to use natural fibres for technical purposes, such as composites and insulation materials is expected to reverse the shift towards synthetic fibres and foams. Sri Lanka is well positioned to be first to respond to such demands for coir. We could cater to the growing demand in China and other developing countries for fibre mattresses, furniture and other value added products. The developing automotive industry in Asia, which is likely to utilise growing quantities of coir is another opportunity Sri Lanka should make use of.

Meanwhile, our coir industry should be mindful of the threat of continuous innovation in synthetic foams and fibres, which could eliminate performance advantages of coir in certain applications such as car seats. The emergence of other countries as coir suppliers to the global market could pose the threat of reducing coir prices. Detrimental price-only competition among members of the industry may cause price and quality erosion in some sectors and loss of reputation of Sri Lanka as a quality supplier.

The Sectoral Task Force for Coir Products set up by the Ministry of Enterprise Development, Industrial Policy and Investment Promotion to prepare a sectoral plan for the next five years has identified key elements for the future industry growth.

Introducing Policy reforms to facilitate the industry, improving product quality and productivity, making Sri Lanka as the Coir Centre and expanding existing markets and exploring new applications have been identified are among the key areas identified by the Coir Task Force.

The Task Force aims to increase exports of coir based products by fifty percent to the value of $ 25million in the next five years. Increasing the export share of semi-processed and value added products to 70 percent, achieving a price premium of 15 to 20 percent for high quality mattresses and twisted fibre and increasing domestic use of coir products by 20 percent in value are among other objectives of the Task Force. It is also planning to maintain overall industry employment at 40,000 despite continuing trend towards automation.

To achieve these objectives the Task Force has recommended providing vocational training to 2000 current and new employees annually and to introduce a more productive and environmentally safer primary production technology. It is also planning to set up five to seven key research and development projects in the areas of processing technology and productivity improvement, product development and market assessment in collaboration with overseas research institutions. It has been proposed to introduce three to five new coir based product lines to the world market.

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Copyright 2001 The Associated Newspapers of Ceylon Ltd.
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