Human Environment and Spatial Relationships in Agricultural Production: The Case Study of Sri Lanka and Other Tea Producing Countries

This book, an interdisciplinary study of human environment and spatial organization in agriculture, covers the historical development of the tea industry and analyzes a set of intriguing relationships among estate size, management, and environmental factors of tea production in Sri Lanka. It applies a host of geographic and economic data to a production function analysis in order to examine returns to scale, intensity of land use, and relationships between yield and factors of tea production. These results are compared with other findings from major tea and coffee producing countries as well as selected crops from developed and developing countries. Finally, this study provides a framework for spatially and environmentally sensitive policy options to optimize efficiency and equity considerations of the tea sector in Sri Lanka.