Middle East conflict disrupts Sri Lanka's $1.5B tea industry, exports fall 17%

Sri Lanka's tea industry, worth $1.5 billion annually, faces severe disruption from Middle East conflict, with export earnings declining more than 17% over the past year due to rising costs and reduced demand. The crisis threatens livelihoods across the sector, which employs hundreds of thousands of workers in tea-producing regions. This matters globally because Sri Lanka is one of the world's largest tea exporters, and supply chain disruptions from regional conflicts now extend to commodity-dependent economies far from the conflict zone. The report from TRT World documents how geopolitical instability in one region creates economic cascades in developing economies dependent on export revenue.