The labour representatives at the PLC meeting recently unanimously expressed their willingness to settle all the outstanding issues through negotiaton and not to resort to direct action for redress of their grievances. ``This is a welcome change in the attitude of the labour and would go a long way in fighting the threats posed by the WTO regime,'' TJ Benjamin, the management representative who attended the meeeting, told PTI.

He said the PLC had through a resolution requested the state and Central Governments to immediatley intervene in the present crisis which was certain to take away whatever little competitive edge the plantation industry at present had in the international and domestic markets.

Kerala accounts for 46 per cent of the total planted area in the country and 42 per cent of the total Indian production of the four major plantation crops -- tea, coffee, rubber and cardamom.

Mr Benjamin said the Kerala plantation industry had all along been plagued by escalating cost of production and intermittent labour unrest. Wages alone constitute about 60 per cent of the cost of production which was perhaps the highest in the world.

In the emerging free import scenerio it was genuinely feared that the worst hit would be the Kerala plantations thanks to the wage and cost of production factors. Most Kerala plantations would find it difficult to survive, leading planters say citing facts and figures.

Of late the management has embarked upon a campaign to make all concerned, mainly the labour and the state government, aware of the possible adverse impact of the WTO regime, especially the withdrawal of Quantitative Restrictions (QRs) on imports from April next year.

The campaign appears to have paid some dividends as evident from the change of attitude of the labour towards settling of disputes. More significantly, it was pointed out at the PLC meeting that this year there was no bonus disputes pending in any major plantations as against a spate of such disputes in the previous years.

According to leading planters of Kerala, the question of increasing productivity is still a vexed issue and the labour is yet to respond to the same positively. In the free import scenario, any further escalation in the wages without a corresponding increase in productivity would spell doom for the industry, they fear.

Apart from the cost factor, another disadvantage of the Kerala and South Indian plantation products is their qualitative inferiority compared with the distinctive superiority of North Indian plantation products, mainly tea. In the post-QRs scenario, this would only add to the woes of the South Indian plantation industry, especially that of Kerala.

The average production of tea alone in the country is about eight lakh tonnes of which around six lakh tonnes is consumed domestically, leaving two lakh tonnes for export. South Indian tea production is nearly two lakh tonnes, of which at least 50 per cent has to be exported to ensure reasonable prices at auction sales, according to industry sources. What is more depressing is the fact that the auction price has been steadily falling at the major auction centres like Kochi, Coonoor and Coimbatore.