Today both teams had a well earned rest and b onded with the wild animals in Udawalle national park.Tomorrow we will be writing the report and then travelling to the airport. Richard is meeting an academic in the morning, so we may not get time to write again. It has been a humbling experience once […]

Today Nik and Andy considered the issues raised so far and researched alternative methods of cinnamon fumigation, fairtrade and farmer associations.We also met with Dennis Fox briefly to discuss subsidies and cinnamon processing. Richard spent the morning with the Deputy Director of the Tangalle Institute who wants Durham University to help with its course offerings and […]

Today the cinnamon team visited Mr Bandule’s cinnamon factory. We were quite excited about this as it gave us the opportunity to compare this with the facilities of Mr Runage.We found them to be similar except in terms of size with Mr Bandule’s factory being smaller. Both factories use the rubbing machine and use ISO […]

Andy and Nik spent the day with Mr Runage looking predominantly at prior recommendations and his desire to export to Europe.On recommendations, we were pleased to see that Mr Runage now has a second modern factory at which the rubbing machine is in constant use. For exports, we discussed ghemawats cage theory and ohmae’s steps […]

After catching up on sleep from the flights yesterday, we awoke to a beautiful sunny morning. After a light breakfast of local fruit, eggs and toast we split into the two teams for cinnamon and fisheries. Cinnamon We visited the University of Ruhuna and discussed prototype technologies for both cinnamon quill and bark oil processing. […]

Twenty four hours after leaving home, we arrived in a wet colombo to take the infamous (and beautiful) drive to Weligama.Andy thought the view was more colorful this time, suggesting that many of the buildings along the route had been redecorated. Nik thought that there were in fact more buildings along the route, so maybe […]