Kerala toddy tapping, the practice of climbing coconut and palm trees to draw fermenting sap for the state’s traditional beverage, has lost most of its workforce over the past decade. Numbers have fallen from more than 50,000 workers ten years ago to roughly 16,000 to 17,000 today, according to industry figures, a collapse that is now visibly affecting how much toddy the state’s licensed shops can actually serve their customers.
In Palakkad district, licensed production capacity stands at 300,000 litres a day, but actual output has fallen to around 40,000 litres, according to trade figures, a gap of nearly 90% between what the industry is permitted to produce and what it can staff itself to make. The decline is sharpest in specific pockets: the Chavakkad range has gone from 496 registered tappers to around 150, while Chittur, once home to roughly 2,500 workers from within Kerala, now counts about 150.
“The shortage of workers is our biggest problem,” said C K Vijayan of the Toddy Workers Union, an assessment borne out by the industry’s own recruitment struggles across nearly every district. Rajithan M R, a 57-year-old tapper, put the generational break more starkly: “I don’t want my son to become a toddy tapper.”
Why the climbing stopped paying
The economics explain much of the exodus. Tappers typically work nine-hour days across three shifts for less than Rs 1,000 (around $10, or £7.85) daily, a wage that has not kept pace with Kerala’s rising agricultural labour rates elsewhere in the state. Producing a litre of toddy costs roughly Rs 120 (about $1.25, or £0.94), against a retail price of Rs 140 to Rs 150 (roughly $1.46 to $1.57, or £1.10 to £1.18), a thin margin that leaves little room to raise pay even as fewer workers are willing to do the job.
The work itself carries physical risks that make it a harder sell to younger workers than office or driving jobs offering comparable pay. Tappers climb 15 to 20 metres up coconut palms multiple times a day, exposed to hornet attacks and falls, for wages that increasingly compare unfavourably with safer alternatives available in towns nearby. Coconut growers, meanwhile, have grown more reluctant to permit tapping on their trees, partly due to palm diseases reducing sap yields and partly due to land subdivision and urban development shrinking the number of accessible palms altogether.
Regulation has compounded the labour shortage rather than easing it. A rule requiring toddy shops to relocate if they fall within 400 metres of certain buildings has pushed shops out of viable locations, squeezing an already shrinking trade further. New competition from branded low-alcohol beverages, including flavoured malt drinks aimed at younger drinkers, adds further pressure on a product whose appeal has traditionally rested on authenticity and local sourcing rather than marketing budgets.
Earlier state liquor policy has tried to widen where toddy can be sold, proposing to extend distribution beyond dedicated toddy shops into hotels and resorts rated three-star and above, a move framed around tourism and youth employment. Whether that expansion generates enough new demand to justify training a new generation of tappers, given the pay and physical risk involved, remains unproven years after the policy was first floated.
The parallels with Kerala’s seafood sector, where sustainability certification is reshaping who can compete in export markets, are inexact but instructive: both are traditional coastal and agrarian trades confronting a workforce that no longer sees a future in physically demanding, poorly compensated rural labour. Toddy tapping’s decline, unlike fisheries, has no certification scheme or trade agreement waiting to rescue it, only a shrinking number of men willing to climb.
