STiR coffee and tea magazine

STiR coffee and tea 23 Tea Board of India orders northern tea factories closed over winter Tea Land Adaptation Project (Malawi) Once the final autumn pluck con- cludes in early December, millions of tea branches are pruned and piled high in tea gardens throughout north-eastern India. Every year unscrupulous factory owners conspire with tea growers to process these waste cuttings into thousands of metric tons of foul-tasting tea. Tea processed from dry or decom- posing leaves tastes terrible but can be blended with better quality cut, tear, curl (CTC) to increase volume. Adding tea dust and colorant conceals the nature of this tea until cupped. Bidyananda Barkakoty, adviser to the North Eastern Tea Association, explains that "tea fiber, which should be declared tea waste, is used by some factories to remanufacture CTC, giving it a black grainy look. Some use color adulterants." "These teas are not fit for human consumption. Moreover, these teas create an oversupply situation which impacts the price of new season teas," he said. While tonnage this year is estimated at 255 million kilos, up from 251 m.kg in calendar 2017, prices per kilo remain flat at $2.70 per kilo (INRs197). Closing factories during the winter when there is no fresh leaf available should improve overall quality. The order requires gardens in Assam, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland, Tripura, and Manipur to cease plucking by Dec. 10. Gardens in West Bengal, Bihar, Sikkim, Himachal, and Uttarakhand to complete their harvest by December 15. In all these areas processing operations must cease until spring. Tea harvested in Southern India, which does not experi- ence the same seasonal cycle, will continue to be harvested. Growers welcomed this move as a positive step to rein in the unscrupulous tea manufacturers. Violators face fines and more severe restrictions could follow. In announcing the new policy tea board chairman P.K. Bezboruah said, "It's time we take stern measures to produce quality tea." The decision "will help reduce substandard teas produced by reprocessing in the month of December" and it sends a clear message that India is serious about improving its reputation for quality, he said. Currently only 3% of tea is harvested in December, usually early in the month. The ban will hardly impact gardens already producing good quality tea. Greenpop aims to help in restoring Malawi's degraded forest land, through its Tea Land Adaptation Project (TLAP), a joint initiative with a range of funding and support organizations, including UTZ and Rainforest Alliance. It reflects lessons from other Greenpop projects in Southern Africa over a seven-year period. The main ones are that policy and external direction expertise are not enough. The priority must be coalition-based and heavily focused on behavior change. One dominant emphasis in its program design is "sensitizing" gender awareness and strengthening the role of women in the decision process. There are six planned outputs from the project which is in its early stages: 1. Mapping and selecting the multiple stakeholders and institutions key to successful implementation. 2. Community-based training on development resources and building local and district action groups 3. Identifying and mobilizing capacity needs 4. Training pilot communities 5. Disseminating best practice cases and lessons for action Greenpop is a small player in a diverse and expanding new "reforesta- tion economy." This includes tech- focused firms like BioCarbon Engineer- ing: that uses drones to fire seeds into the ground in satellite-mapped target areas at a rate of 400,000 a day, 150 times faster than handplanting. (Green- pop cites as a major success 8,500 trees a month and a total of 50,000 in a South Africa project.) EcoPlanet Bamboo converts land to alternate timber and fiber sources to supply the tree-devouring paper-creating industries. Many grower associations and government agencies are launching very large-scale initiatives that reflect the urgency and size of the problem. Greenpop's bottom-up, localized strategy may be a model for tea farm reforestation and restoration, with tea's plethora of small operations in remote regions and tight communities. Or it may be too small, too complex and too ambitious to meet the multiplicity of challenges. Let's hope it is a success that complements the top-down, scale-inten- sive initiatives. MALAWI Reforestation in Tea Areas Tomorrow, around 40 million trees will disappear from our planet. And the day after that. Many of these are in tea growing areas. Greenpop plants trees. It is a small volunteer-dependent organiza- tion based in Capetown, South Africa. Greenpop's work is centered on educating and mobilizing local rural communities to hand plant seedlings. One of its closely watched initiatives is in Malawi's tea gardens. Malawi is one of the three largest producers of tea in Africa and grows 10% of its total. It is a desperately poor country where 62% of the population fall below the World Bank extreme poverty line measure of $1.25 a day. Tea farming is the largest formal sector employer, comprising 50,000 workers and 14,000 smallholders. This core source of livelihood is under threat from climate change accelerated by the deforestation that reduces biodiversity, erodes soil, and removes shade. Malawi has lost around 20% of its forest areas in just two decades.

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