Issue link: https://read.dmtmag.com/i/716988
www.acma.it ACMA, with its brand Tecnomeccanica dedicated to the development of solutions for packaging tea bags, is today in a position to offer a complete portfolio of machines suited to meet the needs of the main producers worldwide. Acma technology. Make it natural Loose black tea from the Nagomari plantation in western Georgia "Tea was an important industry dur- ing the Soviet period. We produced more than 100,000 tons annually, mostly black tea," said Levan Davitashvili, Georgia's deputy minister of agriculture. "But the plantations were abandoned when the Soviet quota system fell apart, and there was no organization to look after them." Shortly after Georgia declared indepen- dence in 1991, said Davitashvili, the new country became embroiled in a civil war that killed thousands, crippled the economy and ravaged agriculture in general. "At the same time, the market opened and we were no longer the only supplier of tea to the former Soviet Union. It was hard to compete with Sri Lanka and China," he said. "But the biggest problem is that during communism, nobody had experience running a business in a market economy. So these companies suffered in the new environment. Right now, the tea plantations are in very poor condition." During a week-long reporting trip to Georgia in June, sponsored by the National Tourism Administration of Georgia and arranged by the country's embassy in Washing- ton, a group of reporters traveled westward from Georgia's ancient capital, Tbilisi, in the east to the booming Black Sea resort of Batumi. Along the way, the group of four toured three wineries, explored the ruins of half a dozen Orthodox churches and inspected the so-called "administrative border" of barbed wire erected by the Russian military that separates Georgia from South Ossetia, one of its two breakaway republics (the other is Abkhazia, which was home to many tea plantations that are now off-limits).