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| The problematic brew of China's tea industry |
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All the tea in China is proving to be a lot of tea these days, as hillsides across central and southern China are bulldozed to make way for tea farms even as many young Chinese are losing interest in the beverage. China still has millions of tea lovers who lavish the same attention on their beverage that oenophiles devote to wine. The finest grades of green tea, made from the most delicate baby leaves and roasted in a pan by hand, sell for hundreds of dollars a pound in Shanghai and Beijing. But Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, McDonald's, KFC and other Western businesses have come up with many other ways to slake thirsts in China. Shifting tides in tastes, especially among the young, are creating waves both at home and abroad. Teahouses in China already are being replaced by coffeehouses, and Starbucks, now with more than 140 stores, has spawned a cottage industry of copycats. With tea in abundance in China, more and more is being shipped abroad, by third-generation tea farmers like Pan Jintu, who has just begun supplying green tea to Starbucks stores in the United States. "Many people love tea now, so I foresee our business will grow," he said, standing amid his rows of tea bushes, as women in broad hats plucked tea leaves in the surrounding hillsides. But expanding sales by Chinese tea growers like Pan are causing alarm in other developing countries that depend on growing tea, including India, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Kenya, Malawi and Zimbabwe. While the growth of China's textile industry with the end of global textile quotas has attracted more attention as a threat to poor countries, China's tea industry also poses a serious challenge to some of the world's poorest nations. China is now poised to become the world's largest tea exporter by tonnage, overtaking Sri Lanka this year and Kenya next year. Millions of people across Asia depend on the tea industry for survival. Particularly vulnerable are three countries that suffered from the tsunami last December: Indonesia, India and above all Sri Lanka, where income from the growing, processing and transport of tea helps feed nearly 10 percent of the people, according to the Asian Development Bank. Yet China's re-emergence as the world's leading tea exporter evokes a pattern that is centuries old. The British East India Company, which bought its tea from China, held a monopoly on supplying Britain until 1834. Only when that monopoly was broken did other countries become big exporters. The saying "I wouldn't do that for all the tea in China" came to mean a refusal to do something even for a large and valuable payment. The history of tea itself reaches back to ancient times in China. The earliest known literary references date back nearly 5,000 years, when Emperor Shen Nung is said to have discovered the infusion when leaves dropped into his hot water by chance. Green tea is widely believed to have medical benefits. Black tea, which may have similar benefits, is made from the leaves of the same plants as green tea, though processed differently. But after millenniums of popularity, tea consumption in China is growing by only 2 percent a year, according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization in Rome. By contrast, Chinese figures show tea production rising 8.7 percent last year and rapidly accelerating, as recently planted tea bushes reach maturity and as inefficiently managed state-owned farms are turned over to output-conscious entrepreneurs. Beijing has set as its top goal the alleviation of rural poverty and high income inequality between people in coastal cities and in rural areas, to the benefit of the tea industry. Municipal and provincial governments now vie to offer subsidies to an industry that is increasingly seen as an answer to lingering poverty and unemployment in the countryside and are paying as much as half of the cost of planting new tea farms and building tea-processing factories. Beijing has also eliminated an 8 percent tax on tea production as a way to increase rural incomes. Tea promotion policies, which also include heavy spending on research institutes to develop better strains of tea as well as subsidies, do seem to bring greater prosperity to tea-growing areas. A drive of about 160 kilometers, or 100 miles, on the modern four-lane highway from Jinhua to Hangzhou, at the northern end of Zhejiang Province in east-central China, passes dozens of villages bulging with new three-story homes built of brick or concrete and featuring the garish green or blue tinted windows now in fashion here. Every few miles stands a new brick factory with a towering chimney belching smoke. Jin Yuemei, a 54-year-old peasant on the outskirts of Hangzhou, paused before dousing nearly waist-high tea plants with a pesticide and described how her home now held a television set, a refrigerator and even a couple of air conditioners. "Everyone has these things," she said. "We are quite rich now." Tea production is a huge employer in countries around the Indian Ocean, including East African nations and Bangladesh as well as India, Sri Lanka and Indonesia. But already, four dozen large farms producing black tea have shut down in the last two years, displacing tens of thousands of workers in southern India. Tea is one of the world's most labor-intensive crops, with leaves that need to be harvested weekly for 7 to 12 months of the year. Although no one can yet claim to definitively read the tea leaves, there are several simmering challenges that could temper China's tea business. With so many hillside forests cleared to make way for tea bushes, erosion has become a problem. "The central government will restrain them some because if people keep developing tea gardens as they wish, a lot of trees will be cut down," said Dai Changhua, the deputy general manager of Bonna Tea Enterprise near Jinhua in a rural area of Jiashan County. Prosperity here is also pushing up wages, so farms already are drawing migrants from other provinces. The winters, though milder than they are in northern China, cause tea bushes in central China to stop producing new leaves for harvest from mid-October to mid-March. In contrast, tea bushes in warmer areas, like southern India and western Java in Indonesia, can grow and be harvested all year long, improving yields. Finally, even a small appreciation in China's currency "will really affect our business," said Xu Hairong, the deputy director of the Tea Research Institute at Zhejiang University here. Source: www.iht.com Oct 11, 05 |
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